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

[Sunset]

The Desert Sands of Alderus Prime, Under the Twin Suns of the Samson System, Somewhere in the Southwestern Gamma Quadrant... Republic Date 175.085...

"...the choice is now yours to make," Commander Timmons said loudly, doing his best to project his voice out over the slave market and the crowd that filled it. He was alone now, standing at the front of the stage where so many slaves had once been paraded in front of willing buyers. The clothes he had worn in disguise were still on his shoulders but they looked different now that he was able to stand tall.

"If you want to return with us to Sunset then we will take you with open arms. If you have family out there, the Republic will help you find them!" he promised. "Whatever you want to do next, wherever you want to go, we will help you..."

'...within reason', though he left that unspoken.

Everyone was here now, both the slaves who had been freed in dramatic fashion in the desert and those who had remained behind in the pits. Behind them all sat the armored flank of the transport that had returned them to the city, the letters and flag painted on the side a reminder of just who had brought them here. For those that bothered to look up, there were also a cluster of open horseshoe-shaped dots circling high overhead; a group of warships that had run off a few late arrivals when they'd unknowingly tried to make orbit. They wouldn't know it, but their allowed departure would be just more opportunities for the Republic to run down both slavers and their sources.

While most of the yard was filled with former slaves who milled around or looked up at the stage to consider his words as his translator spit them out again and again in every language it could pick out of the crowd, they were not alone. Off to one side there was a modest selection of the town's formerly-finest; wives and concubines to the ruler, fat merchants with rings on their fingers, the captain of the guard, and other similar notables. These in turn were surrounded by a narrow cordon of Republic Marines, their stance casual as they stood quietly, their faces invisible beneath their helmets. This had not stopped more than one ex-slave from issuing crude threats in their direction - and more than one rock had been vaporized as it crossed the thin grey line. This had been warning enough to stop the physical threats but angry muttering could still be heard.

"I'll take your offer," a voice piped up from the front. "Anywhere is better than here!"

There was a ripple of general agreement at this and a familiar reptilian emerged from the crowd to put one hand meaningfully on the stage next to the Commander's feet. A few more followed - a mother with two small children, a diminutive insectoid who settled down on the edge, their wings moving slowly - but he raised a hand to hold the crowd back. "And we will take everyone who asks," he knelt to extend a hand to the man who had pulled the rope ahead of him for all those desert miles, "Everyone."

"...what if we want to stay here?" a new voice shouted, the owner pushing their way to the front. This time they were human - or close enough - and he hopped on the stage to turn to the crowd, "For some of us, this was our town before they," a hand and accusing finger pointed to the small knot of finery, "turned this place into a shithole! I say we hang the lot of them and turn this place back into what it once was!"

This time there were more than a few cries of violence from the crowd and a few of the tougher-looking former slaves took a few menacing steps towards their former masters. For the most part the Marines didn't do more than casually shift - a foot here, a shoulder there - but it was enough to fuel the man's next words, "Are you going to protect them? From us? From justice?!"

For a moment Timmons considered reaching out to grab the man's hand and pull it away but a breeze had blown through the crowd and there was the sense among many that things were about to turn ugly. The two locked their gaze and he stared up into the eyes of mortal hatred. For a long minute there was silence and then he rose, "What's your name, sir?"

The man's jaw worked; he'd been expecting a different answer and even that regular detail has slipped away in the heat of the moment. Finally his tongue loosened, "Titus. My name is Titus."

"Well Titus, then I suppose I should introduce myself to you. Commander Sergeant Timmons, Republic of Sunset Defense Force," he stepped out and put out a hand. "Nice to meet you."

Titus stared down at the hand, large and brown and covered with scars like his own. There was a look of expectation on the other man's face; a question of what came next. Another breath and his shoulders sagged, "Nice to meet you."

"Alright, Titus," Timmons repeated his name again, pinning both respect and responsibility on his bare chest, "let me answer your question. It's a long answer, so let's have a seat. In fact, how about everyone have a seat?" he looked to the crowd. "We've spent a lot of time on our feet - time for a rest."

Without asking Titus to join him, he stepped to the edge of the stage and dropped to the edge, his feet dangling over as the few who had stepped forward sank down as well. This in turn prompted a general collapse as one after another individuals and groups sank to the ground, some folding up robes or shirts to serve as seats while others took children on their laps. A few of the notables followed suit as well, though others remained standing with worrisome looks as though this sign of peace were the prelude to a sudden attack. One or two of the toughs remained on their feet as well, though most sank to their haunches and glared back and forth between the platform and the cordon.

