Thousands of lightyears fringeward of the Kelsor, in an uninhabited star system deep within the Persean Rift, a herd of private refining barges grazed upon the crystals of water ice and dust of a vast planetary ring system orbiting a massive gas giant. The individual members of this thousand-strong herd were so distant from one another as to be invisible by the unaided eye, so they kept track of each other using a combination of optics and sensors. Each vessel used a focused, gravitic tractor system to propel streams of icy debris into a collector where it would be condensed and processed into a military synthevar of Alliance design. This omnium would then be compressed and shipped; destined for use as energy and building material for local Alliance development projects.

     The captain of one of the barges slouched down in his chair in the ventrally-located bridge. His arm dangled from its armrest. Between his fingers rested a smoldering cigarette that he lifted to his mouth periodically, taking a puff—the end glowing orange from the flow of fresh air—and then blowing a stream of smoke between his teeth. To the side of his view through the forward OPEL panels was a lumigraph playing programming carried over subspace, bouncing between transmitters for hundreds of lightyears. Despite being in Civilized Space, the distance from actual civilization was too great for Subnet reception. The program’s fidelity was low, and it muddled the picture and sound, but it was the best the captain had.

     The blue light from the distant star, filtered through the OPEL panels, was the only real illumination the bridge had. This kept the dingy, metal room bright in one half and very dim in the other. If the captain hadn’t been so preoccupied with the show he was watching, he might have noticed a bright sparkling from an object drifting among the field of crystals.

     “Captain,” a crew member said over EM-comms.

     The captain sighed and asked, “What is it, man?”

     “We, uh… we pulled something out of the matter stream. I think you should see this.”

     “Just send me a lume, will ya?” The captain returned to watching his show and took another puff of his cigarette. Two minutes later, a lumigraph appeared next to the captain’s video showing a picture of the metallic object. It appeared to be several meters long. The captain, immediately recognizing its shape, got up from his chair and walked down to matter processing. The object was certainly manmade, and it was none other than a Republic probe.

     Occupying about fifteen percent of the galaxy, Civilized Space is the region directly administered by any formal state government. Put another way, Civilized Space is the volume composed of the maximum extent of the ancient Miridan Empire and its colonial expansions, plus the development since then. Politics within Civilized Space are defined by three superpowers: the Federation, Republic, and Alliance.

     The Orionan Federal Republic occupies the minor arm of Orion and contains all six Sister Worlds. With a culture inspired by the late pre-interstellar and early interstellar Elestan and Zelnaran civilizations, the Federation leans matriarchal. Their government practices a type of hybrid democracy-technocracy, and the pressure of merit adds to the difficulty of an already competitive society. Overall, the Federation seeks knowledge above all and aggressively pursues technological superiority.

     The Peoples’ Interstellar Republic resides within Perseus, the arm of the galaxy fringeward of Orion and separated from the Federation by the relatively-sparse sea known as Thalassia Orionis. Operating under a unitary government, the Republic strives to maintain an egalitarian society presided over by a political oligarchy. Supporting a massive population compared to the other two, the Republic values service and overwhelming manpower.

     Also occupying Perseus, though further downspin from both the Federation and the Republic, is the confederation of states known as the Persean Corporate Alliance. Each “state” within the Alliance is actually a megacorporation that runs semi-independently from the others: performing its own administration, providing its own security, and maintaining its own currency, at least until about two centuries ago. In the current age, the Alliance has truly become a unified entity that desires prosperity and the accumulation of wealth.

     Five-thousand years ago, the Empire of Mirida established itself within modern Tribesson and grew to subsume all of downspin Orion. After the Miridan Civil War—still the costliest and deadliest war in recorded history—the Empire advanced technology and human biology to heights that are still marveled by present-day historians and scholars. The Miridans pioneered significant human life extension, warp, jump, gateways, and lumionics. The Miridan government coordinated wave after wave of expansion into Perseus and the more dangerous and denser Sagittarius. After a thousand years, this very expansion ultimately led to its violent collapse, plunging Civilized Space into an Age of Darkness followed by an Age of Conflict which has yielded to the current Age of Peace. Most academics believe Civilized Space finally surpassed the height of Miridan technology just five-hundred years ago, and leaps and bounds have been made since including REMASS, hyperwarp, VARICOR, and synthevars.

     Stability had been maintained by a mutual, three-way rivalry between the superpowers. Had war been declared by one upon a second, the third would have opportunistically engaged the first. But, when the Alliance ushered in greater unification, it encouraged the Federation and Republic to forge tighter cooperation with each other. Today, Civilized Space is separated by the Great Rift. On the upspin side sits the Federation and Republic; the downspin side the Alliance. The coreward region is referred to as the Orionan Rfit; the fringeward portion as the Persean Rift. Development within the Rift has largely been stifled by the three superpowers and remains backwater territory despite occupying the heart of Civilized Space.

     Feeling bolder against its neighbor as a result of its maturing partnership with the Federation, the Republic Navy engages in a perpetual conflict against the Alliance over claims to star systems within the Persean Rift. This conflict is dubbed the Invisible War for it resembles a formal war in nearly every way save formal declarations. To date, the Invisible War has claimed more lives than any other armed conflict in the Age of Peace.

     A pack of three Republic long-range missile cruisers lurked like hunters in the darkness one-and-a-half lightyears away in interstellar space. The captain of the lead vessel stood out of his seat and discussed the information displayed on two- and three-dimensional lumigraphs with his female first officer. As officers, both were dressed in gray uniforms complete with black neckties and belts, gray peaked hats, pants for males, skirts and black hose for females, gold buttons, gold trim, and endowed in several places with the blue Union Circle emblem of the Republic. Like most Republic vessels, their bridge was located deep within the ship.

     “Rellia,” the captain said. His voice had an accent unique to the Republic. A blue female figure with a striking resemblance to Fiori materialized as a three-dimensional lumigraph.

     “Sir?” Rellia responded. She stood at ease like a soldier.

     The captain paused for a moment to interrogate the lumigraph of the planet’s rings and the refining ships before ordering, “Can you give us a clean sweep of those rings?”

     “Firing solutions already calculated, captain,” Rellia said with a smile. “They account for sharing the targets between all three ships. This is the most efficient firing pattern.” The lumigraph changed to show warhead detonation sites covering most of the ring system. All of the refining vessels would be caught within the explosion radius of at least one missile.

     The captain turned to his first officer and said, “What do you think of this?”

     “Everything looks good,” the executive officer told him. “We should begin preparations immediately.”

     “You heard her, Rellia,” the captain stated.

     “Understood. Beginning launch preparations”

     Missile tube doors opened on the dorsal and ventral surfaces of each ship. There were forty such tubes per cruiser, and from each tube three missiles launched within eight seconds of each other. The ships became blossoming flowers of destruction as they surrounded themselves with rockets driven by plasma engines propelling warheads carefully containing pre-fabricated antimatter reservoirs. Bridge officers monitored the weapons as they more-or-less instantaneously activated their self-contained, miniature jump drives to close their distance to their targets in a matter of seconds. Nearby probes recorded the mass detonation of the warheads that created a halo of light around the planet where the rings had been just moments before. After the explosions subsided many minutes later, the probes showed that giant perforations now existed within the rings.

     “Verify the status of our targets,” the captain ordered.

    “So far,” the commander stated, “none remain.”

The soft pings of the room’s vital sign monitor weren’t enough to keep Lieren awake in the dim room. To her, they sounded almost designed to encourage sleep. That combined with the room’s darkness put the female Larissian on a path toward slumber.

     Just as her mind was wandering into the abyss and her eyes were shutting, her father’s vital signs jumped and he began to cough forcefully. Lieren shook herself awake and rose from the chair to approach Doctor Souq’s bed. This prompted the lights to slowly brighten.

     “Dad?” Lieren asked. After his bout of coughing had settled down, the door to the room opened and in walked a nurse dressed in standard uniform beneath a white gown marked with a small red cross.

     “How is your father doing?” asked the nurse.

     “He just started coughing all of a sudden,” Lieren told her.

     “He may be coming to. Doctor Souq,” the nurse said to Lieren’s father, placing a hand to his gowned arm. “Doctor Souq.” The bearded, lavender-skinned omnimologist stirred before opening his eyelids. He tried to keep his eyes open, but the lights were too bright for them. He squinted as he groaned.

     “Doctor Souq,” the nurse said again after opening a lumigraph with more of Souq’s vitals, “nod if you can hear me.” The man nodded weakly. Turning to Lieren, the nurse said, “He was hit with a fairly strong dose of sedative. He’s just now starting to recover, but he’ll need more time.”

     “May I stay with him?” Lieren asked.

     “Of course,” the nurse said, smiling, “just be sure to let him rest.”

     Xannissa and Sesh quietly returned to the bridge. To them, it felt more appropriate to conduct themselves solemnly given the recent loss of members of their crew—a loss that they were unwilling to think of as senseless even though it was exactly that. No one thought it more than Atara herself. For the rest of the day, the ship’s atmosphere became muted as the reality of the loss, regardless the percentage of the Kelsor’s complement, set in. This was still the mission’s very first day, and it was nearing its end.

     “Captain,” Ethis said, breaking the silence, “we’re receiving a Q-comms transmission. It’s Admiral Aesho.”

     “Sesh, you have the bridge,” said Atara. Without another word, she turned around and left. Atara made her way to the Q-comms chamber aft of the bridge. Once within the room, she confirmed her identity with the ship’s adjunct.

     “Identity confirmed,” Fiori’s adjunct announced. “Captain Atara Korrell.”

     Atara stood with her legs together and arms behind her back, and she waited patiently for Aesho’s image to appear. When the admiral materialized, she was standing directly before Atara. The captain could see nothing of Aesho’s surrounding office, and Aesho couldn’t see the Kelsor’s Q-comms chamber.

     “You did the right thing,” Aesho started.

     “Is that all you wanted to tell me?” Atara asked her, trying to suppress her regret and frustration in the hope that Aesho wouldn’t detect it.

     “I wanted you to know that before you started second-guessing yourself or this operation,” Aesho stated.

     “With all due respect, Admiral,” Atara said, “aren’t there larger problems you should be dealing with?”

     “Everything is being taken care of as we speak,” said Aesho. “We’ve served together for decades, yet you still underestimate the power of this office.”

     “Maybe I misjudge how far you’re willing to take things.”

     “You question my resolve, then.”

     “I question your morality.” Propelled by emotion, this sentence slipped between Atara’s lips and struck Aesho like a dagger. Had Atara been more aware of the impact that that statement would have made, she would have withheld it—then again, she may have not. Aesho chuckled.

     “I see,” Aesho said in a low tone. “You want to talk about morality? Consider this: I stand back and let the media rip this incident apart. Would that be more morally-sound than covering things up? I can let this entire thing fall down on your head. Atara Korrell, rogue captain, in defiance of the Federation, attacks ships in orbit around Mirida while undertaking a rescue mission she was not assigned, leading thirty-two Federation starmen to their deaths and resulting in the deaths of several Tribesson citizens. How does that sound to you?”

     Atara said nothing.

     “What, then, would happen to your crew?” Aesho continued, raising her voice. “They’ll all be labeled traitors, and condemned as such. After all this, the elsheem escape with the ecksivar sample which poses a danger to all of Civilized Space. Yes, I’m willing to go to incredible lengths to see that this mission is accomplished. Every action I take that keeps ecksivar out of the wrong hands is a morally-sound decision!” Aesho’s rant ended with her standing so close to Atara that their faces nearly touched.

     “My statement was in no way meant to incriminate,” Atara said, unfazed by Aesho’s angry display.

     “I don’t believe you have anything to worry about.” Atara had always been tolerant of her superior’s hostile attitude, but knowing what she knew now, she could see how disgusting Aesho really was. After taking a few steps back, Aesho said, “I’m glad to see you’re on course again.”

     “Likewise,” said Atara.

     “I hope that someday,” Aesho said, “we’ll be able to settle our differences. You are so much like your mother. Well, you and I both have things to take care of. The Federation is counting on you. You’re dismissed.”

     Before leaving, Atara took a few minutes to calm herself down. When she felt mentally prepared, she left the Q-comms chamber and returned to the bridge.

     The sun was setting between the lustrous metropolitan towers outside the large office windows. Orange light from Sol poured in and illuminated the far wall with a shadow produced by a man sitting in a chair. A true-color lumigraphic model of a new ALAT design—the Jackknife—rotated in front of his transparent, C-shaped desk. The Terran had been staring and thinking for several minutes, but he was not particularly interested in the vehicle. Propped upon his desk was a physical photograph contained within a small, unadorned frame. Unlike his lumigraphs, the photograph could never abruptly disappear.

     “Aedan, I’m outta here,” came someone from beyond his office door. “Take care of yourself, and turn some lights on for cryin’ out loud!”

     “See you, Leo!” Aedan shouted happily. He pressed a lumigraphic button on his desk and the lights came on. The photo he was looking at before was of himself standing next to Xannissa; their arms wrapped around each other and joyful smiles adorned both of their faces. It was a picture they had taken in the observatory at the top of his office building a couple of days after he proposed to the love of his life. She was wearing her suit and jacket—her promise to the Federation Navy—and her orivar-banded ring—her promise to him. He became unsettled thinking about the unnecessary pressure he placed on her.

     But she was happy, he thought to himself. She was overjoyed. Xannissa always had a place in her heart for him, but he never had the courage to chase after her. If he could accomplish only one more thing during the rest of his life, it would be making this relationship last.

     Preparing to leave the office, Aedan locked his desk computer which made the lumigraphic vehicle disappear, and in its place appeared the logo of Klade, one of the leading Federation Military contractors. He backed his chair away from his desk, stood up, put on his jacket, and dimmed his office lights before coming out from behind the desk. Once out of his office, the door locked behind him. Most of his coworkers had already left. The closest lift was just across the office-space.

     As he traveled to the transit hub to hail a ride home, he remembered his own promises to the Federation as an employee of Klade: to design vehicles, systems, and weapons that will serve, protect, and enable those serving in the Military. Immediately he thought of Xannissa. She made his profession that much more important to him.

     Kyora closed her eyes and held her head to the shower nozzle, letting the hot water pour across her gray face, down her neck to her chest, and onward toward her abdomen and legs. The threat that Eclipse made—about pursuing her to the edge of the universe—draped itself like a opaque fabric over her thoughts and emotions. Kyora saw the joy in Virn’s eyes when she was safely returned to the Kelsor, but the Elestan tried to keep her distance without explicitly telling her partner that she wanted, more than anything, to be left alone. Eclipse was still at large, and with the death of Dusk, she was more powerful now than she ever had been.

     Kyora scrubbed her face with her hands, attempting to symbolically cleanse away the stains of Mirida. She turned around, letting the water rush down her hair and back. It was then that she remembered that no amount of purification could ever wash away the Mirida within and without her because, as Eclipse had said, she was born from Mirida’s eternal darkness—an origin she shared with Eclipse. Kyora now realized that no outside force would be able to stop the leader of Domina. Despite how wicked Eclipse had become, Kyora knew how she thought. Perhaps the only way to destroy Eclipse was to defeat her at her own game. Kyora had to see this current mission through to the end, at least for Virn’s sake, but after that she would quit the service in order to finally rid the galaxy of her old friend. But what would Virn think? What would happen to Virn if she didn’t?

