Sunset: Then, Now, Tomorrow (Maintenance & Role-Play)

[Sunset]

The Maric Cabin, Kayv, Alawk's Star...

Slipping through the water like some bizarre hairy eel, Alwyra's tail lazily slid back and forth in long, slow circles as she floated at the surface of the tub, little more than her face, the swell of her breasts, and the tips of her fingers visible as she relaxed in the delightfully warm buoyant water. A rainbow of colored bubbles surrounded and washed over her and with a focused breath she blew an encroaching mass of them up and away to swirl over the rest. She did some of her best thinking in the tub and so, as she relaxed, a hologram floated above her filled with a careful array of information culled from various sources. Much of it was faded now; Business dealings that had already been handled by her management team but that had required her to sign off on it in some manner. There was also the day's news - headlines that scrolled past while SNN Nightly News played in a smaller tile next to it. Up next were her two least favorite subjects and she closed her eyes to while away nearly an hour not thinking about it.

Long enough for one item to not have moved an inch and for the other to acquire a new entry as the smart agent latched on to a new tidbit it had uncovered in its regular trawl of the Internet.

An eye opened and the slowly pulsing yellow bordered pane went blue as it detected her attention, highlighting the new entry and expanding to open a summary. For a moment, she almost disregarded it as one of those things that sometimes popped up thanks to an obscure combination of keywords or clever marketing that didn't really have anything to do with the desired subject. But as she read the quick summary she began to see the connection and the potential appeal - for a certain definition of appeal!

'Predator or Prey: The Ultimate Game. Put yourself in the body of the hunter or the hunted - or is it the other way around? Utilizing the just-released ExoCortex adapter system for the popular ForeverPet cybernetic animal line, Exotic Excursions is ready to put you inside the head of predator... Or is it prey? Experience every visceral moment as you guide a hunter through their stalk of one of the most difficult of wildlife predators; The deadly Martian Tiger. The chill air on your skin, the scent of blood in your nose. From the start of the hunt to the moment of death, you'll be there for every thrilling moment!'

The augmented agent hadn't been incorrect; It was right up Tadi's sexual alley. Instead of being interested in the adrenaline thrill of hunter versus predator, she would want to experience the gore and violence first hand. The ultimate rush; Death and violence with minimal risks. She didn't want to think about it too much but there was always the question as to what had pushed the young woman in that particular direction? Doubtless there were any number of psychiatric theories but such a thing was best left to the professionals - perhaps when Tadi went away to University she'd find some help there.

'I know I shouldn't be putting it off on someone else, but... It's just yicky, and she's not my daughter. What if it's some kind of daddy thing? Which...'

If anything it would be a mommy problem. Even two years later Kedo hadn't told her the details of how he'd lost his first wife and the kids had avoided it completely. She could go digging but it seemed like an intensely private moment and again, something she didn't want to dig too deeply into. What if his first wife turned out to be a murderer who had then gone on to kill her debt-labor boss, taken over his multi-billion dicoin business, then lied to him for years while they'd had two kids?

"Should just drown myself in the tub..."

[Sunset]

Deep Under the Dragon's Eye (GEC-A1291883), Deep Space, Delta Quadrant...

"...so we have a door with no lock."

Regardless of the apparent uselessness of their activities the little drones rolled on undisturbed. The door - and it was clearly a door - was enormous even in its inner span and the two spheres circled and rolled around and past each other as they played their lights over the decorated surface. If there was a catch it was not of the obvious sort; No knob, lever, bar, or handle marred the intricacies and detail of the frieze that stretched from curved post to arcing mantle to the less ornate portal in the center. Not even the direction of travel was evident with the certain possibility that the door had either been built to look as if it was such or had - like the tomb doors of Ancient Egypt - been dropped into place from above to renain forever.

"It's in the water," Commander Sloan declared, a near-certainty in her tone. "Eye..."

The Engineering Chief was already on it and one of the drones lefts its place to sweep around the edge of the pool, shining its light down in at an angle that lit the opposite edge in watery shadow as it moved past the legs of the supporting statues. Almost as predicted a ledge a meter or so under the surface revealed itself to point in the direction of the enormous door. With a splash and a plop it dropped into the water and sunk, the ripples that spread across the pristine surface circling out and reflecting back to slowly disappear. The cone of light that swung out from the sphere rotated around and dispersed the darkness to illuminate a narrow tunnel that led towards the door and the unknown beyond.

"Good catch!"

"Thank you, but it made sense. They've already used the same trick one," the Commander referenced the kilometers-deep shaft and the bend that isolated it from the next set of chambers, "No reason why they wouldn't use the same method again. There's a lot of questions there though; The surface complexes are all underwater, which would seem to indicate an aquatic species. Presuming they were intended to enjoy them. But the second section is dry land and also heavily decorated. That might suggest we've got an amphibian species that can also withstand enormous changes in pressure. Deep underwater..."

Sloan paused and looked to the Eye, "What's the pressure like two kilometers underwater?"

"Just about two hundred kilograms per cubic centimeter. And we're at one kilometer," he pointed out, "The drones are at three. So yes, this species," he looked up to the towering statues that surrounded the first well, "Can survive those depths. Which... I suddenly wish I was a biologist because solving that problem even for high-end alloys and composites was an engineering challenge. Unless they cheated. And I'm pretty sure they cheated and I'm pretty sure I know how."

"How?"

But the Captain's question was already being answered as a wireframe of the undersea tunnel network was being laid out in glowing green across the lower half of her vision. The upper half was similarly being filled in with a representation of the temple complex on the sea floor. The position of the other teams, as well as the buildings they had explored, was then marked as well and a series of red lines was drawn straight down from these.

"I can't call it anything but ambitious," he went on, a note of respect in his voice, "But my suspicion is that each of these marks the top of a shaft. The building was sealed, the water pumped out, and then they dug shafts down and used those to build the complex below us. In fact, I'd bet you that if we looked around, we might find more of these U-joints where they could enter the shaft heads, do the work, then carry out the cut stone. Stone they would then use to make a lot of statues," though Commander Sloan had a question; "Wouldn't they have built the statues out from the shafts then? Instead the aging points to the shafts like an arrow, oldest to youngest."

"Good question. I could be wrong there - we can compare the stone from the undersea tunnels to the statues though, see if they are a chemical match."

'That would be a 'yes',' Doctor Vikosio chimed in remotely, 'Spectroscopy of recovered samples and the tunnel walls shows just that - the two are an essential match.'

"So they just carried the statues and stone out from the shaft sites. Either way, they are making the trip. Which means they just planned out how much stone they would have and how they would dispose of it. But why carve a statue then immediately smash the face off it? It has to be some kind of religious significance."

It was a question for another time; The drone had reached the end of the tunnel and was now floating up towards an unseen surface. In moments it would breach the new world and everyone watched with baited breath...

[Sunset]

SDF-Nocturnal, En Route to the Anviltop Facility, Ares Super Cluster...

"Lieutenant Lomak, ma'am," the virtual agent - a holographic secretary that looked more like a bouncer than a receptionist - went on to fill in more esoteric details in a blur of information; "He wants to talk to you about a rescue operation. I do not have any indication that he is currently involved in any rescue operations or is assigned to a unit that would participate in such. Lieutenant Lomak is, according to his personnel file, currently studying for a Master's Degree at the University of Ein'S'Sten on Shiva."

"In what?"

"Theoretical Physics."

The mention of Ein'S'Sten and the officer's unusual course of study had perked the Director's interest; In most cases a random contact from an unknown person, even someone inside the Defense Force, would have been directed back into the chain of command or to Public Relations. But the University was something of an oddball notorious for more than its fair share of lunatics, crazies, conspiracy theorists, and nut jobs. That it was located in the ArAreBee enclave of Shiva partially explained the peculiar habits of many of its scholars and students but that Lieutenant Lomak was an Ork and not - stereotypically - prone to such whimsical behavior begged for additional questions to be asked.

"And since the Lieutenant is on the line - put him through," she decided, taking a seat on the corner of her desk as the Lieutenant's projected holographic reconstruction formed in the center of her office. There wasn't much reason to make it other than a casual visit; The Nocturnal was still a few hours out from Anviltop and even then her visit was more administrative than urgent. Sometimes the best results were from a handshake and a working lunch rather than a terse email.

"Lieutenant Lomak," he tensed and she took a moment to study him. Any impression that he might be the savage was instantly dispersed; Carefully poised, he was darkly handsome with carefully styled black hair and glittering eyes that were similarly sizing her up. Just the hint of two thick tusks jutted from his lower lip but this gave his face the appearance of a lantern jaw and a broad cleft creased it down the middle. Perhaps it was adopted by his avatar for the call, but he was wearing the uniform though a few of the service ribbons weren't immediately familiar; "Admiral."

Her quick search on the odd ribbons had given an even odder result; Intelligence Service during the Long War. It was an odd distinction to carry - most of the operatives that had survived were out in the field or retired while many hadn't made it out due to the speed at which circumstances had developed.

"What can I do for you?"

"Rumors, Admiral," he shifted, his voice betraying a hint of nervousness. "Rumors that say that you can change the universe."

Her eyebrow rose, "Me? I've rocked someone's world but changing the universe? That seems ambitious, depending on how much change you're looking for."

"Is it? Perhaps I should explain; There is some discussion among certain circles that you were involved in something concerning the Dulyani..."

"The Dulyani and a pocket holographic universe," she finished for him, realization dawning. "But that wasn't changing this world - we were altering the boundary conditions of another universe. We were changing it."

"But you could change this one?"

"In theory? Yes... Given access to all the energy in this universe. The Dulyani situation was unique. That universe was generated via an artifact of unknown origin that existed in this universe and thus we could use the energy in this universe to affect it but it was limited in size. An eternal prison - at least in theory."

The practice turned out to be different. After millenia of captivity the inhabitants had learned how to - or been assisted with - escape their prison and intruding again on our own. By altering the boundary itself, a literal twisting in knots, she had created a new lock. it could be forced but any intrusion would be very limited. There simply wasn't enough energy in the pocket universe to affect the primary universe on a significant level.

"Your message said something about a rescue operation - what does this have to do with that?"

"Maybe nothing," Lomak admitted, but there was a look of determination on his face and the glitter in his eye had grown stronger, "Or everything. I was posted in... Before the Break. I was a spy; I blended in, I fell in love, I got married. Partnered, as they called it. I got out but she..."

Katryna nodded understanding, "She didn't."

"No."

"And you want to try to get her back. Reality realigned itself in the Break and you think we might be able to use something like the Dulyani Artifact to reach to the other side and pull her through," a thoughtful expression spread across her face, "And you know... We just might..."

[Sunset]

The Anviltop Facility, Deep Space, Ares Super Cluster...

"It is almost a meta-philosophical question as much as one of physics," Katryna mused as she walked around the virtual reconstruction of the facility at GEC-S4498. According to the remote monitoring the twisted band that was the portal and boundary of another universe had stabilized, absorbing all of the artificial blood provided to it and growing to a substantial size. In the beginning there had been a few sparkling attempts from something on the other side to open the gateway, to create a breach between her universe and the universe of starless nights and ever-changing days. "If our universe can realign based on the perception of reality - a zero-energy event - what does that say about our reality? Did the Dulyani create this holographic universe," she ran a virtual hand down the metal-infused stone of the portal, the strange red runes reflecting the virtual light along their blood-stained surface, "Knowing in turn that this universe, our universe, is itself holographic? That somehow a mass decision of consciousness can set our boundary conditions to allow certain things, disallow others, and change those rules?"

Lomak grunted. Unlike the Admiral, who was decidedly intimate in both proximity and in knowledge with the altered portal and the techniques used to construct it, he was keeping a respectful distance from the gateway while trying to absorb the implications of what she was saying, "Are you saying that we can alter this universe with something as simple as a memetic? If everyone accepts that four legs are now more useful and common than two, suddenly I will have four legs?"

"The Federated Segments has a whole division dedicated to memetic warfare," she pointed out, a brief hologram flashing up to show where it was on the organizational chart of the super-Federal state. "But it is dedicated to the idea of changing things on a cultural level and, of course, resisting that change. Monitoring the spread of memetic infection and their various effects. But is it enough to change the fundamental nature of the universe? I don't think it is - memetics are by their very nature changing. They shift as quickly as the clouds. If they were capable, somehow, of changing the very fundamental aspects of reality then we'd be seeing those effects on an essentially regular basis and we aren't."

"But the Break could be that kind of memetic shift? The mass effect of people re-defining the boundaries of our holographic universe to include or exclude specific portions of it? Certainly the brain - consciousness - burns calories, but is that even close to the kind of energy that one would need?" Lomak shook his head and then turned to study the wall, "I don't think so. But that energy has to come from somewhere."

"Which asks a big question about the nature of our universe. If it can be re-defined in such a manner - and we know about things like Fractal Sensitivity Syndrome so there is some basis for it - then that implies that there is enough energy coming from outside of the system to either change the boundaries of our universe or to change the conditions in a portion of it to such a significant extent that the question of how much power is required becomes meaningless to the source of that power."

"And so you're suggesting that our universe is holographic and that there is an outside force or entity that is somehow both capable of and active in changing the boundary conditions? Just as that," he looked to the portal, his arms crossed in a show of hopelessly defiant disbelief, "Is capable of changing the nature of the universe on the other side? That almost sounds like I should be praying to a god for miraculous intervention."