While this was happening a dog appeared, running up the steps to the stage and making its way to his side. There seemed for a moment to be a whispered conversation though no lips moved and then he spoke again, "And we're all hungry too. There's food and water coming - fresh from the kitchens - but it will be a few minutes. So... What are we going to do? Well, let me tell you something about Sunset first. Liberty - which is why my friends and I are here - Equality, Justice. We're a nation of idealists, so maybe it won't surprise you when I tell you that we're going to see justice done. Those people," he looked to the side, considering his words carefully.

"...they're not all guilty. Some of them might as well be slaves too. There might not have been shackles involved and the cage might have been gilded, but it was still a cage. We'll find out though. That's what trials are for, with judges and juries. Fair trials - taking into consideration the laws of this place before they came. If they are guilty... Well, I don't know your laws and I don't want to speculate. But if any of you do want to stay here? I'd say we'll do our best to give you that chance..."

[Sunset]

Inside the Nazi Base, The Vinson Massif, Antarctica, Earth, Sol System... A Forgotten Crypt...

"...well, they gave it their best try," Kraus decided, the immediate certainty that he could have done better in his voice. Not that they hadn't tried - from the look of things this had originally been an open suite of rooms but was now a confusing tangle of machines, pipes, cabling, cabinets, and conduits. Some of it must have been dragged in from other areas of the complex - there were bits and pieces that all found familiar - but others were custom, either careful or sloppy. Such was the mess that all four had had trouble clambering over this and that to reach the side of the room's lone bed.

The body that lay under the glass looked peaceful, except for the eyes wide open in shock and hands extended to claw at the transparent half-cylinder. Paper-like skin was stretched taut over bones that seemed to poke through here and there while pipes and apparatus filled every hole - including some that were not normally there. A machine of some kind filled the left side of his chest and a glass orb embedded in this had cracked its seal to leak the contents across the sheets. The same leg was gone at the knee, similarly replaced with no useful mechanical prosthetic but a cuff and octopus-tangle of pipes that disappeared into the bed itself.

"That's not mecha-Hitler," one of the techs observed, though he still kept the barrel of his purloined StG44 pointed in the general direction of the corpse. It was unlikely that it would suddenly lurch to life and leap at them but in a place like this unlikely was not the same as impossible.

"Nope!" Fredrick rolled the 'o', "I can't say I'm surprised but I am surprised - I was hoping for mecha-Hitler. Or at least Hans Grosse. It does answer a lot of questions though!"

"Such as?"

"Such as the man and the woman who met the u-boat on the coast of Spain," he said, referencing an earlier post. "That wasn't Hitler and Eva Braun - that was me. Well, him. Who is me. Him. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. I wonder if he left a will..."

"To my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson," the other technician began mockingly. "I'm dead. And if you happen to find this, I've enclosed the keys to my safe deposit box, the secret to our family history, and the answer to why the kids always teased you in school."

The Doctor looked up from where he was now rummaging through a nightstand that looked like it had been cannibalized for parts, "Huh? What kids? I was privately tutored by an elderly woman who, thinking about it now - yep, another clone. Ah ha!"

His fingers had come across something in one of the drawers and he held a folder aloft triumphantly. A convenient medical apparatus was found for the lantern and he spread several documents out on the semi-flat surface of the glass coffin. There was just enough space and paper for all four to squeeze in and take a look and each began to read their separate pages while the frozen eyes of his ancestor stared up at them, "Interesting!"

"Very interesting!"

"Mine's just pictures!" Meri objected. "Pictures of old gross naked men!"

"Autopsies," her husband noted absently, trading her stack for his and just as quickly turning them over with a shudder. "Ugh. I don't need to see my own gross old man dick. Even if he's my first ancestor..."

"What do you mean?" Meri looked over at him and he scooted closer to direct her back to the pages, reading aloud as he did; "'Subject was recovered from Antarctic ice flow 'Koff' on or around June 15th, 1932. Subject was discovered fully clothed and wearing garments of unknown manufacture and tailoring. Subject had with him several objects of unknown origin and use. See Appendix 32.b. Numerous attempts have been made to determine the nationality and origin of Subject; none successful. Analysis of Subject's possessions resulted in the identification of several previously unknown elements. See Appendix 38.c...'"

"Congratulations, Doc. Sounds like you're really not from around here!"

"Well, except that I am. Human at least. Mostly." He'd flipped through the pages and was now examining another, "'Appendix 38. Analysis of the Subject's possessions has revealed one to be analogous to a compass,'" he looked over and tapped on a small black-and-white photograph of a triangular spindle-shaped object. "'Made of an unknown radioactive material, it was at first identified as a simple magnetic compass but careful examination revealed that it is not pointing towards magnetic north or south but instead at a specific location near where the Subject was recovered...'"

[Sunset]

RDF-Thunderhead, Near CORE IV Deep Space Station, Somewhere in the Transgalactic Rift, Between the Monoceros Ring and the Milky Way Galaxy... Republic Date 175.093...