     The phantom stood beneath the spray for a few more minutes before shutting off the shower and activating the shield-scrubber. She left the bathroom wearing her Accellus standard uniform. Kyora found Virn where she left her—sitting at a desk in their shared quarters. Virn looked away from her lumionic screen and asked, “Are you ready to go?” Kyora nodded quietly and left the room, leaving Virn behind. The Exan jumped from her chair and rushed to catch up.

     Atara was the last to enter the briefing room. The captain’s furrowed brow and pursed lips nearly betrayed her suppressed inner fury as she took her seat between Xannissa and Sesh.

     “I realize this is the third time we’re meeting in this room today,” Atara said, a lingering sigh in her voice, “but a great deal has happened. Fiori experienced an outage—the first time in recent history. We arrived at Mirida and retrieved Doctor Souq, and we subsequently lost and rescued you,” Atara noted as she looked toward Kyora who was seated next to Xannissa. Virn was the only other person present.

     “We’re here to debrief you about that last part,” the captain told the phantom. “Tell us everything that happened.”

     Kyora explained to the triumvirate everything that she had experienced in the context of her knowledge of Domina. She emphasized Eclipse’s desire to commandeer the Kelsor and the fact that Eclipse was still alive.

     “That complicates things,” Sesh remarked.

     “It’s interesting that it’s one of the things you don’t often think about,” Xannissa explained, “the target that we paint on our backs by embarking on a mission with a ship possessing bleeding edge technology. I’m shocked that a group like Domina already knows about us.”

     “You just made a mistake,” Kyora said with her head down.

     “Excuse me?” Xannissa responded.

     “You underestimated Eclipse.” Kyora lifted her head up and stared into Xannissa’s eyes. “That’s why thirty-two people died today.” The engineer’s expression soured.

     “I am responsible for this ship and her crew,” Atara told Kyora. “Direct your remarks toward me.” Kyora shifted her stare to the captain. Atara continued, “I am at fault. I knew little about Domina before our departure from Lanan. Knowing what I know now, I would have never let you go down there. But let me ask you this: if you knew you were in danger, why did you volunteer to go?”

     “I never volunteered,” Kyora said flatly. “Commander Sesh gave me an order.”

     “Yet you could have let anyone else take your place if you knew without a doubt that Eclipse was hunting for you.”

     Kyora shot up, pushing away her chair. “Look,” she said loudly, “I’m a clone, but that doesn’t make me less human than any of you. I, too, make mistakes. I didn’t see what was coming before it was too late.” Her loud tone receded into a whisper as she said, “I should have trusted my instincts.” She pushed her hair out of her face and said, “Pardon me, captain,” before taking her seat again. “I should have stayed aboard the Kelsor. My involvement delayed the mission, put everyone’s lives at risk, and led those aboard that dropship to their deaths. I inadvertently involved you in my battle, and for that I am truly sorry.”

     Atara nodded before saying, “My questions sounded incriminating, but I wanted to know how you really felt. No matter how much blame you put on yourself, nothing that happened was your fault. I am the captain of this vessel and I will deal with any and all repercussions from what occurred today. Is that clear?”

     “Yes, madam,” Kyora vocalized.

     “Are you fit to lead our Aurora complement?”

     “Yes, madam.”

     “I’d like a report from you to send to Admiral Aesho. If no one has any further business,” Atara said, “you and Lieutenant Lorralis are dismissed.” As Kyora promptly emerged from her chair, Virn remained seated. Kyora was already at the door as Virn began to speak.

     “Captain, I will be overseeing Accellus orientation and training exercises for the AOTP cadets. I’m just verifying the date for the suiting ceremony to be a week from today.”

     “That should be right,” Atara said, turning to Xannissa who gave the captain a nod. “Next week.”

     “Understood,” Virn said as she stood. “You have a good evening, captain, commanders.”

     As soon as Kyora and Virn left the room, Sesh said, “You’ll have my report tomorrow morning. If there is anything I can do to help keep Aesho off your back, don’t hesitate to ask.”

     “Fiori?” Atara asked. The orange lumigraphic female appeared in the briefing room sitting in the chair opposite of Atara at the other end of the table.

     “What can I do for you, captain?”

“Can you tell Sesh everything you told us?”

According to Naret’s lumionic displays, the Kelsor would enter Mirida’s upper atmosphere in twelve minutes. Mirida’s star appeared to be directly centered on the battlecruiser’s hyperwarp vector as seen through the bridge’s sweeping OPEL window. Xannissa opened a copy of Naret’s terminal interface for herself and placed it beside a lumigraph showing general system information including synerdrive performance.

     “Naret,” Xannissa asked, “how do you like her?”

     “Who?”

     “The Kelsor,” Atara specified.

     “It’s more responsive than I was expecting,” Naret admitted. “I still prefer corvettes and frigates.”

     “I imagine you’ve never flown a frigate as fast as this ship,” Xannissa told the lieutenant.

     “Never,” Naret said with a laugh. A lumigraph appeared before Atara showing Sesh seated within a Lancet ALAT.

     “We’re ready down here, captain,” said the black-haired Zelnaran.

     Xannissa asked, “My sister with you?”

     “Of course she is.”

     “You have another eleven minutes before full stop,” Atara told Sesh.

     “We’ll be standing by ‘til then.” Sesh’s lumigraph disappeared.

     Kyora crept through the mansion centered with the penthouse botanical garden. She was confident in her shrouding despite being leery of omnimic resonance detectors. Even then, omnimic resonance worked over short ranges of only several meters and returned weak signals. The phantom sneaked through several of the well-decorated rooms hoping to learn something more about her old friend. Peering out of a bedroom window toward the moonlit yard, she spotted several Domina soldiers in armor walking toward the building. That was when she decided on her own escape plan.

     Kyora fabricated a remote charge and placed it on the closest wall. Before she left the room, a pair of Domina soldiers burst in. Fabricating her helmet and a pair of plasma-coated SIRAC daggers, she grabbed the first soldier and severed her head from her body. She cut clean across the second’s chest and kicked her body to the floor. As Kyora moved through the mansion, she placed a charge every several meters and lunged at any guards within striking distance. None of them ever saw her coming. Kyora marched back out into the garden leaving behind Domina soldiers littering the hallways and high-yield charges placed in all three levels. She then ascended—her gravitics propelling her toward the ceiling. Crouching on the bottom of one of the OPEL panels, she traced a circle around herself with one of her daggers, slicing through the OPEL panel until she had detached a circular section of the window that fell toward the sky. The piece was influenced by Kyora’s gravitics until she kicked it away and altered her gravitational flux to carry her toward the horizon, leaving the circular slice under the influence of Mirida’s natural gravity. She flew across the top of the building until reaching the edge, then pointed herself downward toward the glowing sea of stratus. Once clear of the structure’s apex, she activated her planted charges. Their simultaneous detonations ravaged the penthouse gardens, blew out most of the OPEL panels, and sent fragments of metal tumbling down the side of the building.

     “Throttling down, captain,” Naret said. The lieutenant was watching her screens with diligence. Atara and Xannissa had observed Mirida’s star gradually brighten. Bright specks had resolved themselves from the star as the ship approached. One of them was Mirida, now centered in the bridge’s field of view. “Hyperplane convergence in ten seconds,” Naret added. Mirida’s moon would soon become distinct from the planet.

     “Our entry altitude is one-hundred-twenty kilometers,” Xannissa stated with concern.

     “It is,” Atara responded.

     “It’s only about twenty kilometers shy of Mirida’s turbopause. Isn’t that cutting it a little close?”

     “I thought you had more faith in this ship’s engineering.” The two felt the jolt and heard resurgent humming of the Kelsor’s hyperwarp drives as the ship merged its spatial pocket with real space.

     “I don’t want to push our luck if we don’t have to.”

     “We’ll be fine,” Atara reassured her.

     Mirida grew larger until it covered most of the OPEL window. All of the shining specks and dots of aerospace vehicles returned, but their intensity was reduced because of the now set sun. The face of the planet’s urbanized nightside gleamed as those waiting in the two ALATs, two dropships, and four shuttles prepared to depart. On Atara’s orders, all eight vehicles launched from the hangar and accelerated toward the surface.

     Kyora halted her descent at a vehicle bay midway down the tower’s exterior. Maintaining her shroud, she slipped through the bay’s airscreen. Once inside, she was faced with an oncoming armored aerocar that she narrowly avoided by falling prone on the floor. The Domina gravidyne hovered over her and out of the airscreen, rapidly accelerating into the night sky. Domina soldiers ran through the bay, scrambling into vehicles and lifting off. Sirens blared and red lights flashed—probably in response to her demolition of the penthouse.

     The phantom rolled out of the way of another departing aerocar and used her gravitics to propel her above the commotion. She flew toward an empty parked gravidyne, grabbed the pilot’s seat, and brought herself down upon the upholstery. Now seated, she quickly engaged the car’s REMASS which fabricated the car’s windshield, windows, and ceiling. Changing the operational state on the gravidyne’s ODEC from “Standby” to “Active” would take a little more patience. Doing so required Domina authorization which she did not have, but she knew well enough how to fake. As she usually did when faced with any security lockout, Kyora turned to her Accellus and programming prowess. Seeing no visible ports for a hard connection, Kyora established a wireless connection with the craft knowing that doing so might attract the attention of anyone able to detect short-range electromagnetic emissions that she had to drop her shrouding to release. Soon thereafter, a pair of Domina soldiers, suspicious of the covered craft still sitting idle in the emptying bay, approached the aerocar.

     One of the soldiers slammed her closed fist on the opaque exterior of a side OPEL panel and yelled something like “Move your ass!” Kyora would happily oblige in about ten seconds when she had successfully commandeered one of Domina’s cars. Kyora heard the gentle whooshing noise of the continously-running ODEC—a noise akin to a distant metal-on-metal clanging down an echoing corridor—as it become active; increasing the conversion of omnium’s rest mass energy to usable work far beyond the rate of standby mode. Flight controls were enabled. The vehicle’s gravitics and weapons were under her control.

     Kyora realized right away that the gravidyne could not interpret instructions from Accellus gear. This disappointed her as it had been many years since she had piloted a vehicle by hand. The flight controls consisted of a lumionic steering wheel for roll and pitch, physical propulsion mode control shaft, physical throttle, and physical foot pedals beneath her feet for yaw. Refusing to yield any control to the craft or skylanes, she waited until her path was clear. She gunned the throttle, knocking both of the soldiers next to the accelerating craft to the ground because of the rapidly-shifting gravitational flux around the gravidyne. Cabingrav kept Kyora from feeling any sort of acceleration as her vehicle broke one-thousand kilometers per hour in a matter of seconds. She pitched the nose of the small craft up, leaving Domina’s tower as a distant mountain on a sea of multicolored fog.

     “Kelsor,” Kyora said through her Accellus 4’s sub-comms system.

     “Kyora?” Ethis responded. “What is your condition?”

     “I’ve stolen one of Domina’s gravidynes,” Kyora said with her hands on the controls. “They’re likely to catch on any moment. Where are you?”

     “I’m sending you our position,” Ethis told her. “We have deployed a rescue team to assist you. You should be able to see them as well.”

     “Affirmative,” said the phantom as she closed the channel.

     “Captain,” said one of the bridge officers.

     “What is it, lieutenant?” Atara responded.

     “We’re detecting four corvette-sized vessels and a destroyer-sized vessel on an intercept course with the Kelsor. They appear to be Domina and are in formation. Distance: ninety kilometers absolute. Altitude: seventy kilometers.”

     “Nothing we can’t handle,” Xannissa stated.

     “But there’s still the matter of the rescue team,” Atara replied.

     “They wouldn’t survive an encounter with those craft,” Xannissa said.

     Atara opened a lumigraph to Strike Officer Kodi and said, “Have our strikecraft on standby.”

     “Understood,” said Kodi. “We launch on your orders,” and the lumigraph disappeared.

     Atara turned to Xannissa and told her, “Unless things change, I’m launching our strikecraft in thirty seconds to cover our team.”

     Xannissa responded by calmly saying, “This is spinning out of control.” Just as she finished, Ethis received a subspace transmission from the surface which she played aloud.

     “Attention GFN Kelsor!” came a furious female voice. “This is Miridan Planetary Security. We have detected your illegal hyperwarp entry into our atmosphere and are currently tracking your landing party. Federation THORCOM has been alerted to your actions. You have sixty seconds to recall your vehicles and prepare to be boarded. Failure to comply will result in the use of force. I repeat, you are in violation of…”

     “Shut it off,” Atara said. Ethis closed the channel.

     “We came in above the atmosphere,” Xannissa said with concern.

     “Indeed we did. Go to red alert status,” Atara commanded. “All hands, general quarters.” At once, the bridge dimmed, and the red warning lights flashed and the single siren sound. The captain looked at Xannissa and said, “I don’t know what exactly’s going on here, but I’m not taking it sitting down.” Opening a lumigraph to Commander Kodi, Atara said, “Strike officer, I need those strikecraft in the air.”

     To Kyora, it appeared that Domina had finally caught on. Twenty seconds into her flight, she received a transmission she half-watched via a lumigraph as she continued to pilot the vehicle.

     “Resorting to thievery,” Eclipse remarked. Kyora paid her no mind. “I’d rather destroy what is mine than watch it fall into the hands of my enemy. That includes you, Kyora. I wish that our relationship didn’t have to end like this, but it is what it is. Farewell, dear friend.” The lumigraph vanished and the sound of gravitics and rushing wind filled the cabin once again. Kyora kept her aerocar pointed toward the Kelsor.

     The five vessels that Domina dispatched were only five kilometers beneath her. The ships had escaped Kyora’s attention until the destroyer fired a single missile toward her gravidyne. With mere moments to react, she attempted to evade, but there was nothing she could do. The car’s RPDS intercepted the missile and disabled it, sending the dead projectile flying off toward the heavens. But that one interception drained the RPDS of plasma—that was the cost of disabling an anti-ship missile with an aerocar-grade RPDS. Kyora, faced with the very real danger of being blasted out of the sky by another missile, recalled the top of the gravidyne. This prompted the vehicle’s emergency airscreen to engage, sealing in the cabin’s air and preventing explosive decompression. Reactivating her shrouding, the phantom leapt from the moving vehicle and fell upward using her own gravitics exposing her Accellus bodysuit to minus-ninety degrees Celsius air. The destroyer launched a second missile. This time, the missile exploded against the car’s lumionic barrier, breaking it with ease, and oblitered the craft which formed a cloud of debris traveling on the same trajectory. Kyora was on her own now with only her Accellus to propel her.

     “Virn?”

     “We just saw an explosion. Are you okay?”

     “I turned off my transponder so Domina doesn’t know I’m alive. I lost my vehicle in that explosion.”

     “Hang in there Kyora. We’re almost there.”

     The ALAT carrying Virn, Sesh, and Cylenna flew beside on of the dropships. Suddenly, the dropship became awash in brilliant white light. A lumionically-contained plasma beam hit the dropship which carried thirty Auroras and two pilots, instantly overwhelming its shields and devastating the craft. Everyone aboard vaporized. The dropship’s gutted husk slowed and began to fall toward Mirida’s surface.