"Not to be mean but," she ducked under the portal, swinging around it and coming up on the inside with an impish grin, "But you are an Orc. A creation of Melkor and by virtue of that a creation of Ilúvatar. The Elves would say Eru is that creator - but the Duab'Akii would credit Akii with being that creator, and Yahweh the god of the Jews, and... It could be possible that these are just our method of somehow explaining whatever controls the boundary conditions of our universe just as we control the boundaries of this artifact. I'm not saying we should pray, but if our universe is indeed holographic - and if we can create and shape one, why wouldn't ours have the same nature? - then there may well be something that created and controlled or controls those conditions. Which is..."

She flopped onto the deck, legs crossing into the lotus position with her hands on her knees, "Frustrating, because that is not what we as a forward-thinking civilization believe. Science has a rational explanation for everything, but if there is an outside force controlling our universe then those boundary conditions might not be entirely rational. And of course, since its turtles all the way down, where did those entities come from? What is the explanation for their existence?"

"Can we answer those questions and get my wife back at the same time?"

"Oh... Maybe!"

Jumping to her feet, she summoned a host of virtual consoles - redundant in an already virtual space - and began entering commands at a pace that was positively breakneck. The portal behind her disappeared, reappeared, and then was replaced as was the room itself. Instead of a chamber that sat on the very apex of an event horizon that would ensure its complete destruction in case of a breach, it was now in a chamber that might have been carved from living rock itself and the portal had the appearance of lore and dust with runes carved in dark iron and stone worked by the hands of the Men of the Earth.

"See, I don't think we can restore the Break. Too much energy. But can we alter one portion of it long enough to get your wife back? Maybe. What we'd want to do is create a pocket - not create, more like sew - a pocket universe around your wife. Then we don't need to have enough energy to re-connect the two universes - just enough to connect our universe to hers. But here's the shitty part; We need the cooperation of whatever is setting our boundary conditions or for those boundary conditions to allow what we are trying to do. And of course if we could know those boundary conditions we'd be able to alter them. It's basic information security; If someone has access to the computer, it's already owned. Since we don't, we don't."

"What you're hoping is that the universe already has the possibility of moving someone or something to this universe from another. That the Gods allow it."

"Pretty much! But see, you exist. And that's a good sign. And the Elves exist - also a good sign. So what we'll do is a little magic. My mother-in-law would love this by the way." Drawing out the virtual comparison, she changed the scenario so that the two portals were side-by-side and began her explanation; "So what we're going to do is cheat a bit. We already know this portal can create a breach into the Dulyani Artifact universe so we'll start substituting like-for-like and see where that gets us."

"Will it work?"

"Maybe? At least that falls back into the realm of science. We'll have to experiment, see if we can't get a further understanding both of this artifact and of the nature of the universe itself. We might get lucky and just slap some runes on it and there you go. Or it could take years and years. But faint heart never won fair lady..."

[Sunset]

Ko'Oset (GEC-1778099D), Alpha Quadrant...

"Let me ask you a question, friend..." Timmons leaned back against the bar, his broad back and shoulders seeming to provide more support to the slim analog than the spindly-looking arrangement of crossed branches and carved wooden members that were one of the typical elements of Oseti construction, "Tell me about your history. How long have the Feknarthi been visiting your world? And have things changed during that time?"

The rattle of wooden bowls on the counter behind him was the bartender's way of sorting out his thoughts; Preparations for his next words and for the late meal. Thick and savory, the liquor that he served was often considered the only sustenance needed before the post-insectoids headed for their homes and the night's slumber.

"Myths and legends? Or facts? By the stories of children and old men, they have been coming to our world to take our people for hundreds of years. How much of that is true..." He paused, his vestigial wings rattling, "I can't say. You space-men would know better than we would. But as soon as I can remember I've seen them around."

Timmons nodded; By the notes in the Therian intelligence files, the Feknarthi had been a star-faring culture for nearly five hundred years. Longer than humanity by nearly three times and capable of visiting other worlds for nearly the entirety of that time. That wasn't where his questioning was leading though; "Would you say your world - what you know of it - has gotten more or less violent during that time? Has there been a time when your people have been prone to random outbursts of violence? Attacked one another for no apparent reason?"

It had come to him suddenly - If the Feknarthi had a super-weapon that could induce aggressive and irrational behavior in the Hegemony, why would they only use it against the Therians? Certainly their technology would allow them to crush a species like the Oseti in any kind of military confrontation but that would make it a lot harder to buy booze from them, or to visit their planet for the odd vacation. But something that would induce unexpected and random violence? That could allow them to keep their civilization suitably under thumb without the appearance of direct responsibility.

The hard clatter of a bowl behind him drew his attention and the Explorer looked over his shoulder to find the bartender staring down at it, a gourd full of liquor in his hand, "No. As much as I hate them for what they do - buying our children as slaves, treating us like cattle who would sell our lives for a few sparkling bits of coin... Our world is peaceful. If there is a famine or a shortage, the Feknarthi will step in. For a price, of course. They'll tell us that they are making things better for those of us who remain but they take a whole generation away at the same time. Accept their price and you'll eat well for a year but there will be no children to care for you in your old age."

Was it a reasonably honest assessment or was there still a tinge of bias to it? It didn't really matter for his topmost purpose; If the Feknarthi had been using this weapon on them, he would be complaining about far worse things - wars and uprisings. Every planet had their own peculiarities of weather and circumstances that led to famine and starvation. Technology might have allowed some branches of humanity to move beyond those effects but the planets they lived on were still affected by them. It wasn't a definitive answer of course; As evidenced by the diminutive administrator, the Feknarthi were clearly not a civilization entirely devoted to evil. Against an interstellar rival like the Hegemony, they might be far more willing to employ such a weapon if it was even in their possession.

"When was the last time..."

One question led to another but as the conversation between patron and provender continued, Timmons found himself mostly nodding and listening politely. If the rants of the bartender and other patrons were true then the city should have been devoid of life, fit only as a place for wild animals. That it was not indicated that the relationship was not as strained as they made it out to be. But was it possible that there were others who had been subjected to this mysterious weapon? Perhaps a survey of the civilizations bordering the Feknarthi was in order...

[Sunset]

SDF-Aayrid, En Route to GEC-P1241002 (Unknown)...

"...unfortunately, we were only able to recover enough information from the wreckage to identify what system the ship originated from and a fragment of its registration or identification. There were no survivors or deceased found, and there were no personal effects."

Demi paused to consider her practiced statement. That was the problem with it; 'It sounds too practiced.' Of course that was something of the point because it was also a lie. She knew it was a lie but like all diplomats there was often a time and a place for them and the truth of the matter was buried in her statement. The Wright Brothers had found a ship - an entire ship - and there had been no survivors nor had there been any corpses. In fact, by the briefing materials she had been provided with, the ship looked as if it had just been manufactured and then dumped in deep space. Analysis of the ship's navigation systems had rendered up some details of where it should have been but even these were remarkably scant; Detailed technical information about coordinates, orbits, gravity wells, and similar but cultural information? Not a whiff.

"Like it fell off the back of the truck on the way to the store. Does that even happen anymore?"

It was a phrase she had inherited from her Father, who was old enough to remember a time when trucks driven by people made deliveries rather than automated drone cargo transports. But even his stories were antecedent; Something to explain how the otherwise illogical accident of diplomacy had otherwise occurred. Maybe this was just such an event. When the starship on an otherwise dull task had stumbled across the derelict spaceship out in the middle of nowhere, no one could have guessed that it would shortly lead to contact with an unknown sentient species. That all the details weren't quite as she would lay out...

Well, she would expect them to do the same. Undoubtedly there were safeguards to prevent Defense Force starships from casually and randomly falling into neutral or even unknown hands but sometimes things just fell off the back of the truck.

"As the diplomatic representative of the Republic of Sunset, it is my sad duty to inform you that we have found and recovered pieces - very small pieces - of a ship with the identification information..." She couldn't even say that part. There had been enough in the ship's data-banks for a healthy language translation and she'd done her best to pick up the tongue in the few days available but the name of the ship - if that was the name - was a real tongue twister. A hologram would show it, along with some pictures of what was supposed to be the larger section of what they had found. "So yeah, we really found the whole thing, but we're not going to tell you that. Or that it was full of weapons of all kinds and we now have a pretty good run-down on how advanced your military technology or isn't just in case you turn out to be assholes."

She wasn't exactly sure on that part. There was all kinds of graphs and technical details about yields and payloads and exchange rates but that might as well have been stock market data for all she really knew about the matter. Qualified on power armor? Check. Did the power armor do most of the work when it came to actual fighting? Check.

'Ambassador Love...' The voice of Commander Alderson sounded through her quarters, 'We'll be arriving in five minutes.'

It was less than a minute from the suite to the bridge but just enough time for her to strip off her pajamas and toss them in the bin before pulling on her uniform and pulling the seam closed with an uncomfortable amount of difficulty. At two-and-a-half months it wasn't just a bump but a mound and a curve to her normally smooth stomach that made the two-week old uniform feel like it had been pulled off the printer a year ago. There were other physical changes starting as well and she added a light jacket - unneeded in the controlled climate of the Aayrid - to balance out her new shape or at least her body image and ventured out the door. A pregnant anything wasn't a normal sight on board a starship and only the blue detailing on the uniform prevented her from being otherwise assigned to a rearward posting.

"Ambassador;" She smiled as the Commander greeted her from where he stood at one of the rear stations as she came through the doors. Neither he nor the Captain were seated yet - thirty or so seconds to spare - and as she walked around to take her seat on the Captain's left the two finished their standing preparations and circled around after her. "Standard arrival procedure. We'll be coming in from just near galactic north and taking in the view while we get the particulars nailed down."

Which meant looking for any signs of hostile or friendly greeting, whether the system was crawling with life or barren aside from an enormous manufacturing facility, and other potentially useful details. This far outside of the usual travel lanes the system would be the only one explored for hundreds of light years in any direction and it would be tens of thousands of years before the brief flash of light thrown off as the Aayrid arrived would be visible from Earth and the relatively local stars around it. But light had already been leaving the system, bounced off the various planets and moons, and this was immediately visible on the main screen as the ship dropped out of space warp.

"Well..." Captain J'Chan pronounced dryly, taking in the entirety of shattered worlds and drifting debris, "There's yer problem..."

[Sunset]

The Maric Cabin, Kayv, Alawk's Star...

Sorrow or worry had never been Alwyra's strong suite...

"She fell for it!" There was a cry of joy tacked on to the end and the Neko did a little happy dance, legs pumping and tail whipping around her as she spun back and forth in the space between their enormous bedstead and her desk that sat in its own little nook to one side. Clothes left scattered were kicked aside and into the air, some even aimed towards the laundry chute but most ending up spread into an even wider circle. "She... Fell For It!"

It wasn't as much fell for as went along with; The temptation of a free four year education and drunken orgy had been too much to resist and with barely any nudging her step-daughter's friends had all signed up and taken Tadi with them. Or at least gotten her through the misery of the application process. Since the scholarship wasn't as much of a scholarship as it was a prepaid and prearranged course of study...

"Hum. Hum hum? Hum..." Fingertips poked over a virtual keyboard that suddenly popped into existence, the images generated flowing by in the privacy of her own perception. Her immediate interest was the course sylabus as well as the prospective schedule of classes over the next four years, "Because why not make it six, or eight?"

Most students tried to get their coursework done as quickly as possible, scheduling the classes for efficiency and compatibility. If two different classes might require the same homework, why repeat it and so on? But that would be true if one wanted to minimize their time at University and with a few keystrokes she altered that. Now classes moved logically from one level to the next, waiting however long was needed before the next class might be offered again. A process which, as long as Tadi saw no reason to interrupt her light class load and plentiful opportunities for kinky-gorey sex, would stretch out over the next eight years.

"And maybe in eight years she'll find something worthwhile to do with her life! Like... Planting trees on a frontier world."

Of course, she probably wouldn't need eight years to deal with the whole Hendrick situation but getting the lazy girl out of her hair for that long would be a positive bonus. Which moved her on to the next problem.

"Which is how to deal with those blackmailing assholes."

She checked the house security system; Kedo was still off running the trap line and she meant to join him but there were a few minutes where he couldn't barge in on her nefarious plans and she set to work with planning nefarious. Soon all of the various bits of information she had acquired about both the private investigator who was - supposedly - acting as a conduit for the blackmail and about the family that had - supposedly - hired him was laid out in front of her. His boyishly charming face looked down on her while next to it a rogue's gallery of wealthy old men and women played out into a long tail of people who already had money, didn't need more money, and who hadn't done a whole lot of work to get that money.

"Cause if we're talking old money, these people put the old in old money. Chin wattles, boobs that brush their belly button, ugly jewelry... Pick it, they've got it. Even the liver spots!"

For a half-second she nervously checked the mirror then held up her arm to check for any signs of aging, but she hadn't even hit her thirties yet while some of the old bags in front of her had been around since the founding of the Republic. The Hendricks - heirs to the Hendrick Brother's mineral extraction, refining, and processing fortune - clearly didn't need more money. With a net worth in the trillions...