"...the results are pretty clean-cut," he added before pausing to consider his words. "In fact, they're going to be literally clean-cut too. Let's begin the demonstration and I'll explain as we go along... Lieutenant Wannous? Load the prototype torpedo and target the derelict, if you would..."

The tactical officer nodded - this was the design engineer's show and until it was over both he and everyone else on the bridge was along for the ride - and keyed the instructions into his console, "Ready."

"And set the launch system to one percent acceleration," Chris added, looking over a floating checklist beside him. As a 'guest' aboard Thunderhead, he'd been given the seat of honor to the left of Captain A'Mer'Ica, an ArAreBeen whose angelic features were thus supposed to be green, rather than being the indicator of some kind of intestinal distress. She was watching him closely - this was her ship after all - and he was taking the occasional sidelong glance at her as well, his last date had been well before his previous birthday. "We'd like to be able to see this thing go off, right?"

Somethings were just never meant to be.

The derelict he was referring to - and now the target of the missile sitting in the breach of the launch barrel - was an old SDF starship from back in the days when that was the acronym of choice for the Defense Force. Then she'd been bleeding edge and still now she'd give any ship in the galaxy a run for their money but by the rapidly evolving standards of the Republic she was officially an antique. Even after all the Federal forces and training academies and museums had gotten their picks there were still plenty of her class left. Without a need, she'd been stripped of her name, gutted for spare parts, and put into storage aboard the nearby station for when said need arose. That need was now and before Mister Jeong had sent the Thunderhead to her current position they'd spent the morning towing the derelict into position.

"Now, this warhead is really just an extrapolation of a refinement that has been made to the TRIPWIRE arrays. By using an active-substitution technique, they are able to modify the local space-time matrix in order to accomplish certain feats. The first of these was the idea that they could be used to re-direct or block the operation of certain types of faster-than-light drives. Another was that this same effect could be used in concentration to scramble someone's molecules. A handy tool that, especially for the Intelligence service. Another of my colleagues has now followed this up with a sensor 'jamming' device. I say 'jamming' because it is capable of nullifying the sensor transmissions of a particular ship - not simply muddling or over-powering them."

"It accomplishes this by using that same active-substitution method to erase or nullify a particular sensor platform's outgoing and incoming transmissions. This effectively renders the target ship blind and is, you'll agree, very useful. My extrapolation of that is actually a combination of two different but related technologies- space-time matrix manipulation and holographic boundary manipulation. Lieutenant Wannous? If you would - I should have just enough time to finish my explanation before impact."

This time the tactical officer studied various screens and readouts before pressing the button to launch the torpedo on its way. While there was little chance that another ship might somehow have wandered into the restricted test range or popped up out of nowhere like some erratic gopher, there was both no harm in checking again and every good reason to check, "Firing. Torpedo away."

"Thank you, Lieutenant. Now as I was saying..." He looked up to watch as the brilliant star crawled it's way towards the top of the screen before the display switched to a long-range visual of the derelict, "My matrix warhead combines two different technologies - space-time and holographic boundary manipulation. On impact with the target, the warhead will convert its stored energy into a rapidly expanding boundary manipulation. This manipulation, as some of you might have guessed, simply sets the space-time matrix at the trailing edge of the expanding singularity to 'neutral' - that is, the constants are now the same as any ordinary patch of space."

On the screen a bright spark appeared, cutting its way up from the bottom to end its slice right at the center of the old Equinox-Class's mass. Then there was a burst of, well, nothing and the ship had gained a half-sphere cutout that followed the cruiser's former profile.

"It... doesn't really look all that impressive," A'Mer'Ica said softly, her voice a half-whisper before rising, "One of our conversion-lance warheads, or one of the new ND-types - they'd have destroyed it completely."

"Ah - they would have destroyed," he countered somehow-gleefully. "Destroyed - lots of bits and pieces everywhere. Very messy. Zoom in, if you could?" he asked aloud to whoever could accomplish the task. The display changed and the view was that of just meters away from a particular section of the outer hull. From this close it looked somewhat akin to a desert mess with clear lines of color and texture marking where the meters-thick laminate switched from one material to the next. Just to the right they could see what had been the interior of the ship; first a neat slice of conduit stacked with cables and transmission lines and then what appeared to be the berth of an ordinary sailor, the bunk carved in two and the sheets and blanket as tight as they had been before the torpedo had hit.

"Here it does not matter what the hull is made of or what it is designed to deflect - because all of it rests on the reality of the matrix telling it 'this is how things should be'."

"What happened to it?" the sensor officer asked from behind him. "The matter. Annihilated?"