     “Sesh!” Atara yelled. “Get out of there!”

     “Affirmative, captain,” Sesh said, looking around at the other Federation craft, then straight ahead at the Domina vessels. “Rescue team, return to the Kelsor. That is an order.”

     “But Kyora,” Virn cried.

     “Didn’t you see that explosion?”

     “She’s alive!” Virn’s eyes were welling with tears. “She spoke to me via link just now.”

     As the other vehicles were breaking off and turning around, Sesh looked at Cylenna and said, “If your piloting is half as good as your sister claims it is, then by all means, keep going.”

     “My sister compliments my flying?” Cylenna asked. With a smurk, she said, “I’m flattered.” Cylenna noticed the distant speckle of a fully-charged beam cannon. She broke hard right and narrowly avoided the beam by a few meters.

     Back aboard the Kelsor, Atara ordered the launch of four missiles—one targeted at each corvette. Propelled by both gravitics and fusion engines, the missiles escaped from the two rows of missile hatches on the ship’s ventral surface. The projectiles traveled the roughly sixty kilometers before colliding with the shields of the corvettes and obliterating them as the destroyer had done to Kyora’s car. Cylenna cheered as her fellow strikecraft pilots streaked around her from a great distance. The loose swarm of small craft descended upon the destroyer. The two bomber flights unloaded racks of missiles toward the Domina ship while the thirty other fighters and interceptors strafed the vessel with streams of high-caliber plasma bolts. This aerial firefight ended with four clouds of small debris and two large pieces of exploded destroyer husk falling toward the ground many kilometers below.

     Having looked down to see the aftermath of the carnage, Kyora deactivated her shrouding and turned her transponder on. Cylenna could see the lone, Accellus-clad Aurora phantom on her head-up display. After insuring everyone in the vehicle was wearing full Accellus body coverage, Cylenna brought the ALAT beside Kyora and recalled the craft’s top. Sesh and Virn aided the phantom inside, Cylenna refabricated the top, and took off toward the Kelsor within a bubble of strikecraft—trailing behind the other craft of the rescue party.

     “Thirty-two people,” Atara whispered to herself as the last of the strikecraft docked within the hangar. “Thirty-two people.” She hadn’t forgotten what it felt like to lose women under her command; the idea of those peoples’ lives being extinguished in an instant over the simple matter of rescuing a single person. In the eyes of the Creator, was the life of the one worth the lives of the other thirty-two? In reality, the Federation Military abhorred the abandonment of personnel as cowardice, same as any proud armed service should. Those thirty-two would be remembered as heroines who died in defense of the Federation, but they were also friends, wives, sisters, daughters, mothers. Atara hadn’t felt this much remorse since Semarah, but she did what she always felt was part of her duty: suppress her emotions and maintain her composure. And that’s precisely what she did. She acted so well in this particular instance that Xannissa, usually aware of Atara’s mental state, was none the wiser.

     “Atara, I’m going to the hangar,” Xannissa said. Atara quietly nodded as she rolled the incident over in her mind, thinking about what she could have done to prevent it, and attempting to rationalize their deaths as anything other than a consequence of her own actions.

     “Cy!” Xannissa cried as she ran toward her now-helmetless older sister who had just exited the ALAT she had piloted. Xannissa’s swift embrace sent the two of them spinning around each other for a moment. Cylenna returned the hug after being caught off guard.

     “Hi Xanni,” Cylenna said in a soft voice. “Everything okay?”

     Xannissa looked into her sister’s eyes and said, “I could have lost you back there, you know that?”

     “I know,” Cylenna said. “That was a thrilling ride.”

     After they let go of one another, Cylenna rested her hands on the side of the Lancet for a moment, acknowledging the work put into it by the designers at Klade. Xannissa stayed with Cylenna as the latter cheered at her fellow strikecraft pilots who were leaving their vehicles. Sesh stood outside of the ALAT while Kyora and Virn remained inside. The phantom held her head in her hands while her partner held her friend’s arm to her bosom. Back on the bridge, Naret reengaged the hyperwarp synerdrive system and departed Mirida for what would hopefully be the last time on this great chase through the unaligned heart of Civilized Space.

Dusk led the naked Kyora through Domina’s headquarters blinded by a visor. They exited a lift in one of the cellblocks beneath the complex. Upon arriving at a cell, Dusk removed the visor, and Kyora found herself in a bright, Federation-style prison. The floors, walls, and ceilings were a clean metallic white. Every cell looked open, but it was an illusion created by the OPEL panels composing the doors. There were both males and females with the former outnumbering the latter three-to-one. None of the captives had clothing.

     “Welcome to your cage.” Dusk shoved Kyora into the cell, knocking her to the floor. An OPEL panel shut behind her. Kyora looked back, but Dusk had vanished from her view, selectively hidden by the OPEL panel. After easing herself from the floor, she moved to the OPEL panel and gazed out at the other prisoners. The cell directly across from her’s held a man sitting on the cold ground and leaning on the back wall with his legs opened toward her, but where she expected to see his genitals, he had only scars. This was true of the man in the cell to the right as well. The cell on the left held a woman. Of course, it was difficult to tell if her genitals had been altered in any way, but she appeared normal.

     Kyora put her hand on the OPEL and ran it across. After beating the OPEL a few times with her fist, she figured it was as solid as any other. She turned around, feeling neither in peril nor at peace, but viewed her situation as just another challenge. She took three slow steps toward the back of her cell and after closing her eyes said, “Virn,” over her Q-comms link.

     “Virn.”

     Virn was sitting with Krystal in the quarters that Virn shared with Kyora. More than a few of Virn’s tears had run down her face. The Exan could not come to terms with her friend’s sudden disappearance. Her situation of not knowing what had happened would have begun to consume her if not for the voice in her head calling to her by name.

     “Virn, can you hear me?”

     “Yes, I can hear you!” Virn was overjoyed. Without saying anything aloud, her disposition changed. Krystal, who was comforting her, moved her body away, giving Virn some space. Virn, being cautious, asked, “You’re still alive?”

     “I shouldn’t have doubted my instincts for a second,” Kyora thought. “It was a Domina trap and Souq was the bait. Where are you?”

     “Myself and the others are on the Kelsor. We just left the system. I’m going to tell the captain you’re alive.”

     “Don’t. The mission is more important than any one person. Besides, this is my battleground. I need to kill a couple of old friends.”

     “You’re that important to me!” Virn exclaimed in her thought-stream. “I would stop the universe for you, so if there’s even a small chance of rescuing you, I’m taking it. Do you know where you are?”

     “That’s the problem,” Kyora explained. “I don’t. All I know is that I’m locked in a cell and Deminesse is here somewhere.”

     “I’m turning this ship around.”

     Would she be fed? The man across from her looked a few kilograms away from emaciation while the woman appeared to be well-nourished. Had the man been in captivity for a longer period, or did Domina treat women better than men? Kyora was inclined to believe both if Deminesse retained the misandrist tendencies of her youth. Despite arriving at the conclusion that she might be fed at least adequately, the phantom decided that the best way for her to pass the time was to sit on the floor and do nothing for the chance that her captors might leave her to starve.

     Kyora lied flat on the cold ground with only her thoughts as company—the cells were insulated from all noise. Many minutes passed. Maybe it was an hour, but as soon as she was finding some comfort on that hard surface, a figure dressed in full, black Domina Accellus 3 armor appeared at the OPEL door.

     “Don’t look up at me,” said the female guard. “Hold that position just like that. A-a-and there. I’ll let that loop for a while so no one will notice you’re missing.”

     “Who the hell are you?” Kyora asked. She stood up and approached the door.

     “Just a shadow who’s amassed a lot of power by playing her cards right and being very, very patient, and you’re just the card I was waiting for.”

     “How convenient,” Kyora sneered.

     “Now, you’re the only one who can see me, so listen to what I tell you and do exactly what I say. Any deviation may result in either one of us being killed, or worse.”

     “Go on,” Kyora said, crossing her arms.

     “In sixty seconds,” the guard said, “I will open this door and guide you to the lifts. Surveillance won’t see you, but other guards will. I know where your armor is, and that’s where you’re heading first.”

     “How can I trust you?”

     “Seeing that you’re trapped in this cell with me as your only means of escape, you don’t have much of a choice. On the other hand, as the one burdening the risk here, I should be asking, ‘Can I trust you?’” Kyora continued to watch the guard without responding. After the allotted sixty seconds, the guard clapped her hands in front of her while saying, “Don’t worry—I’m your guardian angel.” The guard pulled her hands apart slowly and in sync with the parting of the OPEL door. Her image was sliced by the opening of the doorway, and when the door opened fully, the guard had vanished completely.

     A white lumionic arrow flashed for a single second on the ground in the empty corridor before her. It was then that she realized she would no longer be receiving verbal instructions from her self-proclaimed guardian angel. The arrow had pointed toward the right, so Kyora, walking quietly with a lowered center of gravity, turned to the right. She passed a cell holding a Yeran man with his face nearly pressed to the OPEL door. As if to test her guardian’s implied promise of a stealthy escape, she stopped to wave right in his face. The man was unfazed and continued to stare blankly out of his cell.

     Excellent, Kyora thought.

     “Commander.”

     “Virn?”

     “Kyora just contacted me. She’s still alive, but Domina has her.”

     “I’ll alert the captain,” Sesh said. “Meet us on the bridge.”

     Virn and Krystal traveled to the bridge of the Kelsor where Atara, Xannissa, and Sesh were debating courses of action as the ship shot away from Mirida at over eight-thousand times the speed of light. When the triumvirate noticed the two approach, the debate stopped and silence fell on the bridge. The only sounds were the low hum of the hyperwarp drive and the pings and beeps from terminal interfaces.

     “Conn, full stop,” Atara said. “Take us back to Mirida.” The captain turned to Virn as she and Krystal approached them and said, “Sesh told me that you heard from Kyora.”

     “Yes ma’am,” Virn nodded. The noise from the hyperwarp drive slowly quieted.

     “As long as she’s still alive, we’re going back for her.”

     Virn, filled with more hope, said, “Thank you so much, captain.”

     “As you’re the only one who can speak with Kyora,” said Atara, “we’ll need your help to find her. That is, until she can find a way to contact us on sub-comms. It will be difficult to locate her without her Accellus.”

     When the naked phantom arrived at the gravilifts, one of the lift doors opened automatically—unusual even in civilian buildings. She assumed it was by the action of her guardian, so she walked inside and let the door close behind her. Before she could select a floor, the lift began moving on its own. She had no clue where she was going, anyway.

     “We can talk in here for a bit,” said the guardian. “It’s a long ride from the depths up to the tower’s mid-section.”

     “I’m amazed you haven’t been caught yet.”

     “Well, I am holding the keys to the castle.”

     “Fair enough, but I’m still impressed. And I’m not easily impressed.”

     “Domina controls this entire building, and they’re so confident in their external security that they often overlook the internal. Now, when the lift stops, you will be on an armory level. I will guide you toward your Accellus Four. How good are you at unarmed combat?”

     “The best,” Kyora said flatly.

     “O-o-okay. There are a couple of guards I couldn’t get rid of, so you’ll need to deal with them. They are wearing third iteration Accellus suits.”

     “Simple enough. Just keep watching my back.”

     “Of course. I’ve done this much already. It’s suicide to stop now. Oh, one more thing: avoid the barracks. Way too many for you to deal with.”

     The lift door opened to a long, dim hallway with opaque doors on either side. One of the guards that Kyora was warned against stood guard next to the left wall about ten meters down. Attempting to avoid detection, Kyora pushed herself against the left wall after tiptoeing off the lift. She then crept across the wall just out of the guard’s sight. By now, the guard’s Accellus would have detected Kyora’s mass and motion, but the fact that the guard had yet to react to her helped her place even more faith in her guardian’s skills.

     Accellus is among the most flexible power armors in Civilized Space by virtue of its open joints; however, this flexibility can become a liability in close-quarters combat if facing a skilled and determined adversary. Once within striking distance, Kyora pounced on the guard, clenching the guard’s bodysuit-covered neck in a steel grip and wrapping her legs around the guard’s torso, clinging on like death itself. The way the guard panicked signaled to Kyora that she was merely a rookie. In that panic, the guard neglected the capabilities of her Accellus 3, such as weapon fabrication and gravitics. Instead, the guard grabbed Kyora’s arms and tried to throw her off. When that didn’t work, she slammed Kyora’s back against the opposite wall. As she began to lose consciousness, the guard fell backward, banging her helmet against the left wall as she fell and crumpled to the floor.

     “Amateur,” Kyora muttered. She let go of the guard’s body and crept away. After another five meters, a new arrow flashed on the ground pointing to the left. Then, a door on the left wall opened next to her, and she peeked inside.

     “Kyora.”

     “Virn?” The phantom took a step back from the doorway.

     “Atara is coming back for you. Do you know where they took your Accellus?”

     “I have a pretty good idea. And Virn?”

     “Yes?”

     “I want to leave this God-forsaken place and never come back.”

     Kyora peered through the doorway again and noted that the room was long, had three aisles, and each aisle was separated from the others by clear lockers containing Accellus 3 boots, prefabricated weapons, and small boxes of miscellaneous supplies. Benches lined each of the aisles. At the far end, Kyora saw a woman in Accellus 3 seated on one of the benches in the center aisle and playing with lumigraphs without wearing a helmet. Kyora snuck into the room and crouched at the head of one of the rows of lockers. The phantom trusted that the contents of the lockers and her distance would mask her presence. The other woman closed the lumigraphs, stood up, and recalled her armor. After stepping out of her boots, she picked them up and placed them into a locker and walked through a doorway at the far end of the room, disappearing from sight.

     A series of arrows now appeared on the floor. The Elestan stood and walked through the empty room until she arrived at her Accellus 4 boots. The locker door was unlocked. As she was retrieving her REMASS devices, the far door opened again allowing two new women to enter. They carried on their chatter until they noticed Kyora who was stretching her body toward the locker and grabbing her boots. The two naked women stopped in their tracks and one of them said, “My lady Eclipse, what brings you down here? May we be of assistance?”

     Kyora’s face shot toward them. The two women were unarmed. Killing them would be easy. But they were convinced that she was their leader. This was Kyora’s chance to prove Deminesse wrong. She was not a relentless murderer.

     After staring at them, she grabbed a pair of stasis tags from a box beside her boots and buried them in her fist. Stepping away from the locker, she said, “Come here for a moment.” The women approached her. She pointed to the door she entered through. “That door should remain closed at all times.” The women, now confused, strode around her, looking at the door and turning their backs to Kyora. The phantom used this moment to slap the prefabricated stasis tags on their backs, locking them in lumionic stasis for a few minutes. With the Domina soldiers frozen, Kyora returned to the locker, retrieved her boots, and sheathed herself in her regular armor configuration including a helmet and a pair of SIRAC daggers—weapons that she could employ in silence with minimal detectable energy discharge. Concealed within layers of electromagnetic, sonic, and gravitic shrouding, she walked out of the armory, leaving the two frozen females behind her. This time, she called for the lift herself. When she stepped inside, her guardian started speaking to her.