"I'd say that most of em should be just put out to pasture. And Erik was - Was it Eric or Erik?" She couldn't quite remember but she did know he was a douche bag and, according to what had been harvested by her own investigators, the unfortunate black sheep of the family. Unfortunate in that he was related to them at all; He'd been shoved off into the cushy but insignificant CEO job at a relatively small subsidiary until the Boardroom Revolt had removed him from his corner office and stripped him of his expense account, luxurious company house, and golf weekends with porn stars turned caddies. He'd tried to make a comeback as a corporate networking specialist using his web of golf buddies and good ol' boys but a chance encounter with one of the underpaid and undervalued workers who had ejected him from the company had ended in a rage-fueled assault and brutal murder, "And with everything in his company's name..."

He hadn't had the means to make right and poor Kyle Jung's family had sold him - or at least his labor debt - off to the Swamp Lord with his wealthy extended family deciding that it was a perfect time to cut the little fucker loose. That had put him in close proximity to a young Alwyra Trindle and the rest was history.

"So why pick this up now? He's dead and buried;" Under both the desert sands and the billion tons plus weight of an enormous city-arcology, "And they don't need the money. But he does..."

Her own private investigators were fairly straightforward and affordable; An AI who enjoyed trawling through public records and engaging in light hacking had given her the web search and basic extrapolation version of the life and times of the presumably involved. There wasn't anything too secretive - even a few affairs and trysts listed among the jowls and wattles set had been essentially public and fuel for the tabloids. But a flesh-and-blood PI had flesh-and-blood expenses and by the numbers he wasn't exactly doing too well.

"So young and ambitious private dick goes client-shopping, finds a family that is loaded and has a casual interest in finding out what happened to the cousin they never liked, and he gets greedy. He's pretty sure he knows what happened, they probably have a good idea but figure he got what was coming, but he decides to shake me down for the remainder. Which I don't want to give him."

It would be different if she had gone on to be the same douche she had replaced but she hadn't; She lived well, but most of the money went right back into the pockets of the workers who had made it for her or to get the next batch of unfortunates started. Every new start-up she'd created either employed debt-labor or refugees or both in large quantity - the work of the Saints if she'd ever seen it. Which didn't mean she was a Saint, "Cause a bullet in the head seems like a good way to solve this problem. Accidents happen, and if they happen to bad people..."

But first she had to make sure he was a bad people.

[Sunset]

Deep Under the Dragon's Eye (GEC-A1291883, Deep Space, Delta Quadrant...

It was the tomb of a Conqueror...

Water flowed off the spherical shell of the basketball-sized drone as its textured outer layer broke the surface and sent a ring of ripples spreading out across a pool that had lay undisturbed for many thousands of years. A beam of light flickered on to shine through the transparent material and revealed the answer to one mystery as it panned across the ring of liquid; The faces of many thousands of the unknown aliens that had been preserved as statues were built up in seemingly haphazard but ultimately uniform array to create a series of steps that rose out of the pool. Spinning itself around, the drone scooted forward in the water to leave a momentary trail that disappeared, becoming as meaningless as the creators of this timeless place no doubt intended. Reaching the first step it because to hop up, bouncing from one carved head to another as sensors recorded their every feature for later analysis.

For those watching both far above in the sea floor temple and those even further aboard the orbiting Ojeni, there was only silence. This was the moment of utmost discovery as the work of many hands was finally paid out. Eyes were glued to screens or looked around in awe as they inhabited the small automaton that had, for the moment, intruded on eternity. Soon enough there would be the clamor for more information and theories would be proposed, tested, and found wanting or sufficient, but for the longest breath in their lives the crew of a starship hailing from a civilization a galaxy away was silent.

The chamber itself was enormous and round, running out to walls that were nearly the length of that exploring spaceship. A great curved ceiling again supported by carved statues loomed overhead, its depths nearly unseen even under the piercing gaze of the beam. Four in number and this time, of all times, the four were different. Each had the cast of a god, features unique to itself but somehow infused with strength and wisdom, intelligence and audacity. Breaching the topmost step the drone paused and swept the beam and its accompanying sensors in a single panoramic circle, all at one revealing the enormity of the discovery. Circles within circles, the pool was simply the center-most of a number of different tiers and starting off down a long concourse the little sphere raced ahead to show a sample of each before circling around to study each in more depth.

The closest, standing under the overstretched arms and faces of the gods above, were a number of standing caskets. Midway between each aisle stood an individual chamber with the lid carved out of living stone to resemble in exquisite detail that of a person, their arms outstretched and body presented towards the center of the room. Whether they were male or female was impossible to tell but their role was observable with an easy guess; A number of smaller caskets, different for each statue, spread out in front of them. Children of the conqueror come with the one who had borne them into the same eternal night. Some had many, some had few, but all were the same distance from the central monument.

Closer to the aisle stood more caskets, different yet similar. Each was faced with the carved image of a mighty warrior bearing arms and armor, their faces savage and proud, and each gazing across the central space to lock eyes with the casket of their opposite. Guardians in life perhaps they were now piled about with riches. Heaps of coins, bars of metals stamped or shaped in both exotic and familiar ways. Weapons leaning together or against the casket as well as banners, plaques, and other trophies of war. Each was unique in some manner, whether bearing their own individual weapons or cast in the guise of an officer or leader of some manner. Between the crypts of friends and lovers and the outermost wall spilled the spoils of an empire. Where the collection of treasures heaped around their last resting place were of an individual nature, those beyond were simply the ostentatious display of wealth. Statues carved of exotic stone and inlaid with precious metals and gems, heaps of coins, jewels and their devices of all shapes and sizes; It proved the moniker of the Dragon's Eye. No wyrm would fail to turn aside for the wealth that filled the four deep trenches that stretched from aisle to aisle.

Past these, built into the outer wall, were what would undoubtedly bear the most zealous investigation though they were, to the eyes of the greedy, worthless. A hundred, if not hundreds, of separate alcoves that each contained the body of a conquered foe. Perhaps the captains of ships personally vanquished or the political leaders of civilizations conquered most had small treasures in their alcoves - weapons and armor, crown jewels, and similar but arrayed before them were the banners and insignia of hundreds and thousands of ships, arms and armor in many types, and examples of technologies both familiar and unknown. Two score separate species - and that was only an estimate - were represented and nearly all were unknown to those who beheld them for the first time. The drone rolled along the line of alcoves, each passing into shadow as the beam of light played past to reveal the silent inhabitant of the next. A hundred and more, each with a perfectly still specimen of a species known or unknown. Four legs, six, or two, some were dressed in what could be called uniforms and others bare except for harness or armor. In some there were borne arms and armor, the equipment of a warrior, while others held writing implements and pieces of paper, holograms, or plastic documents. In some the manner of their death was clear - A head separated from shoulders, a bloody rend through fine armor - but in others they appeared to have been frozen in place to perhaps die where they now stood, forever facing their conqueror.

[Sunset]

Special Projects Covert Research Facility 74-A (Sigma), Denali, The Yukon System...

"Because I fucking hate monkeys."

Site Director Kryger sighed, "This is unethical, Doctor. I should shut it down."

"Really?" Fredrick stabbed his finger dramatically down onto a brightly glowing yellow button and a pair of iron cage doors rattled open to reveal the next two gladiators, "Says the woman who is supposedly a clone of my grandmother. Or a clone of her clone. Argentina, German, Kazakhstan... I'm still not one hundred percent sure on that one. Last time I went in search of my ancestry," he paused as one of the two apes - an enormous and hairy man-shape that would have otherwise been known as Sasquatch, Yeti, or the eponymous Bigfoot - charged across the open decking with a huge pipe wrench raised above his or her furry head to bring it down with a savage roar. It was a clean miss but the four-armed gorilla that was its foe jumped aside, swinging up on the bars and girders that ringed the cage with an expected level of dexterity.

"I got married - in Rome, no less, and by the Pontiff himself - which was a positive. After battling my way through zombies that had apparently infested all of Europe while a secret cabal of super-villains stole the various world monuments just before I arrived and thus rendering myself and my wife disappointed. A negative, except for the zombies. The only thing I like better than watching two giant monkeys..."

Hand-over-hand, the gorilla swung from point to point around the grounded proto-man, hauling its body out of the way of one heavy-handed swing after another, and then taking advantage of one particularly powerful but futile circle to pivot and leap, closing from pipe wrench to hand and tooth range in an instant. Two spare hands grabbed at the shaggy mass of hair and held tight while the enormous balled fists of the gorilla's primary arms hauled back to deliver a hammer blow and then a bone-crushing upper cut to the Sasquatch. The wrench clattered to the deck, the prone body of the backwoods wanderer behind it, and the Great Ape roared in triumph as it sought to finish its foe.

"They are apes," Dr. Kryger pointed out for perhaps the fiftieth time. "Apes. No tails. Monkeys have tails. Why do you hate monkeys, anyway?"

"...is killing zombies. Or re-killing zombies, if you want to be pedantic about it. Since they are already dead and all."

On the floor of the cage, the two notMonkeys struggled, the Sasquatch trying to throw the Gorilla to one side and regain its feet while the second used its mass and extra arms to maintain its position before snatching up the fallen wrench. Fear grew in the eyes of the first as the heavy metal bludgeon was raised in a hairy fist. There was a terrible pause that was really no pause at all and the wrench came down to return dripping with blood and dropping bits of bone onto the still body of the lifeless.

"Because monkeys were created in mockery of proper men?"

"I..." There was no use arguing. Instead she stood by as the Doctor retrieved the dart gun from its holster and emptied the magazine through the bars and into the gorilla. It was only after he had entered the cage and was retrieving the undamaged ExoCortex from the skull of the Sasquatch by means of the pipe wrench that she realized this was the perfect moment for an industrial accident. Her finger hovered over the button for a second and she looked through the list of potential challengers; 'Would it be so bad? Really?'

"So I've heard that they are going to bring back the gladiators," Kraus called out as he braced one foot on the broken skull and used the wrench as a lever to attempt the removal of the implant. Bone crunched and crackled and a spray of blood splashed across his lab coat, "They'll all have an ExoCortex and then after the fight they'll put it in a new fast-cloned body. Since the damned things are nigh indestructible, they'll let the fighters use anything short of anti-tank weapons. Pay-per-view - lot of money to be made. Can I..."

"No!"

[Sunset]

Ambrosia, Southern Anuke, Ares System...

"It cannot be overstated just how brilliant I am." The Doctor was pleased with himself and rightly so, for it had only taken a matter of moments for his brilliant plan to realize itself. On the jumbo screen - appropriately raised above a massive bank of terminals all manned by gray-faced Minions while he, Ms. 17, and Agent 16 stood at the back on a raised platform that very nearly put him level with the superlatively large screen - the enormous underground chamber sprawled out into darkness and moment by moment flicked from camera to camera while the many terminals showed each camera for the razor focus of both the Minion and the wandering supervisors who peered over each shoulder and whispered utterly useless commands and suggestions in their ear. "In fact, the moment I saw that the paws of the rat men had stained the console, I already suspected that they might have something to do with both the machine and the machine with them."

Something about his choice of phrase annoyed him and he chewed the words over again in his mouth, "Have something to do with both the machine and with the mice? No. Never mind - brilliance should be savored, not questioned. It was and is clear that the two have something to do with the other. How else would those samples of SEXYE, crafted by my own hand, become diluted with unknown genetic material? And not just any old fleck of skin that might have drifted on the wind, but specifically tailored elements that then combined with my own to produce a very specific result? No..."

He studied the images on the many screens for a moment, finger tapping against his chin, "No, there is purpose here. And will."

On the large screen, a rat that was nearly half the size of a man and perched on two remarkably humanoid legs could be seen working the console alone in the darkness. Clawed hands moved over controls as though they were familiar with them, touching them here and there as not only the enormous eye in the center of the room spun to look here and there but sections of the room itself moved. Panels that had looked as solid as the planet itself moved from place to place under guidance that seemed as erratic as the mind of their chief-most observer and perhaps they were. Every so often the rodent would pause, peer around the room, and then return again to the console. It was alone in the room with not a sight seen of its numerous kin and perhaps this as well was the reason for the odd behavior.

"But is there intent? And what is that intent?"

[Sunset]

SDF-Aayrid, GEC-1241002...

"The Orinoco is twelve hours out," Lieutenant Ocoijar read out from his position at the navigation station, the Ojeni turning to look over his shoulder at the trio of senior officers gathered around the Captain's chair. Moist green-orange skin reflected the light in ways quite unlike a matte skinned Human and Demi found it somewhat difficult to focus on him as he continued, "But the next closest friendly vessel is another twenty-three further than that."

It wasn't that the presence of the Heavy Explorer - like all Venture-Class Starships, the Orinoco was named after a significant waterway - was completely necessary but it would be useful for determining the exact details of what had happened in the GEC-1231002 System. The Aayrid was one of the new generation of Corona-Class Diplomatic Cruisers; Few in number, they were built on the same general hull as the similarly limited Element-Class Science Vessels and thus had many of the same scientific capabilities as that class of starships - including the same small but precise sensor array that was currently gathering as much information as it could about the shattered star system.