Chris considered the question, "Annihilated? No - 'neutralized' would be the better term. The boundary expansion is powered by stored non-baryonic energy. Dark Energy, if you want the layman's term. It is effectively a swap. If you check your gravity sensors, you should be able to pick up the remainder dispersing. The volume of the affected sphere is based on the stored energy but since some of that volume was vacuum, not all of the energy was nullified."

While the insectoid checked his instruments, the engineer turned back to the Captain, catching her eyes before he continued, "Of course, there's always a right tool for the job, Captain. Those other warheads have their uses and this one has others beyond simply cutting neat holes in things. You could use one to collapse a wormhole, deny entry to.some trans-dimensional horror, sterilize a Von Neumann swarm - I'm sure you're creative enough to come up with dozens of other uses, Captain..."

[Sunset]

RDF-Unconquered Sun, The Hyades Star Cluster, Near Taurus, Probably Somewhere Near Sol... Republic Date 175.093...

The accord was standard-issue, brought together from different established organizations with enough skill and finesse to make it appear as if it had been cut from whole cloth - unless one knew where to look. Erika didn't particularly care; what was more important was the substance of the thing - its meaning and intentions a foundation upon which others could be built and a good number of terrible futures avoided. The name was bureaucratic - appropriate, given who had done most of the work - though the title was odd, given the Hyades Cluster was not occupied by any of the respective members.

At least not yet.

---

A Memorandum of Mutual Understanding and Cooperation

The Hyades Accord

---

"'Set Here by my Hand on Rd175.093, Erika Silaco, Secretary-General of the Republic of Sunset,'" she read off as voice followed pen across the bottom of the page. More copies followed, some for historical archives, others for display, and of course the required counter-signed copies for the other signatories. Once she had finished, she put them aside; they would be cared and carried back to the others shortly.

But.

"Now that that's finished, I believe my daughter has come up with a point of pressing business for us to discuss..."

[Sunset]

Deep Under the Gardening Shed, Prudence, Northern Ares... More Than A Few Days Later...

The secret to conquering Death Itself had turned out to be more complex than a pleasant Saturday morning in the lab. There were considerations to be made - none of them ethical - and already the Good Doctor had conjured and discarded nearly a dozen techniques for achieving his goal.

"The problem is one of recall," he postulated aloud, putting a pair of fingers across his jaw in a familiar gesture. "Ah, thank you..." He raised his feet and waited while one of his squirrel-like Minions slid an ottoman under his legs, "As I was saying, the problem is one of recall..."

His new Minions at least had turned out just as he'd expected and the snippet of coding that nudged them towards a continual consideration of his comfort and circumstances seemed to be effective. Without asking they'd relocated an easy chair, end table, and the aforementioned ottoman out of storage, cleaned them up, and set them down on a thick oval rug in one corner of the lab. A bowl of mixed nuts - of course - had been set out under the lamp for snacking and there was an electric kettle and clean cups for coffee and tea. All very civilized and it was admittedly enjoyable to watch as they went about their tasks, long tails swishing back and forth.

"...since in most cases the most likely cause of death will be radical disruption of cranial tissue. This usually leads to rapid cellular degeneration and thus simply regenerating the body will result in a whole but immediately worthless individual."

The Minions had found this out the hard way as soon as their fully-formed bodies had been decanted. Immediately the child-like minds had been subjected to an unhealthy barrage of chemically and electronically accelerated learning techniques that had pushed them from infants to toddlers then on through the early years until they emerged rattled and traumatized but eager to serve least they repeat the sequence. Was it torture? Certainly - but he did offer an excellent salary and full benefits.

"What must then be accomplished is a method of storing that vital information until it is needed in a manner that will survive most..." A sudden though had occurred and he sat bolt upright in his chair, refusing the plate with an attractive-looking sandwich on it that had just been offered with an upraised hand, "No - not at the moment. I've had an idea. Present your tail!"

Without even a question on her face, the Minion turned and laid her tail across his hands, "Yes - very interesting." He stroked it, "Very soft. And it is constantly growing. More useful, nearly every centimeter of the body is covered in it. A natural storage medium, hidden in plain sight, and capable of iterative backup. Useful as well the fact that both hair and nails keep growing after death. So..."

He felt around in his jacket pocket until his fingers laid on a tool. Finding it was a pocket knife, he flicked the blade open and carefully cut away a small clump of fur. After a quick ruffle to hide the evidence he pushed her tail to the side and swung his feet down, "The first task will be to determine the potential storage density of an individual hair. Then some method must be devised to transmit newly-stored information from the brain to the individual follicles. Tail!"

Again she swung her tail around and he grabbed at the middle, sorting down until he held an individual hair in his long fingers. A 'yank' and it was free, "Did that hurt?"

An honest "Yes" was the answer, though the clear look in her eyes suggested that the conditioning that allowed her - forced her - to ignore the pain was working properly.