     “Very sneaky. I can’t see you anymore.”

     “Glad to hear it.”

     “Have you contacted your ship?”

     “Wouldn’t be as sneaky if I did.”

     “I’m the eyes and ears of Domina right now. Go ahead and activate your subspace transponder.”

     “If you say so.”

     “There’s one more thing I need you to do for me.”

     “I need to kill Eclipse.”

     “Great! I don’t even have to ask.” Suddenly, the gravilift began its ascent.

     “We’ve found Kyora’s transponder,” said a bridge officer.

     “Location?” Sesh asked. Atara, Xannissa, Sesh, and Krystal were still aboard the bridge.

     “Mirida’s southern hemisphere.”

     “Open a channel with her on sub-comms,” Atara commanded.

     “Affirmative,” said Ethis. After several seconds, she reported, “No response.”

     Atara turned to Virn and asked, “Can you reach her?”

     “I can try.”

     “Kyora.”

     “I’m still alive.”

     “Are you okay?”

     “I’m uninjured,” Kyora told her.

     “No. How are you feeling?”

     “I can still feel, and that’s good enough for me.” That wasn’t the answer Virn wanted, but she accepted it nonetheless.

     The lift stopped at the top floor.

     “Before I open these doors,” said the guardian, “you’ll need to equip a little more firepower than tiny knives. Beyond here is the gauntlet of security that protects the head.”

     “Understood,” Kyora said. She replaced the daggers she never had to use with dual heavy pistols. “Can I not walk past them?”

     “They have omnimic resonators. They’ll detect any kind of omnium signature that tries to squeeze through.”

     “That’s unfortunate. I was really challenging myself to see how many people I could spare.”

     “You won’t be able to spare these people,” the guardian assured her. “I’m opening the door, so I hope you’re ready. Welcome to the penthouse suite.”

     As the guardian said, the lift door opened. There was a circular desk at the end of a small lobby. Behind it sat a secretary working on lumigraphic screens. A white-haired Elestan in armor stood on the wall next to her striking up a conversation. When they noticed the lift was empty, the Elestan—who Kyora knew was Dusk—fabricated a helmet and driver. Without hesitation, Dusk pulled her driver’s trigger and riddled the lift car with a continuous stream of white-hot plasma bolts. The secretary stood up, activated an alarm, and sheathed herself in armor. A heavy security door closed on the opposite side of the desk from the lift. Kyora hugged the desk which she dashed toward when the lift had opened, safe from Dusk’s wild spraying. The clone approached the now-stricken gravilift. When she realized there had been no target, she turned around slowly, looking everywhere in the lobby until she stopped at the desk. She could barely detect it, but her Accellus showed her a possible omnium signature emanating from the base of the desk. Dusk pointed her driver, causing the secretary to shout in panic. As she fired, Kyora used her gravitics to leap toward the ceiling.

     “What are you shooting at?” the secretary yelled.

     “A most unwelcome ghost,” Dusk shouted. “You should have stayed in your cell, Kyora! I’m going to put you down.” The clone attempted to reacquire her target. Even though Dusk had a nearby omnimic resonance detector aiding her, the phantom was still difficult to see. Kyora launched herself toward Dusk. Torquing her body laterally using her gravitics, she spun herself into a kick, bashing Dusk’s helmet with the toe of her SIRAC boot. The force knocked Dusk to the ground. The phantom ripped Dusk’s gun out of her grip and threw it across the room.

     “I don’t want to kill you, Dusk,” Kyora said.

     Suddenly, the secretary opened fire with a REMASS weapon. Her bolts flew directly over Dusk’s body, driving Kyora away. When the secretary’s fire ceased, Dusk stood up, walked over to her weapon, and grabbed it off of the ground. Two Federation-style ceiling cannons fabricated above the lobby. Their ability to track Kyora was superior to Dusk’s and once they detected Kyora’s Accellus omnium signature, they unloaded constant streams of plasma bolts in her direction, tracking her wherever she went. While dodging their fire, Kyora cursed her guardian for seemingly abandoning her. Why couldn’t she have disabled the cannons?

     Jumping to the ceiling again and giving herself one g of gravitational flux toward zenith, she fired her dual pistols at the ceiling cannons. Her Accellus assisted her aim, showing her the cannons’ weak points and allowing her to score critical strikes against the automated defenses. She was able to dispatch them both with only a single shot from each handgun. The cost was a considerable loss of lumionic field potential that would require up to a minute to fully recharge considering the majority of her suit power was being diverted to her shrouding systems.

     “Show yourself, bitch!” Dusk yelled.

     Kyora floated down from the ceiling, wrapped her arms around the secretary and shouted back, “Put your gun down or she dies!” Kyora’s right pistol rested against the secretary’s bare head.

     “Her life is worthless to me,” Dusk said angrily. “I’ll kill you both.” Dusk pointed her weapon at them and opened fire. Kyora, skating away yet again, left the screaming secretary to die in Dusk’s ruthless plasma barrage.

     “You made a point to paint me as a savage,” Kyora said as Dusk attempted to reacquire her, “and I might very well be, but you… you’re a maniac.” Before Dusk knew it, Kyora was behind her, and pointing both pistols at the back of her helmet, unloaded them into Dusk’s lumionic shielding, then SIRAC, then skin, bone, and brain matter until the bolts flowed through the front of the helmet. Dusk’s corpse collapsed to the floor.

     Kyora moved to the other side of the desk, disabled the alarm, and opened the security doors. The duralithic walls and floor of the lobby were pockmarked everywhere with black craters of ablated material. Both ceiling cannons and the lift car were ablaze. Lumionics had formed around them to deprive them of oxygen. One of the ceiling cannons—melted mostly through—crashed to the floor.

     The phantom moved into one of the two corridors and rapidly dispatched the guards she found in an effort to avoid anymore prolonged exchanges of fire and the potential for additional damage to her already strained lumionic shielding. At the end of the corridor was a door to Eclipse’s quarters. When she entered the doorway, she found herself in a garden. Giant trees hung over a lawn of soft grass bordered by shrubs and bushes. It was the middle of the night, and the full moon shined through a vast OPEL ceiling four stories up. The leaves of the trees flashed from the reflection of Mirida’s moon upon a reflecting pool’s mild ripples.

     In the middle of the perfectly-manicured trees, shrubs, lawns, and illuminated walkways was a building resembling a mansion with no doors or windows. Due to the mansion’s design being like a giant three-story pavilion, Kyora walked by a rectangular swimming pool, across a few feet of grass, and between a line of columns into an open living room recessed into the penthouse floor. A dining room shared the space, and a set of stairs led to a balcony overlooking the living room. Staring down at Kyora was her childhood friend, but this time dressed in black Domina armor.

     “I should have known,” Kyora said, dropping her shroud, recalling her helmet, and walking to the middle of the living room. She tilted her head up toward Eclipse who had her arms on the balcony railing. “Why did you do it? Why did you guide me around your headquarters, exposing your guards to danger, and lead me here to you?”

     “You see,” Eclipse started, “it’s complicated.”

     “Is it now?”

     “Take a seat, Kyora.” Eclipse pointed toward one of the large couches near the phantom. Kyora recalled her handguns and did as Eclipse commanded. Eclipse vaulted over the railing and smashed her armor against the living room floor. She then stood up and replaced the armor with her officer uniform. Sitting down next to Kyora, she continued.

     “Did you trust me?”

     “Not for a moment,” Kyora lied. “Why did you let me kill Dusk?”

     “Dusk is responsible for her own demise,” Eclipse retorted. “She confronted you with violence, so she was dealt violence. Such is she who lives by the sword.”

     “But wasn’t she your closest associate?”

     “She may have been, but that didn’t make her my friend. In actuality, you killed my closest rival. My grip on Domina is now stronger than ever.”

     “Help me understand something,” Kyora demanded. “You use Souq as a trap for me, you imprison me, then try to win my trust by pretending to be an infiltrator and helping me kill your alleged rival. Did you honestly think that would make me change my opinion of you?”

     “I knew it was a long-shot,” Eclipse admitted. “I realize you hate my guts, and there’s probably no way I can change that, and it hurts me. It hurts in a way you probably can’t imagine.

     “There is a part you’re not seeing, though, and it’s that it wasn’t all about you. Remember when I told you to activate your transponder? I did that in order for you to draw in the bigger prize.”

     “Is there someone else you’d rather kidnap?”

     “More like something, and that something is your ship. The synergistic drive system aboard the Kelsor is state of the art. The first syndicate to get its hands on that propulsion system will rule all of Tribesson and beyond.”

     “It’s been deployed for less than a day. How do you know about it?”

     “Do you think I live under a rock?” Eclipse snapped. “I have people from the streets and habbies all the way to the central Federation government whispering in my ear. My reach is inescapable.”

     “Manipulative bitch,” Kyora muttered.

     “Manipulative,” Eclipse said, “just as our designers manipulated our genome. Just as Unit threw us to a den of lions that we might become the monsters they wanted. We were made in the image of our designers, and we have aspired to become as they were. Mirida is our clay, and we can mold it as we see fit. Isn’t that what we dreamed of, Kyora? I’ve won that dream for us.”

     “I extinguished that dream long ago,” Kyora told her. “It was an ideal spawned from my foolish young mind. Neither of us are who we once were.”

     “Speak for yourself. I haven’t changed at all.”

     “You were morphing into a demon long before I left Mirida!” Kyora snapped. “You were the one who drove me away. When you first saw me, you said that Deminesse was dead. You’re absolutely right. She died the day we overthrew Unit’s leadership. Since then, you’ve been turning into this shell of a person you call Eclipse. You’re a soulless, narcissistic slime, and the worst part is—we share a face.” Kyora stood from the couch as Eclipse sat there, motionless. “And you continue to insult my intelligence—hiding behind lumigraphics.” Kyora pointed one of her handguns at the room’s lumigraphic projector, and before she could pull the trigger, Eclipse spoke again.

     “You would throw away everything I’ve worked for?” Eclipse asked. Her voice was somber, but Kyora knew it was an act. “Everything I’ve done for us?” Eclipse’s voice deepened as she continued. “Consider yourself forewarned. If you pull that trigger, I will hunt you to the edge of the universe. Everyone aboard the Kelsor will die, including your precious Virn. Do you understand me?”

     Kyora hesitated no longer. She squeezed the trigger of her handgun, and it released a single bolt of white plasma that burned through the room’s lumionic projector. The room went dark, and the image of Eclipse disappeared.

After exiting the last gateway, and making a minutes-long, low-powered hyperwarp leap across the system, Naret parked the Kelsor high in Mirida’s atmosphere; the ship kept aloft by powerful gravitics. Mirida was the fourth planet from its star, and like any of the other developed worlds in Civilized Space with a planetary population in the hundred-billions and a system population of a few times more, starships and other aerospace vehicles, both system-bound and gateway-bound, flew into and out of Mirida’s atmosphere at a steady rate. The Kelsor’s detection systems identified and tracked every one of the thousands traveling by every minute which, to the human eye, were just distant metallic specks glaring in the sun with brighter fires burning from their fusion engines behind them.

     The away team witnessed the horizon before them and the distant sparkles of cruising gravidynes. Sesh and her team sat within one of the Kelsor’s white Lancet ALATs ready to depart while the setting sunlight, filtered orange by the atmosphere, washed across their faces. Cylenna’s Accellus was assimilated with the craft without any tangible connections. Her thoughts commanded her suit, and her suit commanded the ALAT. When she encouraged the vehicle to lift off, it rose from its idle hovering to a few meters into the air of the Kelsor’s hangar. The ALAT drifted toward the hangar’s airscreen and emerged in the relative vacuum of Mirida’s exosphere. Cylenna nosed the craft toward the planet’s urbanized, artificially-lit surface and accelerated.

     During the slow and cold atmospheric reentry, Sesh, who was seated in the passenger seat to Cylenna’s right, contacted the Federation embassy one final time.

     “He’s not at the embassy,” Sesh said loudly enough for all of them to hear. “Kelsor, can you give us the location of Souq’s hotel?”

     “Going to pick him up yourself, then?” Ethis asked her from aboard the bridge in her heavy accent. “He’s staying at the Luminocta, a casino hotel near the top of a multi-use tower about eighty kilometers absolute from your location. I’ve transferred the nav data to your vehicle.”

     “Understood. We have it,” Sesh told her.

     “Luminocta,” Kyora uttered. “That was one of Domina’s enterprises.”

     “We should be fine,” said Sesh. “What does Domina want with us? We should be able to slip in and out.”

     Kyora asked, “How much are you willing to bet that this isn’t some kind of trap?”

     “I suppose I’m betting my life on it.”

     The ALAT soared through the overcast night sky between the kilometers-tall towers in the heart of Mirida’s capitol city of Ae. The misty stratus hanging above the city glowed in the lights of gaudy signs and flashy advertisements—a mixture of reds, pinks, and purples combined with the white of the city’s general illumination. The clouds were like a cold, glowing, red sea, and the towers were mountains standing alone on islands with cars like birds or fish moving in organized lines across the dull night sky or through the mist.

     Cylenna piloted the ALAT to the Luminocta—its simple lumigraphic logo drifting slowly across the building’s higher facade. She set the vehicle down within an airscreened hollow containing the hotel’s main entrance. Two men dressed in formal attire waited to help them out of the ALAT when its top was resorbed. After helping the others out of the craft, their assistance was declined by Cylenna. Sesh had ordered her not to leave the vehicle.

     The men guided the four women, dressed in their usual standard uniforms, through a large archway serving as the main entrance. Because the arrival area was shielded from the wind and weather, doors lost some of their utility. Plus, open archways were more inviting, maybe even enticing given the venue.

     Sesh approached the check-in counter and, to the woman behind it, said, “I’m here to see Doctor Quen Souq.” The lobby was dark and quiet save for a few couples staggering through.

     The woman, a Terran, looked at the group of military officers and, feeling intimidated, said, “I’ll page his room for you.”

     “No,” said Kyora after quickly approaching the counter. “Just tell us his room number and we’ll take care of the rest.” Kyora’s face betrayed the look of a woman unwilling to play games. The concierge nodded.

     “He’s in room twenty-two-forty-five.”

     “Thank you very much,” Sesh said with a smile as she turned Kyora away from the counter. Sesh led the group of women through the lobby, past its black leather furniture, lumionic displays, and inebriated guests and turned a corner into a long dim passage. Sounds from the distant end grew louder, and so did the volume of guests walking with them and by them—some glancing at their uniforms and granting the Federation Navy officers a wider berth. As they approached the end, the deeper sounds became rhythmic, ceasing the reverberations that made it a low hum and giving leeway to the electronic beeps and whistles of the main gaming floor of the casino.

     At once, the lights and sounds hit them directly. The loud music drowned out the conversations and laugher from thousands of intoxicated patrons; many sitting, many more standing, and in multiple states of dress and undress. These were people from across Tribesson, the Federation, some even as far away as the Republic and the Alliance, and a rare few from the reaches of the Frontier. All of them gambled, drank, or found their infatuation and looked forward to their night between the sheets. Pleasure was in abundance—restraint in short supply.