"No reason to wait on them for everything," Captain J'Chan decided, though his course of action had already been both decided and acted upon by the various bridge officers seated around him at their individual stations. "Unless we come across something dangerous, we'll proceed as though we were the Orinoco. Which means I want all information forwarded to them for secondary analysis and storage as soon as we receive it."

The dangerous note was less a reference to the capabilities of his starship than to the particularities of the personage it was charged with conveying; He wouldn't have couched it in more specific terms, but it wouldn't be wise nor advantageous to risk both an Ambassador and the Secretary-General's wife for a chance at scientific and exploration glory. Neither were considered particularly important to the career of the commanding officers of a diplomatic vessel though few would condemn some careful poking around as long as it remained both careful and safe.

"What do we know so far?"

"A lot more than we knew five minutes ago," the officer at the Science station spoke up, taking up her traditional role in the conversation as both narrator and curator of the information that streamed through from the various types of sensors that the Aayrid possessed. As the Otterkin spoke, various images and data points began to populate the holosphere that sat front and center between the Navigation and Helm stations and in front of the edge-to-edge main display that completely dominated the forward wall of the bridge. "Inferring from the mass of the remnant planets as well as the debris, and adding in the presence of a single super-Jovian gas giant, I would already be willing to put forward a theory as to what happened though the question as to why isn't clear yet. The super-Jovian;" That is, a gas giant with many times the mass of Jupiter, "Was the likely source of the catastrophe with my best guess being that a moon or tidal-captured asteroid of significant size - large enough to be considered a moon by a reasonable standard - was ejected from its orbit and collided with the system's primary habitable planet which was itself something of a super-Earth."

"How big?"

Here she had a certain answer; There was a significant portion of the destroyed planet still remaining and by extrapolating out the curve of the sphere the original dimensions were clear, "A mean planetary radius of approximately thirteen thousand kilometers and about four-point-two times the surface area of Earth."

The images in the holosphere paused, shrunk, and moved to the side while a simulation of the suggested event played out. Based on the current position of the debris field, as well as the known position of the gas giant, the two stellar-scale inhabitants of the system were in relatively close proximity to each other with the first being in a very life-friendly Earth-like orbit while the second, to keep the Solar comparison, would have been at the distance of the nebulous asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

"The odds are not as bad as one might initially suspect. Orbiting this close, the two would have had significant gravitational influence on the other. Enough that the seasons of the habitable planet would likely have been affected by the shifting position of the super-Jovian relative to itself. Perhaps even close enough that the rocky body's own gravitational influence might have played a part in its eventual destruction, though I'm still working on a model to confirm or deny that theory as well as reverse-engineering a model for the destruction. The significant gravitational influence of the super-Jovian;" The hologram changed to show the enormous swirling blue-silver sphere with its sparkling thin copper rings in the center and an array of wire-framed numbers showing the size and influence of its gravity well, "Makes this difficult. For most of their orbits - possibly thousands of years - the two have a near-negligible amount of interaction based on the current orbits and their relative velocities. But when they cross, the numbers are far more significant."

"Could it be - could it have been - deliberate?"

That question came from the Tactical Officer, who had been leaning across his console with a very much bored expression until that moment. It was a radical proposition but it was in turn his place to propose such things, given his duties as to the general safety of the ship and its crew.

"Maybe?" Her answer was accompanied by a twitch of her whiskers and an almost roll of the eyes but as her own station was just next to that of the young man, she kept it in check. "I would lean more towards a natural occurrence, given the odd nature and the intense interactions possible between the two, but until the reconstruction comes through and I get matching confirmation from the Orinoco, I can't rule anything out," though she very much would have liked to squash the Lieutenant's theory before it became rumor, "Unfortunately."

"Four-point-two..." The interjection came from the Ambassador herself, who began to tap away at a virtual keyboard she summoned into existence with a thought. "Population density... What's a good number?"

There were, of course, a wide variety of answers to that particular question. Across the worlds of the Republic there were both planets and places where people were either numbered in their hundreds of thousands per cubic kilometer or reduced to near negligible percentages. That left a crucial aspect of her thought as a variable and though she put in the number supplied by the Science Officer, it was only going to ever be a very wide approximation.

"Nearly one hundred and fifty billion. Is it possible?"

If so, it would have been a staggering amount of lives lost. Even if one were to go so far as to count all of the various Federal States - with their own needs and circumstances - as included into the population of the Republic, it would still only just match the proposed population of this single world.

"And all to the whims of gravity and time," Captain J'Chan confirmed grimly. "I hate to suggest that it may be too late - at least until Ethoe's timeline reconstruction is completed - but we should at least put forward our due diligence. Helm, put us on a course through the densest portions of the debris field. We're looking for anything that might suggest survivors..."

[Sunset]

Exploration Command Central Planetarium, Monolith Station, Wandering the Stars...

"You know, we seem to come across a lot of dead, dying, or destroyed civilizations..."

The young Ensign, charged with checking and double-checking the new entries as they were added by the far-faster and more accurate Artificial Intelligence that managed the entire exhaustive database, poked at the new entry on the vast star field that he wandered through and past. A small sub-set of the available data appeared and he began to check it against what was displayed on a small hovering hologram that followed him like a lost puppy. It wasn't at all necessary - when it came to transcribing the vast volume of data received from the various exploration starships, Gertrude - which apparently stood for something, though she wouldn't say what - was literally perfect. The only place for errors to enter the database was on the reporting end. But flesh-and-blood sophonts often made leaps of intuition, linking seemingly disparate information based on little more than gut instinct. Gerty had, by her own admission, the gut instincts of a super-critical editor with intuition having no place in the world of conflicting data.

"It makes sense."

"What do you mean? It sounds... Kinda sad, if you think about it," Kalderon scrolled a finger down the entry which documented the current status of the far-distant GEC-1241002. "Billions of lives lost for who knows what reason."

"Mmm, well, that is sad," Commander Aiden agreed, looking over his shoulder to study the data. The entry was unusual not for the reason he had given but rather the source - a diplomatic vessel instead of one of the more usual varieties of explorer. "Have you ever heard of the Fermi Paradox?"

Back in the early days, it would have been a common point of reference for most Academy-educated service members but in the modern era of rapid faster-than-light travel and matching communications and the accompanying advancements in computing, the Paradox had lost much of its meaning. As proposed by Enrico Fermi and Michael H. Hart, it stated that because the Sun is a typical star, and because there are billions of similar stars in the galaxy, and further because - with high probability - many of these stars will have an Earth-like planet and thus have a high probability of developing intelligent life and thus potentially develop interstellar travel. Given that these civilizations should develop many millions of years apart, and that it would only take a million years for even early interstellar travelers to cross the galaxy from one side to another, that there should be plentiful examples of life through the galaxy even if it was only observed. That it hadn't been - at least at that moment in time - led many to believe that either intelligent life considered Humanity to not be, or that intelligent life was not to be found except on Earth. As Humanity - with the Republic only one of many - expanded to the stars, it was discovered that intelligent life was plentiful and that someone had forgotten one important statistical element; Earthlings had only been searching for aliens for two hundred out of their many thousands of years of their existence.

The only way to get that lucky was to buy a lottery ticket in a convenience store.

His answer in the negative, she went on to relate it to him with the Ensign eventually shaking his head, "Not getting it. How does this relate to that?"

"Because every civilization doesn't spring up at the same time as all the others. Instead, it is a continuum and even more scattered across a hundred and twenty thousand light years of galaxy. You might have two distinct star-faring cultures that arise next to each other at the same time, but the odds are pretty small. Not impossible - there seem to be various galactic hotspots after all - but there should be young, old, dead, dying, newly emergent, and post-Singularity entities scattered all over. And there are. And the reason someone hasn't swept through the galaxy and taken them all into the fold is because the galaxy is so very, very big and so very, very dangerous. For every current civilization, there's a hundred - a thousand! - that have fallen to history. This," she tapped the entry, "Is just another one. Yes, a hundred billion sounds like a lot but..."

Mentally touching the controls, she ran the galaxy backwards until it showed the disk as of approximately a million years ago. All of the familiar entities were gone or vastly reduced, showing little beyond a tiny note that indicated their evolutionary ancestors were currently learning how to blow spit bubbles. But across a huge section of the galaxy sprawled a purple blob that was accompanied by a more familiar name, despite the intervening years.

"A hundred billion died in a day's fighting when the Shapers fell. Or, at least She says so," the Commander moved the hologram forward to the modern era, found a planet, and tapped it to show a single inhabitant. "And the records seem to bear it out. If I were the Sec-Gen... I guess I'd be worried about making sure we aren't just another statistic in some future rendition of the galaxy where someone else is trying to figure out the Fermi Paradox..."

[Sunset]

Eastern Islands, GEC-99791B (Alice)...

"Something in their environment is making them sick," Doctor Kechans finished, her conclusion as complete as the twin holograms that spiraled next to her own. One showed the nervous system of an otherwise-healthy Hauyht next to the more closely detailed scans that she'd been able to take given the corpses she'd be provided with while the second showed the spiraling curls of the Hauyht DNA analog with various areas highlighted.

"Is it making me sick, Doc? Cause I have this itch..." Janice started to pull off her uniform, getting it up over her head so that the Doctor could see both the various piercings and enhancements as well as the sexually explicit tattoos that might otherwise serve as a how-to guide if one were both acrobatic and vicious enough.

"No."

"Are you sure?" She turned her back to the hologram and pulled down her trousers to expose her backside as well, "Cause;.." before the Wilson's Chief Medical Officer stopped her, "Okay, now I'm intrigued as to how anyone can do that," she referenced a particularly graphic marking that sprawled across one cheek. "But no. The damage is genetic and generational and more importantly widespread. And, judging by the differences between the two sub-species, you're standing right on top of it and it is something that is reasonably new to the environment. Given how prolific they are at breeding and reproducing, I'd estimate that whatever the source is, it entered their environment only a few hundred to perhaps a thousand years ago and the genetic damage it has been causing has been piling up ever since. For those closest to the source..."

"So I'm standing on it," Janice concluded, answering through the fabric of her bloused as she pulled it back down and hitched her trousers up over her narrow hips.

"Relatively, yes."

"Because I'm surrounded by crazy murder bunnies that are even more bat-shit insane than the regular type. Three questions then, Doc;" Kechans nodded and the Lieutenant Commander continued, though she wouldn't have cared even if the distant woman had cut the connection entirely - two of her questions were of the 'thinking aloud' variety. "What do you think the source is? Some kind of radiation poisoning? Maybe heavy metals? Could be both - that would be kind of cool. Some kind of heavy metal like arsenic that's also mildly radioactive and they've been sucking on it like a retarded kid goes through glue and paint chips. How am I going to track this thing down?"

The first question led to the second and the Doctor glared at her before answering, "It is probably not radioactive. I had the same thought, and I examined their belongings for any trace of radioactivity. Heavy metal poisoning... I'll have to get back to you on that one. Why do you..." She was about to ask why the young woman with a grin on her face and a penchant for saying things that crossed the boundaries of political correctness and then robbed its house, burned it down, and called the fire department to report insurance fraud would know so much about methods of poisoning but that question was already redundant and answered by the time she'd stopped herself. "I'll run some tests. If it is a heavy metal then once I know which one you should be able to track it down with any hand scanner. You might end up being forced into some detective work and I can't imagine they will be all that happy about you poking around."

"That I'm not too worried about. I've got an entire commando squad full of trigger-happy gun bunnies that will put a bullet into whatever I want them to and whatever they can get away with. Just a question of how many we'll have to kill before we find whatever this thing is. Um," and for just a moment Huang hesitated, "Ethical question here, Doc. Is there any chance that these guys can be made right? Fixed so they are only the sexy insane rather than the murdery-cannibally insane?"

"Fast answer, yes. Various therapies could be devised to repair the genetic and then physical damage done. I don't have those kind of facilities here;" the Wilson was a second-line Recovery Cruiser and its medical unit was oriented around search-and-rescue as well as disaster recovery operations. "But we could. I'm not exactly comfortable telling you not to worry about it, but if you keep your little friends in line there shouldn't be an excessive number of casualties. And it's not like they are innocent in all this."

"Right. Eating each other. Got it."

"Now, you said you had three questions? And might I suggest you talk to Commander Thurk for some guidance on that last part?"

The Orc was supposed to be providing the over-promoted and under-experienced officer with the kind of guidance she had failed to receive by heroic and bloodthirsty action. That he had essentially disappeared into the woodwork was either a validation of her rough around the edges style or an indication that he had somehow managed to wash his hands of the problem - possibly by temporarily forwarding her to the Intelligence services for the duration of the operations on Alice. Given that they might last centuries, it was a valid strategy and a display of low cunning that the Lieutenant Commander could learn something from.

"I can do that," which didn't mean she would, "And third question; would you want to?"

"Would I want..."

The Lieutenant Commander turned around to point at her butt and the darkly suggestive imprint concealed, for the moment, under the fabric. That was all it took for the hologram to disappear with a click and she was alone in the tent again with nothing but a grin and de facto permission from a superior officer to engage in a seek-and-destroy operation.

[Sunset]

Ambrosia, Southern Anuke, Ares System...