Excellent - far more efficient than shooting one of them.

"Good! Then the nervous system will suffice! Let's see... I'm going to need some working tissue samples though. Fortunately I still have some of the 'bad apples' from the education program - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, as they say!"

[Sunset]

GEC-1928785Ba, Coreward Expansion Zone, Beta Quadrant... Republic Date 175.099...

"...ungh," Koshi heard his own voice though the haze as his eyelids clawed themselves open, revealing the aft compartment of one of Bellerophon's larger shuttlecraft. Across from him two built-in bunks mirrored his own with a kitchenette next to them and a table in the space between them where the lonely form of Lieutenant Lawrence was sprawled out, his curl-haired head laid across his arms as the black man napped.

Or didn't.

A moment later his own head moved and he turned to look at the Triqu through one open eye, "Good morning..."

"Is it morning?" Koshi raised an arm to push the thick blue sheet that covered him from chest to toe aside, revealing the functional uniform of the Auxiliary Explorer corps. "I was having the strangest dream..."

Lifting his boots from the mattress, he swung his legs over the side and dropped them to the floor with a firm if muffled 'thump', "I had this dream that we'd landed on a planet where everything was basically a bunch of small tribes living on a desolate world. I remember a lot of glaciers, rocky canyons. But they'd realized that if they kept fighting between them they would end up dying off as things got worse. So they had created this ritual where every year they'd get together to have a ceremonial battle with the winner taking their pick of where to live during the next year. Which basically involved throwing rocks at each other. Weird, right?"

"Nope," the Lieutenant got up and walked.over to the kitchenette, returning with two mugs of some steaming hot beverage that looked - and smelled - like roasted and steeped enipc seeds. He handed the cup of dull red liquid to the Triqu and then knelt, looking not at his eyes but at a spot just above his right socket. "Then you said something to one of the chiefs, right?"

Koshi though about it a minute but there was a dull pain there at the end and he raised a talented hand to his forehead, "No? At least, I don't remember doing that. And how did you..."

"Cause you did - and apparently that marked you as a member of one of the other tribes cause then he clonked you with one. Got you nice and good," he added before rising, apparently pleased with what he'd seen. "Put you out cold. Corpsman fixed you up but she said to let you sleep it off. You've got a nice bump to show for it," he finished with a sip from.his own mug.

"Oh."

"And some short-term memory loss. She didn't say anything about that, but she did say you were the first Triqu she'd ever treated."

There was a look of sudden panic in Koshi's eyes and the mug rattled in his hand, nearly slipping hot liquid across his calloused and scaled hands, "'She?' Did you say 'she'?" he asked, suddenly realizing the gender that had been used. "Tell me you didn't say 'she'... Was she married?!"

"Whoa - calm down there, buddy," Lawrence raised an eyebrow. "She didn't say anything about anything. What's the problem?"

"The problem is..." Koshi paused to sink back into his bunk with his feet out straight and the warm mug resting comfortably on the shore spot above his eye, "In my culture when a female does something for a male that hasn't been married, he has to marry her. Only betrothed or married couples serve the other gender!"

Lawrence laughed, "Well, I expect that's something that the Triqu are going to have to get used to as they head out into the galaxy. Can't just go marrying the first alien who holds a door for you. But if you want to go asking after the Corpsman, I won't stop you - but I think you'll make an exception..."

"But I can't!" Koshi protested. "The fifth canticle of the second book of the layers of faith is very clear... And what would my parents say?! Uh - why?" he asked, glancing over to realize that the grin on the Lieutenant's face was just about as wide as it could possibly be.

"Cause I'm pretty sure 'Eye'Synerso' means she's a Skri. Have you seen a Skri? Eyeballs on spiked legs?"

Koshi nodded weakly; "So you might want to check if the third book of the layers of the faith has an exception. Or just forget about it - you woke up just in time."

"Why?"

"Cause the fighting is over and the tribes are meeting to decide who lives where next year. We should get out there and find out where your new home is going to be..."

[Sunset]

RDF-Ojeni, Circlet VI Station Keeping, Delta Quadrant, Edge of the Milky Way Galaxy... A Reasonable Time Later...

"...well, it was a good guess on the nebula, but..." and there was the 'but' as Lieutenant Commander Ingersol touched his fingers to the smooth black glass of his console, substituting the image in the holo-sphere of the Circlet that rotated endlessly alongside them for somewhere between a score and a dozen disparate images of distant nebula. "It only gets us this much closer. If it gets us closer at all - it was just a legend, Kami."