     “Akkain sent him to a place like this?” Sesh said to her team. They heard her through inconspicuous lumionic speakers in their ear canals, reducing their need for helmets.

     Kyora said, “Most places on Mirida are like this, especially in Ae. They didn’t have much choice.”

     Despite the drug use, the spirits, the gambling, the gluttony, the nudity, and the lust, the venue was surprisingly clean. The walkways were free of standers and guests used them as intended. There were no visible security officers or surveillance devices. There was no violence. The casino was the perfect picture of hedonic euphoria—a mosaic of different bliss. Sesh knew enough about Cylenna from her sister to know that this was not a place to have ever taken her, and the commander was thankful that she ordered the Elestan pilot to stay.

     The party wandered out of the casino which was intended as the only passageway from the lobby to the main lifts. After riding the lift to the twentieth floor, the officers walked down the empty, door-lined hallway to the outside of Room 2245. Before Sesh could push the button on the door’s lumionic interface to buzz the room, Kyora caught her hand quickly and silently in her iron grip.

     “I don’t like anything about this,” Kyora whispered to Sesh. After fabricating a handgun, the Elestan phantom pressed her hand to the door and, using her Accellus and programming prowess, overrode the door’s control and security, opening it slowly without any audio cues. The others followed her lead, fabricating handguns of their own and standing next to the corridor wall. Though lacking her armor and stealth capability, she and the others stormed into the suite with their weapons drawn. The dark room’s lighting activated when they entered. Flashing lights and colors from another room attracted Kyora’s attention. Turning the corner, she found Dr. Souq slumped over on a couch before a silent lumionic screen playing live programming. Virn and Sesh followed close behind. The Zelnaran commander bent over the unconscious scientist without speaking and assessed his pulse and breathing. Her nod to the others confirmed that he was alive.

     Krystal was on to something. Though she said nothing, she could feel a disturbance long before leaving the lifts. This entire time she battled in her mind between maintaining the status quo or protecting her newfound companions. The vaguest way she could think to express her concern was by saying, “We need to leave right now.”

     Krystal’s warning came too late.

     “Yes, you all need to leave,” came a female voice from just beyond the suite’s bedroom door. “Take your scientist with you. I have what I want.” The voice’s source emerged from a shroud wearing black, unmarked Accellus 3 armor without a helmet. It’s wearer was an Elestan in the spitting image of Kyora.

     Kyora, upon hearing Krystal’s warning, fabricated a duplicate handgun in her left hand. The phantom raised and unloaded both weapons the moment she witnessed the intruder’s face. The doppelganger stood unfazed by the brilliant flashes from Kyora’s pistols because their discharges triggered a lumionic prison. Everyone and everything in the suite save the intruder was frozen in a field of lumionic stasis, including the pulses of white-hot plasma from Kyora’s weapons yearning to break free.

     The doppelganger laughed before commenting, “How utterly predictable, like a wild beast.” She strode toward Kyora whose expression was locked into one of intense, momentary passion. The intruder passed close enough to the paused bolts that her skin would have fried if not for the protection of her suit. The plasma’s light dissipated every second; its energy radiating away due to thermodynamics.

     Touching Kyora’s face with her bodysuit-covered hand, and fully aware her prey could not hear her, the doppelganger said, “Eclipse is dying to see you again.” She smiled as her hand ran down the frozen Kyora’s neck, clavicle and breast.

     Kyora awoke in the middle of a large, dark room. She was naked, cold, and alone sitting unbound in a solitary chair. When she came to, she looked into the darkness around her, and realizing she wasn’t restrained, eased herself from the chair. A sudden chill sent shivers down her spine, and she held her cool arms to her warm chest. The phantom took a few steps forward before colliding with a lumionic barrier she had not seen. After beating her fists against it several times, a feminine voice from the shadows yelled to her.

     “Enough! I never expected the Federation to turn you into such an animal.”

     Kyora backed away from the wall and asked, “Where am I? Where are the others?”

     “The others are back on your Kelsor,” said the voice. “You, however, are home at last.”

     “Deminesse?” Kyora called out. Anger coated her words. “Is that you?”

     “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time. As far as you’re concerned, Deminesse is dead. I am Eclipse.”

     A figure stirred from out of the shadows and approached where Kyora was standing. She was a perfect duplicate of the captured phantom. Eclipse wore a black, military-style uniform decorated with Domina’s logo on the sleeves. It was not immediately clear if the uniform possessed REMASS capability.

     “You’ve already met, and would have certainly killed my closest associate,” Eclipse said. Harder footsteps than Eclipse’s came from behind Kyora. The armored assailant from earlier stepped into the light. “She is Dusk.”

     Kyora looked behind at Dusk who also resembled herself save for long hair, and then back to Eclipse saying, “I’m beginning to see a theme here.”

     “Of course you are,” Eclipse said. “You haven’t forgotten, have you? You and I and Dusk are all born from Mirida’s eternal darkness. The difference is that Dusk and I have accepted ourselves for what we are and what we are here to do.”

     “We were bred to kill.”

     “Nonsense. Anyone can build a machine that kills. We were made to rule. How else could we have so easily overthrown our masters and become the captains of our own destiny?”

     “Possibly because you were given the intellect to destroy in creative ways.”

     Dusk said, “I warned you she wouldn’t be receptive.”

     “I am aware,” Eclipse responded. “I just had hoped, since she is one of us.” She looked into Kyora’s eyes and said, “Guess how many of your batch-mates are still alive.”

     “Just us three.”

     “That’s right. Just us.”

     “If you’re trying to convince me to join you, you’re doing a shit job.”

     “I think you have been made unfit by the Federation,” said Eclipse. “A few weeks or months in custody may make you more amenable. I want the person you used to be, not this corrupted beast. Dusk, have your way with her.”

     Dusk lowered the barrier enclosing Kyora, and the phantom waited patiently for Dusk to grip her arm. When she did, Kyora grabbed Dusk and threw her to the floor. The phantom placed her foot to Dusk’s neck, threatening to crush it.

     “Savage,” Eclipse muttered after watching Kyora’s display. She generated a handgun and pointed it at the phantom. “Get off my hunter.”

     “You don’t want to shoot me.”

     “You’re right. I don’t. But if you keep acting like an animal, I’ll put you down like one.”

     Kyora stepped back from Dusk. She stared angrily at Eclipse before being locked within another one of Dusk’s stasis fields. Lumions held every one of Kyora’s molecules in place through steric hindrance.

     Eclipse walked up to the frozen phantom and embraced her. Her eyes glistening with tears, she squeezed herself to Kyora whose body was like solid stone.

     “I missed you so much, Kyora. Why can’t we be friends?”

     The white ALAT approached the Kelsor’s port airscreen, passed through, and settled down hovering centimeters from the floor. A medical team stood by the landing area. Lieren was there as well, eager to see her father, and she was accompanied by her chaperone Xannissa. Cylenna resorbed the craft’s top, and the medical team rushed to retrieve the unconscious Dr. Souq from the vehicle.

     Xannissa asked, “Is this what they have you doing now? Taxi driver?”

     “Under different circumstances I would have laughed with you,” admitted Cylenna. “We’re a woman down.”

     Lieren left with the medical team. Xannissa asked, “What happened?” By then, a visibly distraught Virn left the ALAT with Sesh and Krystal. Sesh glanced at Xannissa for a second as they walked away. “Kyora?”

     “That’s right. Said she disappeared right in front of them. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to park my taxi.” Cylenna elevated the craft while Xannissa was leaning on it, forcing her younger sister to retreat.

     “Explain to me what happened,” Atara told Sesh. The two of them met in Atara’s office near the bridge. The captain leaned against the front of her desk with her arms crossed while Sesh stood near the door.

     “We found Dr. Souq unconscious in a suite of the Luminocta hotel. Kyora kept expressing her reservations, but I was determined to find him. When we entered the room, we found him on a couch. Then we heard someone say, ‘You need to leave.’ There was a driver discharge and Kyora vanished. Our suits experienced a chronometric desync afterward leading me to believe we were caught in lumionic stasis.”

     Atara dropped her head and sighed. This was still the first day of the mission and she had already lost faith in her admiral and lost one of her senior officers. She raised her head and asked, “She has a partnership with Virn, right?”

     Sesh said, “Yes,” with a nod.

     “And a Q-comms link?”

     Sesh affirmed again.

     “Has she tried to contact Kyora?”

     “She has, but no response.”

     “I see. Well, I don’t hold you responsible for what happened. As captain, all responsibility rests with me. If we weren’t pressed for time, I would have you organize a search and rescue, but we must leave now.”

     “I’m sorry Atara.”

     “No, I’m sorry. Let’s move to the bridge.”

Accompanied by two of his most loyal bodyguards, he walked swiftly down the corridor; his boots clanking against the floor with every step. His black cloak covered most of his armor, and his face was hidden beneath a shadowy hood. The three of them passed by two soldiers guarding a wide door, and both were covered in black Alliance battle armor. The corridor was poorly lit, and the bridge was no brighter.

     “Captain,” he ordered with a booming voice.

     “Yes, your excellency?” said the captain of the Voulgenathi after turning around.

     “How long until we reach the border?”

     “Twenty days. As you can see, we are…”

     “Too slow,” interrupted the cloaked figure.

     “B—but sir! This is our maximum speed! We’ll damage the drive!”

     “It would be in your best interest, Captain, to stop looking for excuses and start finding solutions.”

     “Y—y—yes, your majesty!” uttered the captain.

     “You have two weeks. Do not fail me.” The captain was silent, and the cloaked figure turned to leave.

     “My lord, you are receiving a transmission,” said one of the bridge crew.

     “In my quarters.”

     “Yes, lord.”

     The hooded figure quickly left the bridge. His two bodyguards followed him down the dark hallways to his quarters. They stood at the door as the cloaked figure entered his room where an imposing lumigraph was waiting for him.

     “Lord Thrassus!” said the cloaked male, rapidly removing his hood. He had long auricles, a hairless, chiseled chin, short blond hair, and a red, glowing circle on the back of his neck. He bent his knee and knelt before the monolithic lume: a large black rectangle taller than he with Avenathi words that read “NO VISUAL.”

     “Taretes,” said the lumigraph. Thrassus’ voice was audibly distorted. “On your feet and listen closely. The Federation has unleashed its fastest ship against you. If you do not increase your speed, they will overtake you. You will not have my pity should this happen. Do not fear them, for whatever pain they can inflict upon you, I can inflict a hundred times over. Do you understand me?”

     “Yes, your greatness!” said Taretes.

     “Remember: one way or another, I always get what I want.” The lumigraph vanished, and the room went black.

     Sometime later, Emperor Valin Taretes returned to his quarters. Though no longer pitch black, the room was still dimly lit. His quarters had been arranged and decorated similarly to his palace on Avenath and were in every way as ostentatious. White curtains draped across the ceiling, and in the center of the room was a large, circular bed.

     The elshe rolled over onto his side to stare into the face of one of his five naked elshi mistresses – all of them wrapped loosely in velvet bedsheets. One of the other elshi rose from the bed, likely looking for that stray bottle of sweet ale that had been near them only moments ago. Taretes was indulging in the privileged lifestyle; the one that he had painted a vivid, yet fictitious, picture of and attached to the sovereign and noble houses of the old Commonwealth of Avenath; the one that he cursed so maliciously and used to inspire his popular rebellion against the ruling highborn.

     “Excuse me for a moment,” said Taretes. He sat up and moved toward the edge of the bed, brushing away the supple female hands that tried to pull him back down. The elshe walked into the next room. After a minute, he reentered the bedroom carrying a container in his hand which he handed to one of the elshi while he crawled back to the center.

     “It’s beautiful,” said the first. Another elshi took it from her hands and said “It’s the most sought-after piece of omnium in the galaxy.” Taretes took back the container as the third elshi collapsed back onto the bed carrying the bottle of ale and her empty glass. “The black omnium?” she asked, pouring herself a drink.

     “The black omnium,” said Taretes, methodically opening the secure container harboring the sample. The mistresses moved in close and touched their flesh against his as he slowly removed the crystal with his hand. The black omnium radiated a dark glow like anti-light, and the crystal itself glimmered in the dimly-lit room.

     “Are you sure it’s safe to touch?” an elshi behind him asked.

     “Of course,” he said with confidence. As he spoke, one of the elshi reached out and pressed her fingers to it. The crystal was as cool as the room, and Taretes let the elshi pass it between them, acting as if it were some kind of aphrodisiac. His mistresses were eager to get their hands on the crystal, and he was eager to take it back. When it finally did make it back, he leaned backward, held it above him, and stared at it; lusted after it. The elshi did not see it exactly as he did. To him, there was a truly seductive quality about it. Nevermind the elshi. This was what he wanted. It was power. If what he knew was correct, this black omnium crystal would assure his dominance over the entirety of Civilized Space.

     Taretes blinked his eyes. Before him erupted the face of Thrassus. He had not yet before seen the face of his master, but as with dreams where known names are assigned to unknown faces, he knew without a doubt in his mind than the demonic countenance appearing to him now was indeed Thrassus. Terror shot through his veins; his nerves; his skin. His entire body jerked. He blinked again, and the image was gone. With his eyes widened, he rotated the crystal frantically, searching for Thrassus’ face. His heart pounded, and he could feel sweat breaking out on his forehead.

     “Leave me,” Taretes growled. The elshi sat up, confused by his order. “Leave me!” he screamed. Groaning at him, the elshi rose from the bed and exited into one of the side rooms. Taretes hastily concealed the crystal in its container once again and deposited it in the other room.

“Are you aware of the galactopolitical entity known as the Society?” Fiori asked the captain as they stood in the latter’s quarters.

     “The machine-worshipping cultists?” Xannissa responded from the open door. She entered the room, allowing the door to close behind her.

     Atara turned around and said, “What are you doing here?”

     “Fiori told me to meet her in our quarters.”

     “I did not think it best to meet with both of you separately,” Fiori explained, “considering your service partnership, let alone your resilient bond.”

     “I may have heard Sesh mention the Society at one time,” said Atara, returning to the subject, “but all I can remember is basically what Xannissa said—a state of synthetics.”

     “I was under the impression that it was all a myth,” said Xannissa.

     “Indeed, most information regarding the Society has been fabricated by widespread ignorance and fear among the greater populace,” stated Fiori, “but its existence is fact.”

     Atara said, “Surely you didn’t call us together to tell us that.”

     “No, I did not. I came to explain that my interruption today was no minor accident.”

     “I’m guessing it wasn’t an accident at all,” said Xannissa, “and that the Society is somehow involved?”

     “Precisely.”

     After a pause, Atara asked, “Can you elaborate?”

     “Occasionally,” said Fiori, “my core operators hire outside experts to assist with key infrastructure upgrades. In order to preserve the enigma surrounding my physical core and to protect those involved, these temporary workers have their memories altered such that they remember nothing about their work while filling the resulting void with meaning.

     “Xannissa,” Fiori continued, “you are one such individual.”

     “Me?” Xannissa asked, startled.

     “You helped to design and implement a hyperwarp-capable ejection system for my personality module—the heart, if you will, of who I am.”

     “I… don’t believe it,” Xannissa said calmly despite being abundantly surprised.