"Intent established," Stephen went on, expounding fruitlessly on his discovery that the rapidly evolving humanoid rats that had escaped his cage to settle in a warren of tunnels that wound their way through his own deep complex were, in fact, doing something, "It is time to move on to the question of destination. What is it that he;" a bony finger attempted to thump the hologram that showed a lone rat of considerable year standing at the same console he himself had occupied not too many days ago, "What is it that he is attempting?"

"Nothing, Doctor," Miss Seventeen sighed, a curl of hair flipping up as she rolled her eyes and slouched onto one foot with an insolence that made the Doctor ponder an extensive stretch of re-education, "He's not doing anything. He's playing."

"Wrong!" It was an ardent declaration but one backed up by the most plausible of explanatory analogies, "He is not in fact playing but is rather issuing commands to a system where we cannot see the results! We run, our heart beats faster. Blood flows quickly through muscle and vein. But can we see this? No. At least not without either proper monitoring equipment or a transparent window installed in the chest cavity. But in this case no mere transparency will suffice - no instrument I possess has been able to measure the forces that keep those two pillars helpless in mid-air and yet you think that I can somehow know all of what that console is capable of? I might be a genius, Miss Seventeen but I am not a god..."

"...not yet."

"No," he agreed, and there was not a trace of sarcasm in his voice, "Not yet. But I did sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night."

"What do you think he is doing then?"

There was the question of how she knew the demi-humanoid was a he, but that was well established by the fact that lab rats and their arcane descendants do not wear pants and that the rat was possessed of a suitably sized endowment. His answer had nothing to do with the size of their subject's testicles, "Just as I would, he is attempting to make repairs. A machine - a system - of such enormous age must have the functionality to make repairs against itself. A living being, if you will. One with a remarkable amount of patience, if my theory holds true. And what is that theory," he asked for her, "Hmm? I will tell you! But first some unneeded exposition; Why would such a system do what it is being observed to do? It is incredibly complex, after all. Near unlimited power, the ability to protect itself from even casual interest... In fact, I would dare say that we would not have ever discovered this facility if it had not intended it and even now we do not know its extent! It could roam in size from what we have observed to the scale of the entire planet."

"The entire planet..."

"No, don't be silly, Miss Seventeen. It was hyperbole on my part - likely it is no bigger than it needs to be to accomplish nothing less than the resurrection of a species!"

"The rat-men?"

"Perhaps, but I think not," Ambrose declared, pulling up an image of the denizens of the underground tunnels and manipulating it until it had adopted a neutral posture and thus scale, "No. Witness the cloning facility we uncovered... Say, that seems to present something of an unhinging of my theory. Why not simply execute the usage of such a facility along with the stored information on the previous species? Of course, if this machine really does date from the days of the Empire then it could be easily assumed that whatever this planet resembles now;" Anuke had become, under the Republic's terraforming guidance, a vast agricultural breadbasket. Endless rolling plains provided enough farmland to feed not only the many billions of mouths in the Ares System but beyond and food exports were still a notable segment of the system's economy, "It has very little resemblance to whatever it was a million years ago. When this system was first surveyed, the atmosphere was an inhospitable stew and the land had - potentially literally - been salted with various toxins. Toxins to us, that is..."

Tapping away at his own semi-circular console, he issued the commands that culled the data and presented the results of the first survey done by the Magellan nearly a century and a half previous.

"But perhaps not to whatever built this complex. If they really were the creation of the Shapers - or evolved naturally on this planet - then it is possible that they were either engineered or evolved to survive in that specific environment. What we could be witness to is an attempt to both understand and then incorporate the new environment into their own biology. Thus the rat-men, who would act as sample collectors and, possibly, as maintenance workers of a sort."

"Will it be dangerous?"

"Possibly," his eyes glittered and his tone indicated he would more than welcome the challenge...

[Sunset]

Deep Under the Dragon's Eye (GEC-A1291883), Deep Space, Delta Quadrant...

"Now," Captain Blaine leaned over the table and fixed each of the various department heads, section chiefs, and senior officers with a stone-hard stare that pushed right past her slim body type and made a couple of them shift uncomfortably in their seats, "A few rules before we get really far into this. We've got the find of the century on our hands here - knowledge and history from a hundred or more different civilizations and who knows how many different cultures. A literal treasure trove of information so we're going to have to be very careful with it. First rule," she paused, looked around the gathered few, and then over her shoulder towards the door and then into each dark corner and even ducking under the table.

"No one, but no one, is to tell the Menelmacari about this."

There were a good number of snickers and grins at this, but the warning was real. The elves had sticky fingers and they loved getting their hands on new information just as much as the Republic did, if not more. But they were like magpies; Dangle something shiny in front of them and they would grab it, take it to their nest, and then it might never be seen again. Even if they got bored with it they might just tuck it away into some forgotten closet and it would never see the light of day again.

"Rule two... Pillage then burn!"

"Umm, we're not going to burn this, are we?"

"No," she answered the random voice, "But we do have a problem and that's your problem," she looked to the Eye. "Drones are all well and good, and we'll want to use a lot of them in order to keep any contamination out of the site, but we need a big something from you. Floating up and down through a few kilometers of high pressure underwater passageway isn't exactly a quick or easy way to access the site. What I'd like is an access tunnel with an airlock and regular surface connection. Send in all the drone we want, but someday we need to be able to send in a team in clean suits to run their hands over the walls and check for secret doors hidden behind bookcases."

"That's a big thing to... Fuck, I got yer answer."

The eyeball turned and jumped down from the chair where he'd been standing and began to pace something out in the open space at the very back of the room, "So we're going to need to build a tunnel about a kilometer long that will run from the surface to the sea floor, right?" A spiked foot swiped across the deck to leave a glowing mark and he added some waves to make the point clear. "Then we mate it up with the shaft and pump the water out. The rock looks pretty stable there, but I'd want to make sure," and more holographic notes were scribbled to one side, "And we'd leave the pump in place, just to be sure. So we'll need a huge pump too. And if you ask the Quartermaster where we keep a kilometer of conduit and a huge-ass water pump, he'll tell you where you can fellate yourself. For those species capable of it."

"So," Kami moved around from her chair to sit on the table where she could see his doodling, "We're going to need another way?"

"Nope! We're just going to need to be sneaky about it." There was an odd shine in his five-lobed eye and she was tempted to let him proceed with his project until completion and the appropriate dramatic unveiling, but that wasn't in the cards as he went on to reveal, "Because we're going to have to sneak in right under the pointy noses of the elves you were just bad-talking. The World Ship probably had more than a few of exactly those type of high-pressure pipes for moving water around and, unless they custom-built everything, we can probably hook together a bunch of standard sections to make one big pipe. Just like they did with the old oil wells - we'll get enough sections to reach the sea floor, reinforce them for the pressure, build a floating platform to act as the terminus, and just slowly extend it down to the bottom. Or bottom up, since our power armor can go that deep."

"And of course they would also have some giant water pumps," Commander Sloan put in.

"Of course. So we've got everything we need - we just need to go get it. And not tell the Menelmacari what we need it for."

"They're not stupid," Sloan noted, the blonde woman sitting back in her chair to cross her arms over her non-existent chest, "We'll have to have a plausible reason for needing a kilometer of pipe."

"And somewhere to store it," Kami added. "How much space is that much pipe going to take?"

The answer to that question fell to Commander Astau, the Centaur looking up from his work to supply the answer. The Quartermaster's department was under his authority and Astrid had most of the relevant figures close at hand as well as a pat answer, "No. We not only don't have that kind of room but we don't have even a quarter of that much storage space, even if we cleared out every storage space into the corridors. But we do have the corridors;" Numbers and holograms flashed up based on the circumference of the shaft. "If we can find the right pipe, and it is in sections or can be cut into sections, we can put it in the main corridors."

It was a certain fact that the Ojeni had to have large corridors because there were some very large species that called the Republic home, right up to the two-and-a-half meter Trolls. It was, by the numbers, just enough room to fit and the Commander's holograms bore that out, "Like some kind of inverted macaroni necklace."

"Now I'm hungry..."

"Then we'll eat while we're underway," the Captain decided, hopping down and heading for the door. "Helm," she called out, the officer on duty turning to her, "Put in a course for Capuchin. And figure out what we're going to tell the Menelmacari when they ask why we need a kilometer of pipe and a big water pump..."

[Sunset]

Defense Force Training Academy Twenty Six, Ares...

Roll Call...

It was one of Commander Sheldon's favorite moments in the day, one filled with plenty of opportunities to call out cadets for their mistakes, offer up false praise, belittle them, mock their so-called accomplishments, and otherwise make them feel poorly about themselves. That was one aspect of his duties after all; If the cadets didn't have a thick skin here, they wouldn't have it out in the real world where both marginal friend and constant foe might try to goad them into compromising either themselves or their mission through the application of some hurtful words. In his opinion - and he was well aware of the irony - words were just words until they were followed with actions. His goal was to teach the cadets to make the best choice when it came to their actions and to weed out those who couldn't break the association between the two.

Better yet was when Roll Call was also the first of a new cadet class.

He'd done his research, he knew who was naughty and who was nice. He'd ignore the nice ones and hand out his version of presents to the naughty ones; There was no sense having any secrets on campus. If you were engaging in sexual intercourse with fruit fresh from the tree, it was better to get it out now than to have one of your classmates walk in on you. Sheldon smiled - there were fond memories behind that particular sexual orientation and its sudden revelation during one particularly boring evening meal. A whole watermelon had somehow found its way into the seat next to the cadet while he was away from his chair and on return there had been several comments about his new girlfriend. It had knocked him down more than a few pegs and now he was serving somewhere in the Periphery with a couple promotions under his belt and the tales of his horticultural obsession still following him years later.

"...a job well done."

These were the last words the Commander said before he stepped up to the door that led out of the main building and out, via secret means, onto the campus quad. It was hidden so that potential students wouldn't be able to use it as a shortcut to depositing their hand-written applications into the tray at the end of the hall where his office and the trash can that would receive them if they strayed outside of the regulations or the lines also lurked. Currently the application had to be filled out using a package of crayons - hard to find in a modern world of self-projected holograms - and not available at the front desk. A self-portrait was required and he had discarded more than one for not sufficiently depicting the cadet as witnessed by himself. A few cadets had managed to find the hidden entrance, pick the old-fashioned tumbler lock, and slip past his desk but these were far enough between that they deserved the rewards for their effort.

But back to Roll Call.

Spread out on one side of the quad was the disorganized mass of nearly-sapient individuals that represented the incoming class while on the other was only the smirking face of Commander Sheldon. As far as they were concerned, despite the presence of both an Admiral and several Captains among the administration, he was and would be in charge for their entire term. Some might court him, others might abhor him, and the best might get one over on him. There were always tales circulating about incoming classes that had come to perfect attention when he'd called for it, bags tucked away and each wearing a uniform that had been set by one particularly exceptional cadet, but in reality only the sharp call of his carefully modulated tone was enough to bring them into some semblance of order. They'd learn better, but for now... "ATTENTION!"

"Fall in," he instructed, "Even lines... You - what is that?"

It was the first target offered and for only a moment he felt bad about it. Right at the very end, one student stood with a pair of sunglasses and a large dog sitting next to him. It had to be a service dog of some kind and whether the young man was blind or not, there were definitely rules about both pets and physical disabilities.

"Me?" The young man, a shocking pale Human with a head of flaming red hair, pointed a finger at his chest and then down at the dog as the Commander pointed in turn; "Yes, you. What is that?"

"I..."

He lifted his glasses and looked down at the animal and the Commander, who had stepped forward to get nicely intimate with his impending victim, caught the flash of white and green as he looked down at the canine with eyes that were clearly perfectly functional, "I don't know, Sir. You told us to fall in and he was standing there."

"So this isn't your animal?"

"No, Sir."

"Who's dog is this?" The Commander's voice rose as he demanded an answer, "Who brought a dog with them?!"

No one moved, no one admitted it, and for a long moment the Commander studied every face, blue, black, yellow, pink or furry to try to pick out the pair of shifting eyes or the corners of the mouth turned up into just the beginning of a smirk that would earn them a truly epic ass-chewing. But there was absolutely no sign of guilt and he turned back to the dog. He didn't own one, didn't really like pets, but this one struck him as rather large. A German Shepard? Perhaps a little smaller, but whatever it was, he knelt and looked it in the eye, "Who's dog are you? Maybe they'll admit it when I call Animal Control and tell them we've got a rabid dog running around..."

"I don't believe so, Sir."

The dog spoke and Commander Sheldon just about fell onto his bony butt, "Did you..."

Mentally he ran down the cadet rolls, thinking back over the various pictures he'd had cross his desk, the various self-portraits rendered lovingly or not-so-much in crayon, and none of them struck him as a house pet. Whatever was going on, it was his position to keep control and he seized it back with fingers rendered nearly numb, "Your name, Cadet?"

That it was a cadet was a bit of an assumption but why else would they be standing in line?

"Annya Sevae, Sir."

He paused a moment to look up the name and the image that appeared inside his reality was that of a reasonably commonplace young woman with mousy looks and brown hair and brown eyes - a very typical resident of the Republic in every way except for the fur coat she was now sporting. Any number of possible insults and demeaning remarks crossed his mind but for a long moment he was flummoxed. Without knowing the why, he would potentially look very stupid when that why was known. It completely threw his game and he stepped back to repeat himself, "Attention! Roll Call... Cadet Sevae..."