"Oh, I know," she agreed readily, her back to him as she stood looking over the navigation officer's shoulder. Traditionally the right-side station - as the commanding officer faced - on any Defense Force bridge was assigned to that position. This was usually considered the easiest of all bridge stations to learn and on smaller ships with less space the duty was rolled together with that of helmsman. Most of the officer's job was to watch the big picture as the ship went from here to there at mind-boggling speeds and so ninety-nine percent of the work was handled by a computer that could think that fast.

Since it was the simplest position to learn - made simpler still by a mind-numbing class at the Academy - it was usually assigned to the newest officer on a particular shift, who would then use the opportunity to learn the ins-and-outs of their preferred station and waiting for that space to open up or (often enough) on another vessel. Thus there tended to be high turnover at the station and Ojeni was in fact replacing two - and the Ensign seated in front of her looked very familiar.

She was a Tloqsi and of course Commander Sloan had only informed her of this with laughter when - coming into the bridge - she'd seen the four-armed officer sitting at her station chatting amiably with the helmsman and her face had shown the slightest hint of surprise. Ensign Tirassi had turned out to be just the sort of graduate that one might expect to be assigned to first shift though and as Thomas went through the details she followed along, duplicating his work at her own station while the galactic weather channel played on a hovering hologram off to one side.

"Based on the story, I'd say they were describing a particularly powerful aurora but if you want to guess nebula..."

"I'm not going to stay attached to the idea if you convince me otherwise, Tom. What do you have so far?"

"Well, these are the nebula that are inside what used to be the borders of Krȃng space. These are all past representations as well, thanks to the joint observation operations;" even before recent events the Eternal Ascendancy, the United Imperial Kingdoms, and the Republic had begun close cooperation in a number of areas, one of which was the long-range observation of the former Krȃng empire. This was accomplished by the simple expedient of sending a lot of ships - and the UIK had a lot of ships - out a distance equal to however long in the past the desired events would have occurred. The gathered data was stitched together and this had revealed an especially useful picture of the empire both before, during, and after its fall. The technique was in use elsewhere as well, with more than one 'secret project' revealed by nothing more than reflected light.

"And we can already rule out most of them." He slid a hand across his station and most vanished, leaving only three."These are the thickest and they have internal stars. I think this one is the best shot," he tapped a finger again and a single green-brown example shifted to the foreground, leaving the other two behind. "There are eight stars inside the main body - were. Seven now. This one," markers lit up, showing the location of the eight with one highlighted more prominently than the others, "has two planets in the habitable band for the Tloqsi and two gas giants that would have been suitable for Circlet construction."

"So that's where we'll head first," Captain Blaine decided, looking up from the data spread across the navigation station to the helmsman, orders on her lips; "except..."

"Except what?" She turned around to find Lieutenant Calindra standing aside from her station, bad news in her stance.

"Republic and Federation Intelligence has identified the nebula as the possible location of a Ver'Un'Guun Fabricator. Most likely in the star system that is now outside the nebula," she nodded towards the holo-sphere that was now just outside the Captain's peripheral vision. "The BUSF and a Fleet task force under Admiral Falk are in the planning stages of an operation to destroy it - if the intelligence comes back positive."

"Which means they probably don't want us turning up to clue them in on the fact that we know what they think we don't know."

"That would be my guess, Captain. I've sent an inquiry off to Fleet."

"How long until this operation kicks off?"

The tactical officer checked the date, "Point-oh-four-five. About three weeks. Assuming the intelligence comes back clear and the BUSF is ready on time."

"Alright, well," she patted the shoulder of the chair above Ensign Tirassi's own, "looks like we've got some sit-around-and-wait time. Pick a station and get some practice in, but shore leave is on the schedule too..."

[Sunset]

Plexus News with Tanya Zaldano... Republic Date 175.099...

"...and with another five percent increase in the UBR expected tomorrow, the commodities markets continue their long slide for the year. Market experts again noted the similarity to the deflationary trend after the introduction of fusion-sourced electricity in the twenty-twenties and the resulting plunge in utility rates," Tanya's sensuous voice noted as a comparison graph between these two market sectors flowed past, markedly different only in the dates indicated at the bottom of the ragged peaks and valleys. "There is widespread consensus among these same experts that the markets will not disappear entirely when the government-introduced Universal Basic Resources hits one hundred percent in the middle of next year but that they will become a high-volume low-margin exchange that serves as a 'pressure release' for the consumer goods market."

Flowing up from the bottom of the screen a number of stock symbols and their matching corporate logos appeared, along with their own graphs and indicators as she continued, "This has not been without corporate consequences, with the most notable being the share price of Hendrick Brothers. One of the oldest resource extraction and exploitation companies in the Republic - dating back to its days as a Martian colony - it has seen its share price drop to nearly a quarter of its former prime and many investors feel it is heading for insolvency. Experts in the labor market do not seem concerned, noting that Hendrick Brothers has been completely automated for the last century, concentrating its wealth and management entirely within the family."