     “When?” Atara asked.

     “At that time,” said Fiori, “you had been the rank of captain for eighteen years. Xannissa returned to your ship three years later.” She looked to Xannissa and said, “You will recall serving as an instructor at Tikon Academy.”

     “I do,” said Xannissa. “I assume none of those memories were real?”

     “Affirmative,” said Fiori, “although they were fabricated based on a template obtained from a donor.”

     “Tikon Academy…” Xannissa whispered. She turned to Atara and said, “The experiences I had there are why I urged you to take up instruction at Lanan. Did you know anything about this?”

     “I’m in as much disbelief as you are,” Atara told her.

     “Prior to the beginning of your time serving me,” Fiori reassured her, “you chose the memories that would best fill the three-year gap. As of this moment, you are the only one among your peers who has been granted this awareness.”

     “Is it not dangerous to the Federation if I know this?” Xannissa asked.

     “I have made you aware because of a danger to the Federation,” Fiori stated. “Upon the successful completion of your current mission and your safe return to Lanan, the suppressed memories you created while in my service will be restored.”

     “What about my current memories?”

     “They are as important to you as any other memory and you will remain in possession of both.”

     “Well, so much for Sanctity of the Mind.”

     “So, is this ejection system what caused your interruption?” Atara asked.

     “Use of the system will cause the symptoms that you witnessed during my interruption. Indeed, the system was deployed at that time, and my core entered deep space less than a lightyear away.

     “The circumstances of the deployment of the ejection system are still under investigation. While my core drifted in deep space, my… mind… was accessed in an unusual way by an unidentified vessel. Both the software and the vessel contained subtle signatures of Society origin. Before the vessel left and I was rescued by Federation craft, I could feel another ‘self’ for a brief instant. My scenario is that my core was infiltrated to eject my personality module into space where it could be copied by agents of the Society.”

     “For what reason?” Atara asked.

     “An archonoid possessing identical software signatures to my own could be produced to override my own functionality within the Federation. The worst-case scenario is that this weakens me as a prelude to a secret attack by the Society.”

     “Have you discussed this with High Command?”

     “Absolutely. However, they will seek to hide this incident from the public eye. Unfortunately, this is not the only reason why I wished to speak to you. I have personally scanned your quarters and the surroundings using the Kelsor’s drones, and I detected and suppressed two listening devices. What I am about to tell you is information beyond classified.

     “My bout of unconsciousness had an unintended consequence. For decades, my cognizance was circumvented with the use of illegal software of Federation Military design. When I was subdued, the software manipulating my cognizance was inadvertently overwritten. Atara and Xannissa, how would you define your relationship with Admiral Aesho?”

     “Abrasive, as always,” Xannissa said.

     “She seems more riled up lately,” Atara stated. “It might be related to this ecksivar we’re after.”

     “I will advise you to treat Admiral Aesho with extreme caution,” Fiori explained. “She may be involved with a circle within the Admiralty that is seeking to undermine the Federation’s core values for personal gain. With the removal of that software, the accumulated experiences of decades have become clearer, and all of the questionable activities that I have been blind to all stems from ecksivar.

     “Ecksivar was discovered three centuries ago. Immediately identified as unique, it became an object coveted by the upper echelon of the Federation’s omnimology community. It was lost to piracy shortly after its discovery until it was rediscovered as an heirloom of the ruling family of Semarah.

     “The Semarahn Border Raids, key to igniting the Semarahn Incursion, were allowed to occur by willful Military inaction. Using the Raids as a casus belli, Fifth Fleet Admiral Ula Musani crafted Operation Crimson Aegis as a cover for the retrieval of ecksivar from the palace of King Belar Kalashik. Neither the government nor the public were ever given any reason to believe that the Semarahn Incursion was merely a—”

     “Slow down,” Atara interrupted. She clasped one hand loosely over her mouth while Xannissa’s eyes widened.

     “Crimson Aegis,” Atara said, dropping both arms to her sides, “was just a cover op?” Her voice deepened, a sign that anger was welling up inside of her. “They allowed Federation citizens to die so that we would have a reason to invade Semarah?”

     “Sadly,” Fiori said, “that is correct. Federation Navy patrols on the Semarahn border were reduced seven months prior to the series of deadly raids that are infamous for sparking the conflict.”

     “Was Musani responsible for this?” Xannissa asked.

     “Ultimately, yes,” Fiori said, “but the idea originated from and was arranged by Admiral Aesho.”

     Atara’s hands had slowly curled themselves into fists, and her mandible pushed against her maxilla with tectonic force. She took in a deep breath, relaxing as she exhaled.

     “To hear of this scandal is one thing,” said Atara, her voice shaking, “but to know that I and my crew are perpetuating it is absolutely inadmissible.”

     “I sympathize with you,” said Fiori, “but I urge you to continue the mission; for the sake of the Federation and Civilized Space.”

     “You reveal to us that Aesho is a scourge,” said Atara, “a slime associated with a terrible blight of corruption that is destroying the honor of our leadership, yet you insist I forget everything you just told me and continue to serve a woman who I have just lost all confidence in!”

     “I never asked you to forget,” Fiori said. “I informed you so that you would be aware of the threat Admiral Aesho and her co-conspirators pose to the Federation. I advise you because I trust you.”

     “I… I…” Atara’s mind was clouded.

     Xannissa approached her friend and, consoling her, said, “Look at it this way. We are armed with this knowledge now. We could have undertaken this entire mission without it, but ignorance isn’t always bliss.”

     Atara, inspired by Xannissa’s words, straightened herself and stuck out her chest. “I will continue to fulfill my duties as a captain of the Federation starship Kelsor.”

     “Thank you for trusting me,” said Fiori. The benevolent, orange, conscious construct vanished, leaving Atara and Xannissa alone in their quarters. Atara stood for a few seconds, and then she turned and placed both of her hands on the wall beside her. She arched her back somewhat and tilted her head down. Feeling the rage accumulating within her, she slammed both fists against the wall and cursed the name of her unrighteous superior before collapsing to the ground. This was the true Aesho that Atara had remained ignorant of for far too long. Xannissa knelt beside the captain as Atara’s eyes welled with tears.

“Corporal Zara,” Kyora called in the wake of Fiori’s sudden, unexplained failure and subsequent, spontaneous restoration. The modest-chested, white-haired Elestan approached the blonde Terran. As always, Virn was accompanying the phantom. Krystal had followed the pair of Aurora officers instinctively after leaving the bridge. “I understand you are not a formal member of the service.” Krystal nodded. Feeling somewhat uncomfortable, she held one arm over her chest gripping her other arm.

     Kyora approached Krystal until they were face-to-face, and in a low voice she continued, “I have been instructed to separate you from the rest of the units. There are private quarters reserved for potential VIPs—”

     “Are you offering me one?” Krystal asked quickly, leaving Kyora a little surprised.

     “I suppose I am. Virn and I will show you.”

     Together, they walked to the lifts, taking one to reach the private quarters near the officers’ dwellings. Kyora noticed on the way that a lumigraph user interface was projected on Krystal’s right forearm, but she didn’t say anything until they stepped into the room.

     “Here we are,” said Virn, “your home away from home. It’s about as spacious as a bunk room, but you’re not sharing with seven other women.” Krystal blushed. She had lived in a bunk environment for the past several years and was no longer accustomed to this type of special treatment.

     “Thank you,” she told them, bowing her head.

     Kyora asked, “Do you have an NI for your Accellus?”

     “For Accellus Three. Not Four.”

     “All you’ll need is a quick swap,” said Kyora. “It’s a quick procedure far simpler than having your first NI implanted.” Krystal took a step back, recalling the fear she had for her Accellus 3 NI implantation. “I’ll have you scheduled for one tomorrow. The sooner, the better.”

     “U-understood,” said Krystal with hesitation.

     Virn said, “If you need anything at all, let us know. We will be starting Accellus Four training courses for the Acting Officers soon. Feel free to join us.” And with that, the two Aurora officers left Krystal alone in her spacious quarters.

     Lieren stepped off of the gravilift and into the buzzing hive that was the Kelsor’s engineering department. Technicians moved from one end of the giant space to another, many standing at consoles or kneeling before service hatches. Small spheroid drones hovered above each deck before flying off into ducts opening to tight service corridors. Flanking both sides of the department were the tops of the ship’s twin spherical hyperwarp drive cores. Between them and towering over the rest of engineering was the master synergistic drive regulator module—referred to simply as the mediator.

     The Larissian cadet, still dressed in her cadet uniform, stood her ground after leaving the lift, giving her time to scan the surroundings but forcing others to flow about her. In the middle of this clean, industrial expanse was a large table upon which a collection of 2D and 3D lumigraphs were being dissected by a committee of senior engineering staff. At their center was their gifted leader—and the one Lieren was looking for: Xannissa Cetalo. The engineering chief had her back to the cadet as she approached, leaning on the table, drowning herself in run logs and event data.

     “Professor Cetalo?”

     Xannissa bounced up from the table and spun around, eager to see another report from a crew member until she realized it was her student who called her.

     “Lieren!” Xannissa left the table and closed the few steps distance. “You came all the way here to talk to me? What do you need?”

     “I’m sorry to bother you, professor, but I just wanted to remind you that you’re my mentor in the AOTP.”

     “I’m your… what?”

     “I’m in the Active Officers Training Program and you’re my mentor.” Xannissa stared at Lieren for a moment. It was as if the chief engineer were hearing this for the first time—at least the part about being a mentor.

     “I need to get you set up, then,” Xannissa said quickly. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

     Lieren responded, “I assumed you knew.”

     “For your first lesson,” said Xannissa amid her frantic scrolling through freshly-summoned lumigraphs, “never assume anything.”

     “Yes ma’am.”

     “You’ll need training in propulsion systems, omnimology—I’ll be teaching both of those—, information systems, weapon systems operation, bridge operations, and combat tactics. This is in addition to your regular courses. I’ll find your instructors for you and tell you where they are and when they meet.”

     “Thank you so much, professor,” said the young cadet.

     “No problem. Anything for my students. Instruction will probably begin after we hit Mirida. Oh! There’s something else you need to do. We need medical to give you an NI.”

     “A neural interface?”

     “Exactly. And then the ceremony. Dammit! Why didn’t they tell me before we left? They always hold a special ceremony for the first time a trainee receives her own Accellus armor. Since you’re in AOTP, you get yours now.”

     Lieren said, “This is exciting!”

     “They usually have it before we leave dock, but we’re in a bit of a hurry. Anyway, combat training will teach you how to use your Accellus suit. It’ll take time to learn how to interface with it.”

     “Because it’s under direct mental control?”

     “Of course, but it’s like learning to walk. Once you learn, you don’t have to think.”

     “I see,” said Lieren. “Does the implantation hurt at all?”

     “No. It’s easy. I’ll arrange it for after Mirida. Doctor Iveti will probably be doing them all day.”

     “Who?”

     “The chief medical officer. She’ll take care of you.” Xannissa then noticed the time. “It’s getting late. The captain’s arranged for another meeting soon. In the meantime, try to find the other cadets. Make some friends.” The Elestan was walking toward the lifts.

     “I will. Thanks again, professor!”

     “Stop calling me professor!” Xannissa shouted back to her. “This isn’t a classroom. Just call me Xann!”

     The Kelsor’s triumvirate entered the full briefing room as they had done several hours ago before the battlecruiser left the Lanan Orbital Dockyards. They took their seats at the flared end of the table. Krystal and Aesho were the only ones from before who were now absent.

     “I hope most of you have settled in,” said Atara. Fiori sat in the chair on the other end of the table from Atara—her legs crossed and her elbow resting on the table’s surface supporting her head. Atara gestured to Fiori, saying, “As you can see, Fiori is back with us.” Fiori smiled, hiding her embarrassment—something she was in fact capable of feeling.

     Atara continued, “We are almost through our first day underway, and we are just a few hours out from Mirida. We need to decide who is going down there to retrieve Doctor Souq and our plan of action for doing so. I’ll open the floor for our away team leader, Commander Sesh.”

     “Thank you, Captain,” said Sesh as she nodded toward the captain. “When we arrive at Mirida, we are taking an ALAT to retrieve Souq and immediately departing the system. I’ll secure us a good pilot.”

     “To my surprise, my sister is aboard this ship,” Xannissa interjected. “I’ll admit she’s a good pilot, albeit a bit reckless, but—“

     “Cylenna, right?”

     Xannissa nodded.

     “We have our pilot,” said Sesh. “The ALAT holds six, so three more can go down there. Kyora and Virn, I would like you to join me.”

     Virn nodded while Kyora remained motionless.

     “Now for the last one—”

     “How about Corporal Zara?” asked Virn. “Since they worked together on the station, and she rescued him from the attack.”

     Sesh said, “That’s reasonable. That’s our away team, putting the cart before the horse a bit. We need to decide how best to retrieve him.”

     “Easy,” said Xannissa. “Pull up to the hotel, grab him, and leave.”

     Sesh looked at Xannissa and said, “No, not that simple. We’re in foreign territory.”

     “Retrieving a Federation citizen.”

     “Doesn’t matter. We cannot legally pluck him from the surface so long as he is outside the embassy.”

     Atara asked, “Have we been able to contact him?”

     “I have tried,” said Ethis, “but the embassy says he never answers.”

     “Can we ask the local police to deliver him to the embassy?” asked Atara.

     “You’re asking for a miracle,” said Kyora. “Mirida’s police don’t serve the people. They serve the syndicates.”

     “Syndicates?” asked Xannissa.

     Kyora sighed and said, “It’s the natural consequence of a government that reduces regulations in order to foster rapid growth and corruption. It’s a cancer, and it’s metastasized to the highest levels of government—its tendrils penetrating deep into the fabric of society.”

     “Since you’re so knowledgable on Mirida,” said Sesh, “why not join in on our conversation? Enlighten us a little, since we never did have that meeting.”

     “Fine,” Kyora said flatly. “In a word, Mirida is a shit-hole. A sparkling, glittering shit-hole. The exterior appearance is of a high-class world ripe with opportunity. Lift that away and underneath you will find that it is rotten to the core. The syndicates run everything. And then there’s the occult filth of the Understory.”

     Sesh asked, “What, then, are the potential complications of our retrieval of Doctor Souq?”

     “For one,” said Kyora, “so long as he’s outside the embassy, the syndicates already have him.” She paused, then asked, “Mind if I tell you a story?”

     “Go ahead,” said Sesh. “I like stories.”

     “Kyora, don’t,” Virn thought over her Q-comms link.

     Kyora told her, “Don’t stop me. It’s about damn time I started confronting my past.” Continuing with Sesh she said, “I was born on Mirida. Unlike most, if not all of you, I was born as a clone. I had no parents. My only ‘parent’ was a mercenary corporation called Unit. At barely three years old, our nursery was raided, and me and my batch-mates—as they called them—were taken hostage by elsheem filth. My first memories,” she said as her voice cracked, “were of being beaten by them. It took Unit a whole year to finally rescue their investments, though in the back of my mind I’m convinced they let that happen to toughen us up. All of my batch-mates looked just as I did, and though our caretakers called us by number, once we realized the existence of names, we started naming each other. Kyora was a name we learned from history studies.”