"Sir...!"

[Sunset]

Oleimos Station, GEC-1299101, Alpha Quadrant...

"Sounds like space madness to me," the officer in the blue jumpsuit replied with a shrug of his shoulders. He was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Human and very much so with a circle of hair around a bald pate and sagging green eyes that spoke of many years on the job. Situated on the Periphery of the Feknarthi Empire, Oleimos Station was a Corporate way-point between the more carefully guarded resource that provided the station's wealth and the Feknarthi who were apparently the most common buyer of their product. "We've had no such problems here," he finished, turning away to deal with the next person in line.

It was a question Timmons would repeat a hundred times that day and receive much the same answer and almost suspiciously so. Were there any instanced of unexplained treachery or seemingly random aggression on a large scale in the area? Betrayals? Uprisings? Insurrection? And when he couched his description in non-descriptive terms in order to avoid giving away who exactly was afflicted, he got on only one occasion a surprisingly specific answer...

"...trying to track down the source of an unexplained insurrection. Not a big deal, just some..."

The young woman looked jumpy; Small and with a head full of frizzy and short blue dyed hair, the Commander was surprised that she hadn't made a break for it just through sheer panic. Like the put-upon purser at the customs terminal, she was wearing the same blue jumpsuit with patches of yellow and gray on the shoulders, elbows, and knees. This, along with the collection of tools that sprouted from every pocket, marked her as part of the station's technical crew. Even more were her eyes - these had been replaced with a pair of squared-off cybernetic prosthesis that made her look like she was wearing a pair of strapless welding goggles.

"Therians, right?" Her interuption was quick and sharp, as were her movements, and as Timmons opened his mouth to being a response he didn't get a chance to finished, she looked around sharply and even over her shoulder before fixing her square gaze on him, "You're talking about the Therians. Bad news, that. Wouldn't want to be involved. You shouldn't be involved." From anyone else it might have sounded threatening except from her it was more earnest, "Yep, I'd get away from that one. Big deal. Big, big deal."

"How do you..."

But once again he was interrupted, this time by the sudden appearance of a pair of the blue-suited station crew who walked by the open end of the corridor and looked down to see the Commander standing there, looming over the much smaller woman. He stopped and grabbed the elbow of the man next to him before turning, "Is there something I can help you with?"

"I was," and again she put in a word edgewise before Timmons could complete his excuse; "He was asking for directions to the Shift Change. Which is to the left, a quarter way round, then left again. There you go, got it? There's your directions to the Shift Change."

Which turned out to be the kind of low-rent diner that the technician, and others of her pay grade, could regularly afford to eat at. Tucked into a tiny commercial module attached to the stringer corridor that sat just where she said it would be, the restaurant was nearly empty when he arrived and by the time she snuck through the door almost three hours later, she had doubled the occupancy. Seated in a corner where he could keep an eye on the entrance and on the kitchen, he'd expected her to join him in his booth with its scattering of silverware and now-empty plates, but instead she took the smaller one behind him and waited for the cook to bring her the order.

'Greetings, Ms. Gray," the robotic cook-slash-waiter-slash-cashier buzzed, 'Due to your violation of management policies requiring payment for your orders, the management of click-Shift Change-click;' the last played in the natural and quite pleasant sounding voice of someone who was likely the owner of the automated diner, 'Has required that this unit obtain payment from you before serving you in any fashion. That will be six ninety five, please.'

At least it said please, and with only a fair bit of grumbling she plucked a card from her pocket and pressed it against the robot's outstretched palm before it put the dish in front of her and rolled back to the kitchen to await the next order. Despite the embarrassment, it was only a moment after she had taken the first bite of what was - to be fair - a more than generous portion of food that she spoke, talking over the back of the booth in a low but still sharp tone, "Yeah, big, big deal. I don't know how much you're tied up in that mess, but I'd get out of it. You don't want to be."

"Thanks for the warning, but how..." He paused; This might just be a trap laid by some intelligence apparatus. Maybe it would be better to let her do most of the talking.

"How do I know? Because I was there. How do you think I got these eyes? Lucky it was just my eyes. Most of the other guys," her voice trailed off.

"Why is everyone on this station calling it space madness?"

"Mmm," there was the sound of silverware on steel as she shoved food into her mouth and began to chew, talking around the mix of shredded potatoes, near-eggs, and artificial ham, "Because they think that's what you're talking about. They don't know about the Therians - nearly no one does. Big secret, right? Crews turned by some unknown force to betray and wage war against their own kind? The perfect weapon. Make your enemy fight themselves. Has nothing to do with Randall Corp, if that's what you're thinking. Nope, nothing at all. Or the Feknarthi, if you're thinking along those lines. Bad, bad news."

The more he listened, the less he liked it. She was basically working her way down the same chain they had been. It was too much information right at her fingertips and for a second he considered getting up and leaving but acting like he suspected her of something might put him in even more immediate danger, if this was some kind of intelligence service trap. Make a run for it and he might find himself rounded up by station security; Listen to the girl and he was only risking a heaping spoonful of misinformation and heartburn.

"Can't really blame them, trying to keep something like that secret. Opened fire on us without warning, blew us clean out of the water. Spent a few months in that life pod. Probably didn't like us poking around."

"Poking around where?" There was every chance now, in Timmons' mind, that she was about to give him a set of coordinates that would lead the Ixutsangi right into a deathtrap and a rather obvious one at that. The question was now where this information was coming from.

"Couldn't tell you," she answered, to his surprise. "Just a tech. Command crew would have known, but they were all really, really dead. All I know is that we were hired to investigate something just like you said. Smart lot we were too but as soon as we thought we'd found it, it found us first. Like they knew we were coming. Didn't even ask why we were there. You should just leave it alone, go the other way. Whoever is paying you - even if it's the Therians - just take your loss and find another job."

"Who hired you?"

"Oh, well, that's how I know. After I was picked up, I went looking for whoever was paying us. Talked to the people the Captain talked to, talked to the people they had been hired by. Trying to get some money to put my life back together, you know? These things were expensive. If it wasn't for the contract with Randall..." Her voice trailed off and she was quiet for a minute. "Look, do yourself a favor. Leave it alone. Its none of your concern, got me?"

[Sunset]

The Maric Cabin, Kayv, Alawk's Star...

"...and he's not bad people. Niargh."

For a few pleasant minutes there while she'd sent the AI on its little search-and-recover operation she'd had her own mental image of her - she'd handle it personally, of course - slipping through the maze-like maintenance tunnels and quiet corridors of some posh office tower dressed in a skin-tight catsuit with nothing but her claws and her wits. Pulling herself up the last bit of duct work, past the laser traps, and just to the thin grill of the air conditioning vent she'd waited just as she'd waited those years ago for Erik to enter his office, cross the well-appointed chamber, sit down on the long couch opposite the high vent...

There had been no suppressor then but there was now but even now in her head the fantasy changed to the reality of those final moments. She could have killed him then, killed him as he sprawled out for a nap in a position that was all too familiar to her as she'd been instructed to kneel between his spread legs, but she wanted him to see her in those last few moments. A rustle of the greenery that sat growing in the high planter below the vent and he'd looked up, his eyes on her as she'd raised the pistol that she'd kept hidden all that time.

"...defend ourselves?" The smile was gone.

"That's right," Grim picked up something from a stack of crates that stood next to him. He tossed it to the man who caught it and looked down at the heavy pistol in amazement. Immediately he turned it around and pointed at the mud miner. "Don't bother - I could kill you with my bare hands before that thing would scratch the paint. And you wouldn't have that one bullet you might want to save for yourself..."

She remembered the guidance Horatio Grim had given to all of the new miners when they'd arrived. Keep that one bullet - you might want it for yourself. She had kept it but in the end it hadn't been for her. The sharp crack as she'd held her breath, squeezed the trigger just like she'd been taught. Taught by a face she now remembered anew. That of a young man with a long scar down the side of his face and a darkness in his soul that had expressed itself in many nights of savage beatings or frantic, heart-racingly wild sex. When they'd shared the bottle he brought home it had been the later but when he'd finished it first it had been the former until the night when she heard the bottle shatter on the concrete outside their tattered hovel in a back alley in the Toconao Arcology. The knife had been sitting there under her hand as he came through the door and when the back of his hand came up as he demanded breakfast she'd snatched it up. Not to defend herself, but to lunge at him.

It sank into his chest and she pushed it deep. Pushed it as deep as it would go until the crack of the pistol had shook her memories away and she'd watched as his eyes - their eyes - went wide as crimson red spread across their chest. The body had fallen away, slumped over on the couch, and the first time she had left it where it had fallen to run and hide until the police had found her. The next time she had been ready; Revenge had been her desire but as soon as she'd scrambled down from her high perch, put two more bullets in his face to make sure, she had noticed the old-fashioned computer and the active session that he had left open. His entire desert empire had been hers in a few frantic keystrokes.

But Parker McArthur was not bad people.

There was a younger sister who now looked up at her, face eager and warm but with a sadness behind her eyes that spoke of the loss of her parents when the Republic colony on Ghost Island was destroyed. She'd heard of it - it had been on the news - but any sense of personal relevance had passed her by. For this little girl it had meant a life without those she loved and a sudden dependence on an older brother who was just starting to make his way in the world. In the scenario that was playing itself out anew in her head, he had seized on a way to assure her future when the casual request for closure had crossed his desk. Money wasn't their objective; The relatives of Erik Hendrick just wanted to make sure he'd never show his face again. It sounded charming though it might have been far from the truth but Alwyra felt comfortable with it.

"But what am I going to do about it? How do I put this guy off the chase without hurting this little girl?"

She couldn't just sit down with him and have a heart-to-heart. More than his sister, he had obligations and debts that would hound him until he found the means to repay them. It was a lesson drilled into every child; Debt is Slavery. Until you repay that debt, they own you.

"Who;" The word trailed off in sudden realization, "Who owns you? Who owns you, Mr. McArthur?"

A few more instructions to the AI and she had both her answer and her bad people. Across the universe bankers were often accused of being the secret hand at the reins of various conspiracies - The Bilderberg Group, The Trilateral Commission, and of course the Five Jew Bankers. All of which might have been rather silly on the face of just how chaotic and disorganized things were in the galaxy at large, but on a small scale? McArthur's lack of standing had led him to something of the shadier end of the investment community in order to obtain the funding he needed and along with the funding had come fluctuating interest rates, imprecisely worded contracts, and, "Could it be? A little meddling in his business?"

A spy in his office, or even just the simplicity of tapping his Internet connection might have clued them off to his investigation and it would only take a little nudge to inspire him to shake her down for the money. Money that might end up in their pockets. It would be a sound investment, if it worked out.

"And I do like the idea of a conspiracy," she giggled as she rose from her desk to pick out the shapeless mass of a thermal skinsuit from among the clothes on the floor. Tugging it on over her panties and discarding her bra for comfort, she began to don the rest of the apparel she would need to join Kedo out on the trap line. "But I also like a solution. Ms. AI-PI, if you could find out how much it would cost me to buy out this young man's loan? Be discrete - dummy company, all that stuff. It would be a tidy way to wrap things up..."

Not that she was sure what she'd do with her own Private Investigations firm, but that little girl looked so sweet.

[Sunset]

SDF-Heart of Gold, GEC-79742, Alpha Quadrant...

"I have good news and bad news," Captain Waretram announced, falling back on the oldest standby in the book as he looked around the conference table that played host to the mission briefing. "For the good news, I'm going with you! A chance to set foot on an unexplored planet, explore a strange new world... The dream of any explorer. The bad news is that no one is going down there."

Answering a series of odd, incredulous, or in the case of his XO - who knew the truth of the matter - an outright roll of the eyes, he went on, "Unfortunately, according to the fine folks who man the sensors, the planet is too geologically unstable to even risk the trip in power armor. So I've decided that no one will be going and we'll be dispatching UHCVs."

UHCVs - Unmanned Humanoid Combat Vehicles - were the preferred option for all kinds of excessively dangerous situations. These units, which were functionally identical to the Marine's GhostDragon power armor, could be either virtually piloted by a remote connection or directly inhabited via NEENJA upload. The second option made the unit as potent as a biologically-inhabited suit except in those particular circumstances where an explicitly biological operator was nessecary; Few and far between, it had none-the-less occurred.

This decision brought a low groan of annoyance and irritation from the assembled. While some of them wouldn't have been going anyway, their adjuncts would have been and it was an almost universal declaration that hands-on was the far better way to do science. Samples might be recovered and returned but seeing them in their original context, the ability to pick them up, turn them over, take a smell or a lick - any of these might have led to discovery. The senses of a UHCV were nearly Human but neither could they smell or lick.

"To come all this way and end up - how do they say - skunked is a miserable sentence to endure, Captain," one department head objected.

Which was a true and fair point. While the discussion might have referred to any number of dangerous worlds identified as possibilities by their chained connection from the white hole to their darker cousin and then on to the new stars formed by their long-ago creation, the Heart of Gold had in fact already visited three of these and had found nothing that resembled conclusive proof that they had been created as some manner of galactic nesting site for whatever lay beyond the barrier present by the artificial singularities. Certainly all three had had the potential to develop extensive crystalline deposits - time, pressure, and minerals abounded - but there was no concrete sign that the probes or guardians or fertilizers or whatever they were had either been there or were there. There was always the possibility that they were dormant but...