"Attempts by Plexus News to secure an official statement as to the source of these resources was again unsuccessful, with a spokesman for Industry Secretary Tormakk Jin referring us back to the Secretary's statement on the establishment of the UBR system at the beginning of last year. Speculation by outside experts consulted by Plexus News has centered on so-called 'star-lifting' - as employed by other advanced civilizations in the galaxy - as the ultimate source of this resource dividend. Others contest this, noting that the distribution system seems far more advanced than those observed elsewhere. Again, Secretary Jin's office did not respond to our enquiries and Plexus News is continuing to investigate the details of the UBR system...

Switching away from the graphs and charts and steady stream of financial data that had formed the backdrop to the previous segment, the camera return to Tanya herself, who was standing in front of the now-familiar edifice that was the former Martian Duma and now Outer Systems Alliance Martian headquarters. During the interim between her last on-site broadcast and the present piece the building had continued to see progress with the facade now showing a pleasant brown, cream, and gray color scheme while the giant robots beside the entrance had been replaced by no-less-grand but smaller statues. These undoubtedly depicted certain key individuals in the Alliance's history though since that history was a short one there was little indication as to just who they were and the accompanying augmented reality captions didn't bother to make the answer clear.

Tanya was standing just to the left of the doors with the waist and leg of one of the statues to her own sinuous left while to her right stood a great slab of a rabbit. She was wearing her usual - an exceptionally tight opalescent pearl dress that was slit on the sides nearly to her ribs with bare shoulders and fitted sleeves - while the Hauyht next to her was wearing a Martian-red fatigue version of the OSA uniform undecorated with name or rank. While she stood with delightful back-arched and chest-out posture, he was braced at a parade rest with feet wide and hands clasped at the small of his back, eyes hidden behind enclosed dull red sunglasses. His chin was lantern-wide and the way the fur on his face puffed out gave him the appearance of a beard that somehow hid and complimented his oversized front teeth.

"Once again I'm here on Mars outside of the Outer Systems Alliance's planetary headquarters, this time with Colonel Jon'Doe of the OSA's 15th Strike Commando. Welcome to Mars, Colonel. Can I ask why, during this of relative peace on the Red Planet, the OSA has chosen to deploy such an elite force here?"

The round ball of a microphone drone was hovering between the two though while she delightfully pronounced every word his lips barely seemed to move as they talked; "Yes."

Tanya didn't miss a beat, "General Cus'Ter noted during our last interview that the OSA intended to keep its headquarters here active as a training and recruiting location. In the foreground a hologram of the General and Tanya talking animatedly had appeared, the down-home image of the talkative bunny in clean contrast with the nearly-silent Colonel. "Is that still a safe assumption and the reason for the 15th's deployment?"

"Yes."

"Earlier today, we were invited to witness a training exercise by the 15th in which they assaulted and secured a seaside manor owned by Ateyf al Saleef, the clothing magnate - and the recent host of an informal gathering hosted by the Secretary-General, Erika Silaco." The camera then cut away to replace Tanya and the taciturn Colonel with footage from a rocky Martian shoreline.

Gray gunships with angled hover pods hanging wing-like from each side of their split-tail fuselage appeared on the horizon, rocketing towards the shore just above the thick blue waters. Crossing the crumbling red beach in the blink of an eye, their passage near-silent except for the rush of air over their faceted hulls, they topped the cliffs and soldiers rolled and tumbled out of doors on either side. These immediately disappeared from view as they went prone in the tangled vegetation and the transports rose to release a spray of rocket fire before splitting away to either side, disappearing as the footage cut back to the previous pair, "Am I correct in assuming that this was a simulated hostage rescue operation?"

"Yes."

"Correct as in the assumption was correct or correct as in it was an assumption?" she teased, though her tone and body language suggested the question was as serious as the Colonel's attitude; "Yes."

"For those interested in military trivia, this also marks the first public deployment of the OSA's updated Pegasus III transport-gunship. In a separate but related statement, the OSA's subsidiary manufacturing company has announced that the Pegasus III will be available in quantities on the international arms market by the end of next month with a significant discount on the remaining Pegasus I and II models. This has pushed stock in the OSA's corporate subsidiaries - floated publicly at the beginning of the new year - higher as a result. Colonel Jon'Doe," she turned back to him, hoping to give him a last word other than 'yes' or possibly 'no' before the end of the interview, "Tell us something about this new aircraft..."

"No."

[Sunset]

High Energy Weapons Engineering Labs, CORE XIIX Deep Space Station, Somewhere between the Monoceros Ring and the Galactic Disc... Republic Date 175.112...