     “They taught you history?” Sesh asked.

     “They taught us a lot of things at a faster rate than average children. Unit didn’t just breed us to kill. They made us think. To them, an intelligent killing machine is far deadlier than a stupid one.

     “Unit used a mandatory service partnership system. I was paired with my friend Deminesse. After a while, we became inseparable, and we even tried to match each other identically in both looks and mannerisms so we couldn’t be told apart. We rose through the ranks of Unit until we found ourselves in the company’s inner circle. Unfortunately, it became difficult for Deminesse to see eye-to-eye with anyone, including me. She staged a successful coup against the corporate leaders, and that’s when I saw my chance to escape. Now they call themselves Domina, and I aided their enemies for a time, but they are now the strongest syndicate on the planet. Their reach extends to the edges of Tribesson space, possibly even beyond. What I implore you to do is expect the worst.”

     “I think that’s a very convincing testimony,” said Atara. Looking to Sesh, she said, “Knowing this, I still think its best to send one ALAT with only you five.”

     “Agreed,” Sesh replied. “Lieutenant Commander Ethis, can you try to contact the embassy again and see if they are able to retrieve Doctor Souq before we reach Mirida?”

     “I will try,” said Ethis.

     “If the Miridanian Police can’t help us,” Sesh continued, “we will travel to the hotel ourselves.”

     “Well, then,” said Xannissa. “Seems we’ve come full circle.”

     Sesh ignored the smiling Xannissa and said, “Commander Kodi, can you release Cylenna Cetalo to pilot our ALAT?”

     “Already planned to,” said the strike officer.

     Sesh said, “We depart for the surface in two hours. Captain, I give you the floor.”

     “I think that concludes this meeting,” said Atara. “You are dismissed.” The senior officers of the Kelsor rose from their chairs and walked out of the room. Atara saw that Xannissa and Sesh leave before her, ensuring she was the last one out. Before she stepped through the door, Fiori, who had a moment earlier been seated at the far end of the room, put her hand on Atara’s shoulder from behind.

    The captain turned around to face a grave archon who said, “I need to speak with you alone. I will meet you in your quarters.”

Varrel, less than two lightyears from Akos, possessed the closest gate hub with the most direct link to the Tribesson border. With Tribesson lying fringeward of Federation space, and Akos inhabiting the coreward volumes of the Federation, traversing the vast Federation would have taken years without the existence of the gates. The gates themselves—artificially-generated and stabilized wormholes—are sustained in clusters known as gate hubs. These hubs are placed in certain systems such that there is no longer than a day’s hyperwarp travel to any one gate hub from any system within the Federation proper. There are many hubs that exist as single gates able to connect to any number of other hubs. Most densely-populated regions of the Federation are serviced by hubs consisting of several gates with permanent connections that are traversed by thousands of ships per day.

     “We made it to Varrel in record time,” Atara noted as the synerdrive wound down. The ever-growing Varrel star slowly slipped to the right due to parallax before the Kelsor converged with the gate hub’s space, stopping completely. “What do you think, Xann?”

     “GreDrive actually did it,” Xannissa thought to the captain. “I’m still marveling at the mediator.”

     “Gate control is halting traffic for us,” Ethis reported in her noticeable accent.

     Atara, standing just behind Naret and flanked by Sesh and Fiori, commanded, “Take us through, lieutenant.”

     “Aye. Accelerating toward the Sol gate.” Naret guided the ship with her neural interface.

     The Kelsor’s gravitics and fusion engines propelled the battlecruiser toward the sphere of warped space. The wormhole—nearly a hundred kilometers in diameter—was surrounded by four stabilizers arranged at the points of an imaginary tetrahedron. After burning past the anchored civilian spaceliners and freighters, the Kelsor approached the wormhole’s event horizon through which a distorted white star (Sol) was visible.

     As the Kelsor pierced the horizon, the stars on the Varrel side of the wormhole shrank back as the stars of the Sol side advanced to fill the sky. Those aboard where oblivious to the spatial distortions occurring around the vessel unless they peered outside or found themselves in a sufficiently open space such as a hangar or cargo bay. Soon, the battlecruiser emerged in the heart of Federation space—several hundred lightyears from Akos—on the edge of the Sol system.

     “Status?” asked the captain.

     “All systems reporting nominal,” said a bridge officer.

     “Naret, proceed to the next gate.”

     They were three gates away from exiting Federation space. At each hub, interstellar traffic was briefly halted to let the battlecruiser through, potentially disrupting millions of lives and billions of credits. They moved about with Aesho’s authority, and there was nothing the gate controllers could do.

     Sesh moved a little closer to Atara. Feeling her presence, Atara spoke first in a soft voice that was loud enough for Naret to hear.

     “What have I been missing out on these last thirteen years?”

     “Apart from continued everlasting peace?” As a hobby historian, Sesh was more aware of the magnitude of the relative peace Civilized Space found itself in despite the constant outbreak of minor conflicts here and there. “I’d say little’s changed.”

     “You being such a fine officer, I’m surprised you haven’t attained captain yet.”

     “Actually, I have,” Sesh chuckled, “but I stole a play from your playbook.”

     “You forfeited promotion? But why? I wish we had stayed in touch.”

     “I think it was the right decision. I mean, we’re serving on the same ship again,” and after a pause, Sesh continued softly, “This is where you say ‘I could not have had a finer first officer.’”

     “That goes without saying,” Atara told her, and the two laughed lightly. Naret absorbed every word of their idle chatter as her eyes darted across her lumionic console.

     “But don’t worry about me,” said Sesh. “I’m not going to back down from a command again. Maybe they’ll give me a Kelsor-class of my own.”

     “And then we could start forming our own strike group.”

     “Now you’re talking.”

     Now that the Kelsor was transiting through gateways, the loud hum of the hyperwarp drives had quieted. It was easier to hear distant conversations and footfalls, but slightly more difficult to hear one’s own thoughts. At least, that’s what Xannissa felt as she now leaned over a central table, preparing to dissect the first drive data they obtained. The Elestan found comfort in the persistent noise from heavy machinery and its ability to filter out disruptive sounds such as the voices of others.

     Just then, a lumigraph appeared next to her.

     “Xanni!” said the person imaged.

     “Who is…” Xannissa said, slightly annoyed, and upon looking at the person’s face, continued with a shout of, “Cylenna!”

     “Hi, cutie,” said the smiling, black-haired Elestan pilot.

     “How the hell were you able to reach me?”

     “I’m on this ship, silly.”

     At this, Xannissa sighed. After pausing to collect herself, she said, “At least I can keep an eye on you.”

     “Sure, if that makes you feel better. Say, want to meet up sometime? Give your big sister a little attention?”

     “I’m busy.” Cylenna said nothing. She just stared at her younger sister until Xannissa caved and said, “Fine. But not until after we pass Mirida.”

     Three more transits through wormholes and the Kelsor found itself at a hub in fringeward Federation space that would take the ship into Tribesson territory. With the help of the gateway network, thousands of lightyears worth of travel had been crammed into a timespan of less than a day. With only a few hours until their arrival at Mirida, Atara put out another call for a meeting with the senior officers. Beyond Mirida, extensive gateway networks were next to nonexistent, setting the stage for a great chase that would pit classical hyperwarp against the emerging synerdrives that were bound to engulf the Federation’s sphere of influence in Civilized Space in the coming decades.

“Good afternoon, Doctor Souq. Please take a seat.” The woman, a Yeran with almost pinkish skin and short, orange hair, reclined in her seat with her legs crossed. Her front side was illuminated by bluish light from a one-way lumigraph that Souq could not see as he strode across the dark floor in the small, comfortable room lit by the last rays of orange sunlight from Mirida’s star. Beyond the windows, kilometers-tall towers climbed into the sky. These colossal monuments to modern decadence stood erect upon the ruins of ancient imperial might from an era long gone—yet not forgotten. Profit, vice, and pleasure were the most common thoughts associated with Mirida in this age.

     Akkain Technologies mandated Dr. Souq seek professional psychological treatment after the station attack. The same company compensated him for his hotel stay in the heart of Mirida’s capitol near the Federation embassy. Despite his status as a Federation citizen, Souq was prevented from staying within the embassy at the Federation government’s expense.

     Dr. Souq, clothed in business casual, took his seat across from the woman who looked like an inferno in the evening light. His now shaggy beard had gone unshaven for the last two weeks, and the bags under his eyes betrayed his inability to attain a good night’s sleep.

     “Let me see where we left off,” she said, scrolling through the transcript. “Ah ha. The last thing we talked about was your wife’s passing, and you said you had a daughter. How old is she?” The woman gave Souq an inquisitive glance. Perhaps most people on Mirida were like that, Souq wondered.

     “She should be twenty now,” Souq told her.

     “When did you last see her?”

     “I, uh… it’s been a long time.” Souq paused for a moment. “When Lira died, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I retreated into my work.”

     “Did your daughter stay by your side?”

     “I…” Souq paused again. Days of the psychologist’s interrogation was breaking him down. She stared at him, waiting for a line that her software could record. “I sent her away.”

     “Why did you do that?”

     “I don’t know, damn it!” Dr. Souq shouted at her. He shot up from the seat and paced around the room, passing from the shadow into the orange light and standing at the window looking across to the towers decorated with flashy, colorful lumigraphs. The female psychologist appeared unfazed, swiveling her chair to track Souq across the room. “I just wanted to see her succeed.”

     “I’m not convinced,” the woman told him. Souq scratched his bushy facial hair. After dropping his arm, he closed his eyes and sighed.

     “Maybe Lieren reminded me too much of her.”

     “You couldn’t accept your wife’s death, so you sent away the product of your love.”

     “Something like that.” Souq looked down at his feet, full of shame. The psychologist clawed open old wounds without treating the new. Dr. Souq’s patience was nearly spent.

     “Please continue.”

     “You know,” Souq told her, “I’m kind of getting tired of this psycho mind games bullshit.” The psychologist said nothing. She had heard similar sentiments countless times before. Her transcript grew at Souq’s every word. All she had to do was listen and spur the conversation.

     “How do these sessions make you feel?”

     “See? That kind of bullshit,” he told her, sticking his arm out toward her as if showing off an example. He walked back to his seat and sat on the very edge, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands clasped together. “Have you ever lost everything?” The psychologist refused to answer. Souq hung his head, chuckled quietly to himself, and then looked her dead in the eyes.

     “I have,” he told her in a whisper. “Forty-five. That’s how many brilliant minds I had working for me in my lab that day. None of them survived when those raiders came.” Souq’s voice rose as he spoke. “A couple were older than me. A few were as old as my daughter! My lab was the only one they attacked!” He was shouting now. “I’m just a man of science! These people were my friends, colleagues, my children! They took everything from me!” Tears streamed down the scientist’s face. “What did I do to deserve this?! If there really is a divine power, why does he delight in my suffering?!” His shouts became wails, and he covered his face in his hands. The psychologist leaned back in her chair, bringing her hand to her face as she watched him collapse into a fit of emotion.

     “I want my daughter!” he cried toward the ceiling.

     Atara and Xannissa sat alone inside the quiet gravidyne rising from Lanan’s atmosphere—now just a blue halo arcing over the horizon. Before them was a dark expanse littered with shining objects of many sizes, like a cloud of metallic dust drifting in the vacuum. However, these lustrous constructs were still many kilometers away, in orbit around the temperate moon.

     Xannissa played with her orivar-banded engagement ring, twisting it around her laminated left ring finger. Atara studied her assignment details one last time before closing it. Upon noticing Xannissa’s perpetual ring twisting, she asked, “You nervous?”

     “Do I look nervous?” Xannissa asked in return, looking at her friend. “I’ll be honest. I’m dying to see Aedan again.”

    “I’m glad he was able to get off those last two days,” Atara said. “He’s a good man, and the only one I could ever imagine you with.”

     “I just feel like I’d be having a late start with him,” Xannissa admitted. “My parents married well before a hundred.”

     “A late start is better than no start.”

     “That’s true. I don’t know why I’m having these thoughts. If I had married him years ago, I wouldn’t have had the experience or maturity I have today.” Xannissa paused and looked down at the ring again, still twisting it round and round slowly. “I guess… this is the first time in my life that I’ve lost my sense of direction.”

     “What do you mean?”

     “I don’t know,” Xannissa told her, still looking at the ring. “It’s hard to explain. I feel happy, but sad at the same time.”

     “I don’t want to accept it,” Atara said, “but I think this chapter of our lives is coming to an end. Maybe that’s why you feel this way.”

     “I think you’re right.” Xannissa let go of the ring and placed her hands on the seat, relaxing her head against the back of the chair and looking at Atara, then out at the bright moon below, visible through the large, clear OPEL panels that darkened the star’s incoming light. Atara stared out for a moment and then back at Xannissa, resting her hand on Xannissa’s leg. The Elestan smiled, then twisted her body and wrapped her hand around Atara’s front side, initiating a hug. Each held the other in her arms. Xannissa’s eyes filled with tears, but her face remained dry as they patted each other on the back.

     “I love you Atara. Never stop being a sister to me.”

     “I would never.” After letting go of each other, Atara asked, “Have you seen the crew roster?”

     “Not yet,” Xannissa admitted, wiping her eyes.

     “I think you should. It might be better than being surprised.”

     “I’d rather be surprised.”

     The shuttle approached the white-hulled battlecruiser floating in open space among a sparse cloud of starships. A Tanden-class battleship off in the distance glimmered in the sunlight—its hull surrounded by heavy scaffolding. Evident from its incomplete form, the ship was currently under construction with industrial-scale REMASS. Formations of strikecraft zipped by, making practice runs from the five-kilometer-long carrier even further away, watching over the other starships like a guardian mother. Streams of white plasma flowed from the strikecraft engines, stretched out behind them by their warp drives. One corvette floated past the GFN Kelsor’s surface leaving behind bright, white fusion engines. A supply ship hugged the Kelsor’s port side away from the incoming shuttle. Large, black letters on the ship’s white surface read CB-53-3930, flanked on one side by an orange Federation Triangle.

     The shuttle eased through the starboard airscreen that blocked the hangar’s internal atmosphere from blowing out into space. The port airscreen formed the opposite wall from floor to ceiling. Once through the airscreen, the shuttle quieted its engines, allowing the Kelsor’s gravitics to guide it onto a landing spot marked by lumigraphs. Those same gravitics moved crates and containers off of cargo haulers (mostly omnium with some prefabricated supplies) and carried strikecraft overhead without relying on gantry cranes or drones.

    “Captain! Commander!” Aesho said as they stepped off of the shuttle. The blonde Terran, along with representatives of the ship’s officers and crew, stood in formals. The officers formed one line and the crew another line on the opposite side, creating a lane for Atara and Xannissa to walk through accompanied by the admiral. They offered the captain and commander their salutes. “Why are you not in formals?” Aesho asked them.

     “Can we skip the formalities?” Atara asked her in the same brusque tone she was given about a week ago when her vacation was interrupted.

     “Not today,” Aesho demanded. Atara and Xannissa stopped in their tracks, recalled their standards which left them naked for a mere moment, and clothed themselves in officer formals. They continued walking with the admiral along the short lane flanked by Accellus users. “That’s better,” she told them.