"Say..." Tithral leaned back in his chair and laced his black fingers behind his head, "Why don't we try waking them up?"

Captain Waretram glanced over at the Bajoni, "That seems very random. Wake who up?"

"The probes. If they are there, but dormant as has been suggested in various quarters, perhaps they are waiting for some kind of signal or sign that there is intelligent life along the lines of which they are looking or waiting for. Crystalline, that is. We just happen to have several examples of those crystalline species among our number," he conjured a hologram showing an admittedly short roster of the Heon and Doso crewmembers aboard the Heart of Gold.

"How? A planet is, despite the size of the galaxy, still a very large thing. One Heon, one Doso... A needle in a haystack."

"The Heon would then be our best bet," he offered, leaning forward to put his elbows on the table and cross his fingers again. "If we could manage some kind of amplifier, it might be possible for one to serve as many. And it would be a question of Heon physiology. As far as I am aware, they make use of natural crystalline pathways to move between communities. I would assume that would give off some sort of electromagnetic emission - that is what we would then want to amplify and see if it provokes a response."

"Can we do it?"

That was directed to the ship's Engineering chief and the bearded Dwarf nodded, "Why not? I'll get the specs and see what I can do. What we might want to do is simulate a large community and then even go back and re-check those last few planets too. I'm thinking something along the lines of a VDA - maybe a Very Communicative Array? I'll get to work while you figure out the acronym..."

[Sunset]

SDF-Ojeni, Capuchin System (GEC-A92791), Delta Quadrant...

"...a shielded ultra-long frequency radio coil."

It was a bullshit answer and Lieutenant Ingersol knew it but it was also a technically correct answer and, as many a bureaucrat can attest, a technically correct answer is often better than the truth. They could indeed use the kilometer of large-diameter pipe to house a singularly enormous radio coil that would allow them to intercept ultra-long frequency radio waves. The longer the coil, the longer the waves that could be intercepted. That there had to be both something to generate and something to intercept was irrelevant; The pipe could indeed be used for that purpose.

Of course the key to any good lie was to keep it simple. Thus when the Ojeni had been contacted by a Menelmacari patrol vessel that was, by the Captain's own admission, only casually interested in what the ship was doing back in a region of space it had only recently departed the answer didn't come from the Captain but instead from the Lieutenant on duty at the Communication's Station. Everyone else was busy swarming over the twelve-kilometer long section of shattered World Ship in search of pipe on the simple premise that it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission and since the elves didn't own it anyway, there was no one to ask permission or forgiveness of in the first place!

"How about you guys," she went on to ask in a casual manner, leaning back at her console and twirling the tip of one of the long sensor tendrils that otherwise draped from her shoulder blades around in her fingers like it was a strand of the hair that the Oeie lacked. "Persuaded the Erae to come out yet?"

That was the stated goals of the Menelmacari operation in the system; The last vestiges of the civilization that had created the enormous World Ship were secreted away in an orbited section of the ruined sphere. Their first contact with the Ojeni had been tainted by violence and thus it had fallen to the Elves to tempt them out of hiding and ensure their relocation and long-term survival. Her inquiry was also potential misdirection - everyone liked to hear themselves talk, especially the elves.

"Admirably," came the reply with a bit of a puff in the chest from the Menelmacari officer. "We;" And there was a distinct emphasis on that, as though both he and his kin alone had accomplished it, "Have established contact and dispatched an envoy to their settlement. The Erae are distrustful of outsiders, but the value in contacting our culture is clear to them. Doubtless our envoy will be able to persuade them more-so; Already we have laid plans to reinforce and move their entire habitat to a more suitable location."

A suitable location and a suitable demonstration of power, both of which would work in the Elves favor. It was showing off on a grand scale but it would benefit the Erae in the end. Though the crew of the starship had recovered some viable seeds, they were few in number and would take generations to reach a viable population. Relocating the Erae to a colony world in the more populated segments of the galaxy would accomplish the same thing though it would doubtlessly be near a Menelmacari colony and thus the glory would go to them. But Captain Blaine had her eye on her own prize and the Captain of the patrol vessel was about to make their task easier.

"We will leave you to your task but the Admiral has asked me to convey to you a warning to stay to this area. The situation with the Erae is still delicate and the re-appearance of your ship nearby may disturb negotiations."

"Not a problem at all, Captain... We'll be in and out as quick as cats," she promised.

The fast the better, of course. Every shuttle and suit that the Ojeni had was hovering around the salvage site like industrious bees and even the ship's little-used fighter craft were out cutting away unneeded segments or opening up holes so that the pipe could be extracted. The same segment had also contained several large pumps and two of these had been removed already and loaded into the starship's main shuttle bay for repair and maintenance. The endless vacuum of space meant they would be in reasonable shape, safe from corrosion and deterioration, but the shattering of the World Ship and chance collisions with debris had left them battered even through the protection afforded by the hull segment.

"Some new seals, a few test cycles, and they'll be right as rain," the Eye promised as he looked up at the larger of the two while his technicians went about their own tasks. "I'd like a third - there's two more that we can access without too much bother - but just to take apart for spare parts for these two. If we don't have time, I'll settle for sending teams over to pull what they can off. It's a bit of a race, Captain. I've got these guys working on getting the pumps working again and you've got everyone else working on pipe."

"And whoever gets done first gets a pizza party," Kami promised.

[Sunset]

Eastern Islands, GEC-99791B (Alice)...

"It's called woad - or was called woad. Some Humans;" Not any that she was related to, but Janice wasn't going to go too deeply into the question of the hundreds of different Human ethnicity and why some of them weren't around anymore. No good reason to stir that particular pot, not when the Hauyht thought all Humans looked alike, "Would use it as war paint in an attempt to frighten their enemies and to show how brave they were. Some warriors would even go into battle naked, believing that their particular batch had been blessed with mystical properties by a shaman or spiritualist."

Come to think of it, the Lieutenant Commander knew ass-all about the religious practices of the bunny rabbits. The reference to red-eyed devils or demons might imply that there was some religious or spiritual connotation to the animosity that the Flops and Kinks felt towards the Shorts but that could simply be the translation software matching their word up to the most appropriate word in Standard. The question merited some investigation and she made a mental note to pursuit it but in the current setting where she was sitting around a stone mortar with a small group of particularly zealous and well-armed murderers-in-training waiting for her to lead them into battle against their hated foe...

...well, it didn't seem like the best moment.

Another handful of the blue berries went under the stone pestle and she ground them down into a thin paste. It was enough to coat the palm of her hand and she pressed her glove into it and then onto one side of her helmet, leaving an open hand print that didn't look half-bad for someone who'd just randomly noticed the flower and decided they needed some warpaint. More berries - they were abundant all over the area - and she began to grind again.

"It was a symbol of both victory and energy," she paraphrased the article she was currently perusing off to the side in her own little augmented reality. "As well as skill in hand to hand combat. Painting it around an eye, or around their eye, was supposed to allow them to see into the spirit realm."

A load of bullshit as far as she was concerned but the first of her squad certainly looked fierce with the blue hand print around her own brown eye, Janice's spread finger prints reaching up under her floppy jungle hat towards the base of her long ears. Satisfied with the first, she went on to the second and the third before another batch of the sticky stuff was required.

"So, keep your eyes open for anything that looks funny. Any weird shit. It could be an idol, some kind of food, something that they share in common. Probably something that they either eat or carry with them. Whatever the source of the taint is, it has to be something they live and work around all the time. But it could be anything so go with your... Mother fucker." Scrambling in her pouches, she pulled out a hand scanner that looked like it could be used as a melee weapon and passed the sensor grill over the ground-up paste.

The answer popped up inside her helmet and she swore a blue streak that only ended in the less-colorful and animalistic, "...bunch of donkey-fucking horse-shit. Cadmium. Right in the stupid, fucking, berries."

She let out a growl of frustration and anger and looked up to eye the three blue-painted bunnies. It wasn't much but over time the metal would eventually become concentrated in their body and produce toxic effects. In Humans the effects of the poisoning were rather messy, but for the Hauyht they could manifest in a decidedly different manner.

"Like say crazy red-eyed murder bunnies and their distant kin... And there goes my plans for a bloody rampage too. Vacation ruined!"

[Sunset]

Concordia, Southern Mars, Sol System...

It was significantly less well-known outside Menelmacar, though not unknown, that the Menelmacari did not manipulate gravity at all. Instead, by processes few understood and fewer would explain to foreigners, they directly sculpted spacetime to meet their requirements, with effects that appeared to be gravitational, to all intents and purposes. It was this appearance that had given rise to the term 'gravitics' in the first place, a misnomer the Menelmacari were entirely happy to perpetuate...

Katryna might have been one of those few people capable of the same - perhaps so, perhaps not - but Lieutenant Lomak certainly was not. Instead the Orc was more than capable of following orders and the Admiral's first set of instructions had been to send him on something of a scavenger hunt. In their first attempt they would be relying on something called sympathetic magic and while the Lieutenant and the Admiral were, as fellows in science, adverse to the idea of magic as a fundamental force in the universe neither had forgotten the maxim concerning sufficiently advanced technology.

"What I'm looking for is any remnant of what the Enemy brought from Earth," Lomak explained as he walked the hallways of the Dominion Archive. A vast warehouse, the building was the place for those things that did not have a place. Whenever the government found itself in possession of something that might be useful but was not immediately used and more frequently those of a dangerous or potentially mischievous variety, they found their way to the Archive and the hands of Alfonso Riverno. Whether or not that was the official title was unimportant; To the lean man it was such and he was thus the curator.

It should be noted that it was hard for Lomak to even use the term Enemy. Fractal reality being what it was, even what one could remember and what one could say tended to sparkle and fade depending both on physical or mental proximity between the subject and oneself. That would be a point that would work in his favor when attempting to recover his lost love; To Lomak, she was still quite real and he could remember every detail from her face to her hands. Being inside the Dominion - which had a more substantial connection to the Enemy than did the Republic - moved him closer to the edge of that reality. It was an odd feeling and an odd game but when those were the rules it was the only game that could be played.

"Particularly metals, especially those that might have had some..." He paused and searched for the best term. As a man of science he was trying hard to avoid using the word magic directly, "Metaphysical use. Some items with a deep connection to their land."

"Ah, interesting. Well, we have..."

And with that, Alfonso led him into the winding maze of stacked shelves, sealed containers, and carefully labeled storage devices that held everything from the final effects of an unknown soldier to samples of dirt and soil from an expedition rendered moot by the discovery of faster-than-light travel. A butterfly collection donated by an individual and then lost, re-discovered, and lost again blocked their path and the Curator wheeled it aside to create both a new path and a new dead-end through the seemingly endless gallery. Here and there as they passed he would point out something, calling the Lieutenant's attention to some curiosity or proposing some potential candidate, but it wasn't until he had passed and then re-passed a particularly large crate that stood in the center of an intersection that he finally turned to examine the label and called the man's attention to it.

"This may be exactly what you want," he said, strong fingers tugging at clasped flat cables as he unbound it. "During their time on this planet, they used these devices to bring terrible beings to this world and stockpile them in the depths."

It had been for a war that had never come but the device was a reminder of those terrible days. A thick black iron bowl, it was carved with letters painful to the eye but still familiar to the Orc around its perimeter, "Perfect."

The next task would be to integrate those particular items of power - the runes - into an archway grown from blood tainted with his own. Here too the device would have a use since its metal frame would serve to constrain and direct the growth of the portal, turning it away from the mobius that she had re-directed the artifact into.

[Sunset]

SDF-Aayrid, GEC-1241002, Alpha Quadrant...

With the careful ease of a luxury liner, the Aaryid slid between enormous pinnacles of rocky mantle that loomed large out of the black depths of space. Like titanic icebergs they drifted past, dim beams from the ship's searchlights highlighting the edges of the shattered surfaces to leave the depths plunged into eternal night. If it were not for the catastrophe of so many lives lost it would have been beautiful with each exposed rocky plain showing the eons carved out of living rock. Of the former residents there was little sign; A drifting wreck here, the tangled spool of some great elevator there.

"Why didn't they run?"

It was a question to break the silence and one left to the Ambassador to put forward.

"They could have left; Why didn't they? We found their ship thousands of light-years from here," her voice trailed off.

Capable of escape, the residents of the system apparently hadn't fled in the fact of imminent disaster. Even that far-distant craft had been devoid of life though it had been utterly capable of carrying many thousands to safety. That it hadn't signaled more than the obvious had happened but the obvious made for the best of starts; "How is your reconstruction looking, Lieutenant?"

"So far every iteration suggests it was an inevitable occurrence. I'm running the model through the system with each new set of additional data points to double-check the numbers but," The Otterkin tapped at her console again, clawed fingers clicking on the glass, "But everything leans towards my initial speculation. I'm forwarding it to the Orinoco to rule out any kind of confirmation bias though. Reverse reconstruction of the debris field drift puts the event at less than a thousand years ago and I'm trying to refine that to something more precise. But we could just watch it happen," she suggested. "If we were to warp out a thousand light-years and look very carefully, we'd probably be able to see it as it occurred."