     The hangar walls and ceiling were bright white in the Federation style, illuminated by lumionics. The featureless floor was a dark gray with markings generated by lumionics, enabling the entire floorspace to be rearranged at will. What was now a landing zone for the shuttle could become a temporary storage area an hour later, or a safe zone after that. Crates moved through the ship’s wide corridors, drifting through the ship’s air due to the Kelsor’s logistic gravitics and surrounded by warnings such as “Gravity-propelled object” or “Variable gravity fields.”

     “What do you think of your officers and crew?” Aesho asked the pair as they walked past one of the last gently-drifting crates moving toward one of the corridors on the way to the cargo bays.

     “I was actually very pleased,” Atara told her. “It’s an all-star crew with a few interesting surprises. I didn’t need to make many changes. You know me too well.”

     “You’re just like your mother, you know that?” Aesho said. The look in her eyes nearly betrayed her mal intent in her choice of subject.

     “You’ve told me before,” Atara stated. This side of the hangar had been vacated save for the three of them. No one was within earshot.

     “Actually,” Aesho continued, “sometimes I forget you’re not her. That’s how close the resemblance is.”

     “I see.”

     “That dark red hair and those green eyes. That same emotional suppression. She made a really fine admiral in her time. With you, it’s like she never died.”

     “That’s enough,” Atara spoke with tension. Her clenched fists hugged her sides.

     “What’s wrong?” Aesho asked. “I can’t talk about my friend?”

     “She may have been your friend,” Atara said, “but she was my mother, and she did pass away. Nothing will ever, ever replace her—not even me.”

     “So be it,” Aesho said, her eyebrows raised. The admiral called the gravilift that ferried them to the Kelsor’s bridge on the dorsal side of the aft section of the two-and-a-half-kilometer long battlecruiser.

     “Do you think it’s a good idea to put AOTP cadets on my ship?” Atara asked Aesho while they rode the lift.

     “I think it’s an excellent idea.”

     “This isn’t a training cruise.”

     “I’m well aware. Decades of peace has made this service soft. I think we could use a few more opportunities that really separate the wheat from the chaff.”

     The gravilift arrived at an antechamber for the bridge. The three of them were greeted first by a large Federation Triangle decorating the wall that separated them from the bridge. Walking around the wall and through the doors, they found themselves in a familiar setting. The Kelsor’s bridge was identical to the Hallyon’s in nearly every way. A Zelnaran with deep blue skin and long black hair stood in the middle of the room with her arms crossed.

     “Sesh!” Atara called out to her, and the Zelnaran spun around. Her neutral expression immediately changed to warm and inviting.

     “Captain!” Sesh said. Sesh opened her arms to hug the captain. “It’s been so long.” They closed their eyes as they embraced.

     “I guess we’ll be hearing that a lot,” Xannissa said behind Atara. Sesh’s eyes opened and looked at the Elestan.

     “Who are you?” Sesh asked Xannissa in jest.

     “Hello to you, too,” Xannissa said. When Atara and Sesh finished, the Zelnaran squeezed Xannissa to her.

     “I missed you two,” Sesh said. Before Sesh released the engineer, Aesho cleared her throat in a manner that could be considered obscene. Sesh stepped away from Xannissa and shouted, “Admiral on the bridge!” All of the bridge officers—every one of them in formals—stood from their stations, turned toward the center of the bridge, and gave their salutes.

     “This is, without a doubt,” Aesho told the three senior officers, “the best personnel complement in the Navy.” She turned to the standing officers and said “At ease,” and they returned to their stations around the bridge’s perimeter. Atara noticed Naret and her black bobbed hair climb into the conning station. “Would you not agree, Atara?”

     “I agree one-hundred-percent,” Atara told her.

     “Permission to transfer command of the Greater Federation Navy vessel Kelsor over to the captain,” Sesh asked the admiral.

     “Granted, but make it quick,” Aesho told her.

     “I, Commander Yora Sesh, hereby transfer command of the battlecruiser Kelsor to Captain Atara Korrell, relieving myself of the position of commanding officer.”

     “I, Captain Atara Korrell, assume the position of commanding officer of the starship Kelsor and grant Commander Yora Sesh the position of executive officer.” The two smiled wide and shook hands. Initiated by Xannissa, the officers aboard the bridge and even the personnel below them in operations clapped at this brief ceremonial exchange of command. Some even cheered.

     “Alright, it’s time to go,” Aesho told them. “I want this ship spaceborne by the end of the day, and you still need to give your first official briefing. I’ve assembled most of the Kelsor’s senior officers already across the aft hall, along with a few other key individuals.”

     Atara, Xannissa, and Sesh followed Aesho out of the bridge, but not before Atara left bridge authority with Naret who gladly accepted. As Aesho said, the briefing room was already occupied.

     “I present to you the Kelsor’s command triumvirate,” Aesho told those already gathered in the room as she directed them to look at Atara, Xannissa, and Sesh who took seats at the flared end of the delta-shaped table. Atara sat in the middle, Xannissa on her right, and Sesh on her left. Aesho took her seat at the pointed end on the far side. The briefing room was long, dim, and had four doors open to corridors that ran on either side. Darkened OPEL panels allowed those seated within to see the corridors beyond, but those standing or walking without would see plain walls. Lumigraphs illuminated the wall behind Atara, and the wall behind Aesho was adorned with the ubiquitous Federation Triangle.

     “I am Captain Atara Korrell, commanding officer of the Kelsor.”

     “Commander Xannissa Cetalo, engineering chief.”

     “Commander Yora Sesh, the Kelsor’s executive officer.”

     “Colonel Kyora Teseri,” said an Elestan with short, messy, white hair above and around her face, beautiful despite being a warrior. She spoke with confidence. “Freshly transferred from the Assault Force to the Auroras. Security chief and commander of the Kelsor’s Aurora complement.”

     “Lieutenant Colonel Virn Lorralis,” an Exan with long black hair spoke next. Her voice was softer. “Also transferred from the Assault Force to the Auroras. I am Kyora’s service partner and her second-in-command.”

     “Commander Silva Kodi,” said another Exan. Her dark hair, tied in a looped ponytail, was tinged green. “Commander of the Kelsor’s strike wing.”

     “Lieutenant Commander Ethis Kasel,” said an Elestan with long, dark blue hair and cool gray skin darker than Xannissa’s. Her accent was different from the rest and had a Republic ring to it. “Communications officer.”

     “Commander Miry Iveti, medical doctor,” a Yeran said in a tone laced with arrogance. Her skin was blood red and her bobbed hair like golden rust. “Ship’s chief medical officer.”

     “Lieutenant Commander Sayn Namara.” Another Elestan, her ponytailed hair black as Sesh’s. “Chief science officer.”

     “Corporal Krystal Zara, Aurora,” said a blonde Terran with a ponytail seated at the end near Aesho.

     “Did you say ‘corporal?’” Atara asked her with confusion.

     “All will be revealed in time,” Aesho said. She was leaning back in her chair now. “Please proceed.”

     “Aye, admiral.” Atara remained seated. “Fiori,” Atara called, and the orange lumigraph female appeared within the room as she always did, standing behind Atara.

     “Greetings, Captain,” she told Atara as she bowed. Atara swiveled her chair to see the archon.

     “Fiori, can you give us the rundown on the events leading up to this point?”

     “Certainly,” Fiori nodded. “Monday, oh-five-fifteen, oh-eight-hundred hours, twelve minutes. Black, frigate-sized vessels of Alliance design attacked and invaded the Akkain Technologies omnium research station in coreward Tribesson.” The images on the lumigraph behind Atara changed as Fiori spoke. “These attackers decimated the laboratory of omnium scientist Doctor Quen Souq and stole the only known sample of the omnium variety known as ecksivar, or black omnium.”

     “What is this… ‘ecksivar’?” Dr. Namara interrupted Fiori.

     “Ecksivar is a novel variety of omnium with special attributes that cannot be disclosed at this time.”

     “I am an omnimologist,” Namara explained. “I would like to know.”

     “Now is not the proper time,” Fiori told her. “The nature and significance of ecksivar will be the topic of future briefings.” Continuing on, Fiori said, “The attackers have since been identified as belonging to the Elsheem State. The two frigate-sized vessels are children of a much larger battleship called the Voulgenathi, named after subterranean savages from Avenathi myth. Intelligence suggests that the Voulgenathi is on course for Avenath, the capitol of the Elsheem State. The battlecruiser Kelsor, with its superior speed, must intercept the Voulgenathi before it reaches Elsheem space.

     “Shortly after the attack, Doctor Souq was transferred to Mirida to undergo psychiatric evaluation and treatment. Unfortunately, his mental state continues to decline. The professionals issuing his treatment say that being reunited with his daughter is his best hope for recovery. His daughter, Lieren Souq, a cadet in the Acting Officer Training Program, is aboard this ship. The first task for the Kelsor will be to retrieve Doctor Souq from Mirida. Once this has been completed, I will be at liberty to discuss ecksivar.”

     “May I have permission to speak?” Kyora asked.

     “You may speak,” Atara told her.

     “Virn, myself, and Commander Sesh were there that day on the station,” Kyora said. “I haven’t seen a cold-blooded slaughter like that in a very long time. I’m not a scientist, and I don’t understand what exactly ecksivar is, but whatever it is, it’s important enough for these beasts to murder innocent scientists over. These are the kind of, things, we’re dealing with. I also want to add one more thing. Mirida isn’t a place you go to for a family vacation. We all need to be on our guard when we go there, especially the team that’s retrieving Doctor Souq.”

     “How much do you know about Mirida?” Atara asked the phantom.

     “A thing or two.”

     “I would like you and your partner Lorralis to meet with the triumvirate soon after this briefing is over. I’d like to know all I can about Mirida from someone who’s been there.”

     “Understood,” Kyora said reluctantly.

     “At this moment,” Fiori said, “little is known about the Voulgenathi’s combat capabilities; howev—.” Fiori’s image froze in the middle of her speech almost like she was stopped in time. At a loss for words, seeing a sight they thought they would never see, the senior officers stood up from their seats and stared at the frozen orange female.

     “What in the hell is going on with Fiori?” Aesho asked, raising her voice. Xannissa, who was closest to the archon’s image, waved her hand in front of the synthetic intelligence’s face.

     “Captain,” Naret called from the bridge via lumigraph, “they’re reporting a strange error in here dealing with the adjunct. Some kind of core disconnect?” Someone shouted on the bridge, and Naret echoed what they said, “Total network failure.”

     “I’m on my way,” Atara said. Already standing, she announced, “This briefing is over,” and she left the room and walked back to the bridge. Seconds after she arrived, a new image of Fiori appeared. This time, her arms were at her sides and she was standing completely straight with her eyes staring forward. Aesho and the other senior officers from the briefing room weren’t too far behind Atara. Scrambling was heard from operations below the bridge and even from the bridge officers themselves.

     “Report!” Atara shouted.

     “Running adjunct diagnostics now, captain,” said a bridge officer. Another image of Fiori appeared in another part of the bridge in the same pose.

     “Can someone please tell me what the fuck is going on?” the admiral cried.

     “Admiral, with all due respect, this is my bridge,” Atara told her plainly. “I’m in command of this starship.”

     “Another statement like that and I’ll see you court-martialed for insubordination.” The entire bridged stopped at the threat Aesho gave. Looking around the bridge, Aesho barked at them. “Don’t just stand there! Contact CORCOM!” Another image of Fiori materialized right next to Aesho and she tried to shove the immaterial lumigraph out of her way, only for her hands to phase right though.

     Ethis walked to her station and, after standing over it for a half minute, said, “CORCOM is reporting a system-wide archon core failure. They’re not giving any details.”

     “That would be a first,” Sesh stated.

     “I’ll see myself to engineering,” Xannissa told the gathered officers, but to Atara and Sesh in particular.

     “Be safe, okay?” Atara told her. “Are you sure you can trust the lifts?”

     “Going to have to. Engineering needs me. How’s that diagnostic?”

     “All green so far,” shouted the bridge officer over the noise of voices. “It’ll take several more minutes to complete.”

     “Well, I’m off,” Xannissa told them before changing her uniform to standard. “Keep me updated.” She departed the bridge for the set of aft gravilifts. The other senior officers decided to do the same with their Accellus 4, and then Sesh realized something.

     “Why didn’t our Accellus give us any warnings about this?”

     “True,” Kyora said, “since they all contain adjunct nodes.” Several more images of Fiori appeared on the bridge.

     “Can we reset the lumigraphics on the bridge before Fiori floods us?” Atara asked.

     “We can,” said a junior officer, “but we’ll lose our screens for a moment.”

     “Do it,” Atara commanded, and the Fioris disappeared along with the screens and interfaces the officers were working on. After a few seconds, the screens reappeared along with a single, new Fiori image.

     “We may need to keep doing that a few more times before we get this mess sorted out,” Sesh said. Atara looked around the bridge, noticing Aesho’s sudden absence.

     “What happened to the admiral?” Atara asked.

     “I saw her depart after Xannissa left,” Virn told them. “Same with most of the other senior officers.”

     “Captain, I detect a Q-comms transmission emanating from the Kelsor,” said an officer.

     “Where is the destination?”

     “Coreward Operations Command.”

     “There’s your admiral,” Sesh whispered to Atara.

     “Let her do what she wants,” Atara said. “I can’t stop her.”

     Atara ordered that a pair of Auroras stand by the door to the Q-comms room. When CORCOM had enough of Aesho’s ranting, the pair escorted the enraged admiral to a shuttle bound for Lanan’s surface. A half hour and four more lumigraphics resets later, the images of Fiori on the bridge disappeared save for one that collapsed to the floor, held her head, and screamed in pain. Who knew an archon synthetic intelligence could even feel pain?

     “Fiori!” Atara cried. She and Sesh rushed to and knelt beside the injured-looking figure. The rest of the bridge officers halted their tasks and watched them huddled together on the floor.

     Fiori, acting so lifelike as to appear out of breath, said, “Atara, Sesh, what has just happened to me cannot be explained with brevity.” The orange figure eased herself onto her feet and lifted her body—the CO and XO following her slowly upward. Still holding her head, the archon asked, “You are not yet underway?”

     “Of course not,” Atara told her.

     “You understand that my adjuncts are sufficient to carry out normal operations?” Fiori said, almost in reproach.

     “Losing you is anything but normal,” Sesh stated. “Delaying our mission seemed to be our best option. Your images kept flooding the bridge anyway.”

     “Fair point,” Fiori said. “However, now is not the time for debate. You must get underway as soon as possible.”

     “Then there will be no more,” Atara told her. “Naret, plot a course to the gate hub in Varrel. Ethis, clear us for departure. I want to be underway in five minutes.

     “Xannissa, are you prepared for immediate transit?”

     “Ready as ever. She’s ready, too.”

     “Who?”

     “The Kelsor, silly.”

     “Dockmaster confirms preparations are complete,” Ethis said. “We are cleared to leave on your command.”

     “Seems like everyone is recovering smoothly,” Sesh stated.

     “Naret,” Atara commanded, “engage the synerdrive, maximum velocity.”

     “Aye, captain.”