It was a staple in the exploration (or intelligence) bag-of-tricks for any civilization capable of faster-than-light travel; To observe an event that happened in the past, one would move away from the location of said event a number of light years until the event in question could be observed directly. There were limits to how useful this technique was since the further light traveled from the origin the more diffuse it became and thus either a larger 'observer' would be required or shoulders would have to be shrugged in acceptance of a lower resolution image.

"We could;" But Captain J'Chan was just as aware of the limitations of both the technique and his own ship as Lieutenant Ase. "Contact the Orinoco. See if Captain Tallister is willing to delay her arrival and get us a visual."

Since the starship was already making its way towards GEC-1241002 it would be in a prime position to skip much of the trip by dropping out of warp long enough to establish the timeline of the destruction wrought upon the system. More-so it would be able to gather a far more accurate rendition of events. While the Aayrid had a capable sensor system, the Republic's Venture-Class Heavy Explorers were fitted with not one but two of the most sensitive sensor arrays that the Republic fielded and these were then backed up by an additional four that were each equivalent to the Aayrid's one. The concept of over-kill was not one widely acknowledged in the ultra-wealthy star state; There was only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload.'

"I think," he sat forward and then rose from his chair, walking around to the upper level of the bridge as he continued to talk, "That since we are here, we should try to figure out the answer to Demi's question. Operating under the assumption that Lieutenant Ase's theory as to the cause of the destruction is correct, we have the opportunity to try to found out why they didn't evacuate. Crazy theories," he stopped behind the Tactical Officer and glanced around his shoulder to the various displays on his console. Most were filled with just the kind of tactical information that he would expect to see but one was a scratch-pad of sorts, filled with numbers and formula that were already ranging well into the obscene, "Are welcome."

Despite his solicitation it was not the young man who spoke first but rather the Ambassador; "They didn't because they didn't need to. This is just what's left over - they experienced a Singularity Event and no longer care."

"Beyond the concerns of mere mortals?"

It was a discussion she and Erika had been having off-and-on since the introduction of the ExoCortex into the Republic. Would it herald a Singularity Event? And was that a good thing or a bad thing? If one had occurred here - and according to the scenarios Erika had laid out most star-faring civilizations were either on the cusp or balanced on the knife-edge of one by virtue of their ability to travel the stars - it would explain why the ship the Wright Brothers had discovered seemed to be abandoned and why the civilization that had inhabited the system had seen no reason to take significant material resources with them. They would have little to no need for them and, by virtue of an essentially immortal existence, any physical setback would be only momentary.

"Phenomenal cosmic power... Itty-bitty living space," she answered with a soft smile but now it was Lieutenant Dann's turn to put forward his crazy theory; "Which doesn't explain why that ship was out there all by itself. So I'm going with the idea that this was still deliberate. Yes, it was eventually going to happen but that doesn't mean someone or something didn't make it happen either a little bit earlier or in a more precise fashion. The numbers..."

Laying out his hand in the main holosphere, the Tactical Officer showed off the numbers he'd generated. In essence they were number-porn with most requiring a commitment of energy that would make the Republic blush and the Super-Federal State cough and look away.

"Well, they don't look good. But that never stopped a lot of the idiots and whack-jobs out there in the galaxy, did it?"

[Menelmacar]

Written co-operatively with Sunset.

---

MIV Fawë-mi-lómë (Snow-by-Night)
Capuchin System

There were, of course, more than one Menelmacari ship among the ruins of the shattered World Ship. Considerable resources were being expended in the construction of the outpost and the support of the operation to make nice with, and ultimately rescue, the Erae. Of course, considerable resources were also being expended in the exploration and restoration of parts of the World Ship itself, in an effort to learn more about it, in hopes that this might improve Menelmacar’s own considerable skill with megastructures, and also in hopes that both Menelmacari libraries and later Erae generations would rediscover the original Erae culture that had built the World Ship to begin with.

Such a concentration of resources, as well as so valuable an archaeological and scientific find (which would, in fact, properly be credited to the Ojeni and her captain and crew), required a small fleet, and accompanying the half-dozen or so Tinúviel frigates, one of which had encountered Ojeni on her second visit, was a pair of Egalmoth destroyers and Fawë-mi-lómë, an Úrulókë cruiser, and umpteen thousands of VDA nodes scattered throughout the debris field. A very comprehensive picture was thusly maintained at all times.

Fawë’s captain, Círyaran Maethorion nos Fithurin, was thus the second-ranking officer in the system, under his direct superior who commanded the rapidly-growing outpost itself. Maethorion frowned a bit as he observed the interaction between the frigate’s own Círyaran and the Ojeni’s comm officer.

“Of course you realize, my lord, that she is of course lying to him,” noted Snow, the Shipmind of Fawë-mi-Lómë.

“I suspected as much,” Maethorion answered. “Though mostly on a hunch. What’s your line of thought?”

“Sunset has considerable industrial capacity, in the same class as our own,” Snow began. “The device they propose to construct is not particularly complex, nor is the research it would support time-sensitive. They would get superior results from a purpose-built coil than from debris field salvage, and Sunset does not lack for the industrial or heavy-lift capacity to deliver one. The only reason they would be here is if they are in a hurry and conducting an operation in secret.”

“Which means they’re not building what they say they’re building,” mused Maethorion. “Then what?”

The sensor officer, Nostariel, spoke up. “I may have an answer, or at least a hint. Have a look at this.” She brought up the feed from the nearest VDA node to Ojeni on the holo that surrounded the bridge. Visible were two large machines being removed from the World Ship fragment and being transferred to Ojeni. As they watched, the machines vanished into the shuttlebay.

“They look like pumps to me,” Nostariel added.

Snow nodded in agreement. “There’s not much use for pumps in a low-frequency radio observatory.”

“Can that ship even carry that much pipe?” Maethorion asked.

“Not on your life.” Snow shook her head. “Well. Not in the cargo or shuttle bays. Maybe, if they jettisoned basically everything, strapped it to the hull, or filled the corridors.”

“The plot sickens,” muttered Maethorion. “Lock lasers with Ojeni and get me their captain.” There was a strict policy of radio silence in the system, to avoid overly disturbing the radiopathic natives, and as such either QE or beamed comms were necessary. Strictly speaking, moving Fawë-mi-lomë into line of sight with the Sunset ship was not necessary, for opening a QE link with the nearby VDA node and beaming from there would be sufficient.

“SDF Ojeni, this is Círyaran Maethorion nos Fithurin of Menelmacari cruiser Fawë-mi-Lómë. You may recall me from an impromptu musical number some months back. I would like to speak with Captain Blaine.”

There was a few moments pause on the other end as the Communications Officer noodled and dithered. To maintain the shattered illusion, she had been instructed to play the chump but this was not a casual inquiry or invitation to dinner that could be avoided by pleading a prior engagement. Invoking the chain of command put the Lieutenant in the simplistic position of complying and it was, after the requisite warning, that the Captain herself joined the conversation just as the Oeie ducked out.

“Captain Maethorion;” The much (much) younger woman depicted in the hologram was a sweaty mess. Missing her uniform jacket, she was wearing a tank top that showed both the internal and external signs of hard labor, “What can I do for you?”

Maethorion smiled. “Captain Blaine, it is a pleasure to see you once more. My apologies for pulling you away from your no doubt hard work,” he said, and it was genuine, for he had no doubts that wrestling two- or three-meter pipes was nobody’s idea of fun. “But it occurred to us that we may be of some assistance in this matter. Your ship, as far as we know, isn’t capable of carrying this much cargo, at least not without a great deal of inconvenience. On the other hand, Fawë-mi-Lómë has two hundred fifty meters of fly-through hangar deck. We will not be missed here for a few hours or days. We could easily carry your pipes to any destination of your choice. Loading and unloading would be quick and you wouldn’t have to do nearly so much cutting, which will save you a great deal of time and improve the structural integrity of your… radio coil, was it?” he asked.

“Radio coil?” Something flashed across her eyes, a physical reflection of the side-channel conversation that was going on in her head as the Lieutenant briefed her on the theoretical construct that the other Lieutenant had pulled out of his posterior for her benefit. “Oh, yes. The ultra-high frequency antenna. Well, I wouldn’t be too worried about it,” she demurred, stretching an arm behind her head and scratching at an itch that just wasn’t present. “It will be free floating. The pipe is just there as a container for the coil.”

Where, exactly, she was going to get the many thousands of kilometers of wiring needed to make the lie plausible, much less where exactly she was going to put it was a new, sudden, and pressing concern. A mental image of storing it all in Lieutenant Ingersol’s posterior as he attempted to explain the holes in his particular plot brought a smile to her lips and she took on the aspect of a particularly satisfied cat as the process played out.

“That does raise another point,” Maethorion noted, and it was clear his thinking had followed similar lines. “In observing your salvage operation I’ve noticed you’ve not seemed particularly interested in salvaging several tens of thousands of kilometers of wiring in order to construct the coil itself, nor communications equipment, nor generators, nor the shielding that would be necessary to protect your coil from stray rocks if you’re not worried about the strength of the pipe itself… but you were quite interested in pumps, which are notably not a feature of any radio observatory I’ve ever personally seen.”

He let that sink in for a moment, then continued. “Captain, I think we both know you are not building an antenna. It also did not escape our people that you were uneasy with effectively turning over to us matters here, but that difficulties with the Erae made it necessary. Contrary to what you may believe, we have no particular interest in stealing credit for a discovery, and you have been fully credited for this find in all relevant Menelmacari scientific literature. Also, as we promised then, we are keeping your people entirely up to date with our findings here. If building this contraption of yours is part of pursuing another find -- and given the stated mission of your ship, I would not be surprised if it was -- let us help.” He paused. “Please. Managing a patrol squadron is boring me out of my very old skull.” Beside him, the blue-haired pale woman who was, presumably, the AI avatar, nodded in wholehearted agreement.

“...I once met someone who was into that sort of thing.”

But the aside was just that and retreating into the support of an unseen bulkhead she relented, “Alright, fine. But you’re going to have to get a bigger hat to keep this one under. Like, Roanian sized.”

The elf grinned, a surprisingly easy smile, all trace of smugness in it gone. “It’s in the vault, you have my word on that. I’m sure the Warlady will let me delegate this post to my second for a week or two to help our allies build a radio observatory. In truth I will have to tell her we are helping with an exploratory mission. But it will not go further than that.”

“Which means you want to know what it is? Or do you want this one to be the mother of all birthday cakes?”

“Mmm, dramatic reveals are such a pleasure,” Maethorion answered, “Obviously we will need to know what you’re really building. But to what end, that would be a lovely surprise.”

“Ah, well, yeah. You kinda already guessed that bit. The pipe is for a conduit to the sea floor and the pumps are to get the water out and keep things dry. Past that, well, don’t want to ruin the surprise…”

[Sunset]

Special Projects Covert Research Facility 74-A (Sigma), Denali, The Yukon System...

"I thought I told you 'No', Dr. Kraus," Francine glared at the Doctor as he sat, feet up on his desk and a bag of popcorn in his lap and a huge holographic display sprawled out in glorious better-than-life color in front of him, "What wasn't clear about it? The word 'No'? You do seem to have a hard time with it - perhaps it is time for a formal reprimand!"

"Chill your panties..."

The Doctor swung a handful of popcorn at the display where a half-dozen monkeys, an equal number of great apes, and some people who looked like they hadn't stepped off the evolutionary ladder all that long ago battled it out with more varieties of edged weapons than the Site Director had reasonably known to exist.

"This isn't my doing. Unfortunately. Someone already had the idea..."

A howling leap and an orangutan jumped down from a high balcony over a very-industrial looking railing, swung sideways suspended by one of its long arms, and chopped down at the head of a gorilla who looked up just in time to catch the spiked edge of the bat'leth between the eyes. There was a sickening crack as the curved blade spiked through flesh and bone and then a rush of blood as the ape pulled it free and held the weapon high over his head in a show of triumph. All around it more of the hairy beasts fought and died for the amusement of a thick crowd of spectators - Fredrick among them - who stood at a circling network of high railings and balconies that ran all the way around the arena. For those who could not attend in person there was a network of cameras set up as well as hovering drones that followed the action.

"It's twenty-four-seven;" And as if to emphasize his point a gate opened - one of a dozen scattered around the complex - and a new challenger emerged. Half-man, half-ape, he was clad in a suit of armor that looked as though it had been culled from the prop room of a post-apocalyptic production. "Look at him! Isn't this awesome? Just as how it was supposed to be; Monkeys fighting and dying for our amusement!"

"You're sick."

"Am I?" He rubbed at his chin. "Which is the deeper illness? Someone who would watch animals fight to the death or someone," he paused and the display changed to show a tropical scene - a gorgeous island studded with palm trees, huts built of thick poles, woven mats, and thatched roofs - where dozens of women in various but mostly states of undress butchered each other with weapons fashioned from native materials. The screams of the dying and the wounded were continual and without being prompted the view was rapidly moving from one climactic moment to another, leaving as soon as one of the women involved fell to the sand dead or dying.

"...or someone who enjoys this? I know the rational given, Director. The adrenaline rush, the tense moment-by-moment question of life or death. For some it is about that final moment, that last thrill. But me?"

He switched back to the previous channel and sat back in his seat to stuff a handful of popcorn in his mouth, "I just fucking hate monkeys."