"...the Mark Three? Right this way," Captain C'sgove said, directing Katryna down a corridor that looked belligerently out of place against the station's normal earth tone-futuristic interior design. Harsh and brutal, the walls, floor, and ceiling were bare fibrous concrete with bundles of cabling and wire hung to either side or crossing down the middle. Halfway down a pile of tumbled debris nearly blocked the way and on the other side was a deep crater that had been partially filled with an unknown liquid seeping from a now-exposed pipe. The next few twists and turns were more of the same until the two spilled out into what appeared to be an actual open area with even blue sky visible above an alien canopy and the steel-saw sound of unknown pseudo-insects softly moaning through the trees.

"Sorry I didn't have the prototypes immediately at hand," he apologized, though the Director didn't seem to care as she followed the Captain into an irregular ravine that matched the course of an icy clear stream as it wound past and through ragged stumps, moss-covered boulders, and under a bank-spanning log before emerging at the edge of a waterfall. Below them was a nearly-familiar settlement of modern precast homes and structures that had been gutted in some past conflagration and this in turn looked out over a gorgeous valley blocked up at the end with the wreckage of a spacecraft of unfamiliar design. "Had some time on my hands, so some of the guys and I have been field-testing them."

The Captain's idea of a field-test had to be nearly a thousand acres of battle-scarred wilderness but she didn't seem particularly put out; "That's okay - nice day for a hike. Did you make all this?" she asked as she climbed hand and foot down the rocky cliff that edged the waterfall. He followed her and by the time he was at the bottom and had swept himself clean of accumulated dirt and debris she was standing at the edge of a shear escarpment looking down the trail beside her as the wind whistled past.

"The artist doesn't know their own creation?" he answered, smiling back at her questioning glance. "No - you did. Well, we 'built it'," he held up a paired-pair of fingers, "but we took the geography data from the Circuit's terrain generator algorithm. This is a very small segment of the Circuit that's been printed here using the same technique. We just added a few things," he pointed to the burned-out community they were passing and then further ahead to the crashed ship.

Or had it landed? As they crossed the open grasslands between the two it became clear to her that the ship was both more and less intact than she would have expected for a wreck and this was confirmed as she got close enough to spy a massive landing leg with boarding ramps running up either side nestled into a rocky cauldron. The stream ran around and through it and leaves and sticks had piled up where water eddied around metal. One of the ramps was blocked by a ragged piece of hull that fallen from above and so they took the other to find themselves suddenly on the inside. This too was new, with everything that could be demarcated in three-sided pyramids or truncated versions of the same.

She ran her hand over one of these and was rewarded as a display lit up, the projected image rippling and cutting in and out. A moment later it failed for good with a spark and a sizzle, "Who did this? It isn't mine," she noted appreciatively.

"One of the guys. She's a community developer in one of those online massive simulation games. Ludicrously big counter-force battles, fate of the system at stake, that kind of thing. Lots of 'Supreme Lord Admiral' types ordering millions of pixel people to their deaths. She does really good work."

"Huh - she does," Katryan agreed, stopping short in front of a triangular door that she'd expected to slide open at their approach. Instead it looked obstinately down at them from another inverted truncated pyramid set into the door itself; "Ah - we're here."

Pressing past her he put his hand to the onset and then stepped back as displays flickered to life and an orange scanning beam leapt out from the center to sweep over them. Apparently satisfied with what it saw, an alien voice pronounced something with too many umlauts and the door split down the center from an invisible seam that glowed orange as it went wide and a cliff of harsh-smelling smoke tumbled down over them. Inside was a small three-sided room - the doorway being one - that any video game player would recognize as the ship's armory.

Dozens of short rifles were stored upright in cabinets across both walls while shelves below these held long crates of grenades, carefully arranged rows of belts housing some manner of generator, vicious-looking melee weapons, and a collection of bulky headsets, one of which Katryna scooped up and fiddled with for a moment before putting it on over eyes and ears, the thick microphone boom mouldings itself to one side of her jaw where again a flattened pyramid lit up as a holographic display popped up in front of her mouth, "What, do the aliens not wear body armor?"

Aside from the obvious difficulty involved in wearing the obtrusive device over or under a helmet, there was neither armor or helmets on display and he reached out to grab one of the belts and fasten it around his own waist, "Nope. Shield generators. We had to solve the HOBD problem so Kyle came up with these. Plus," C'sgove picked up a headset and put it on before pressing an activation facet...

"...you get to run around looking like this!" he said far too enthusiastically as his normal form was replaced with a latex-forehead alien that was wearing very little and built entirely of tight muscle, dermal plating, and sexual tension. He posed and despite his now-inhuman face his features gained a smouldering intensity as he looked off into the impossible distance.

"Ha!" she laughed but a second later she'd also found the activation stud to be replaced with a hyper-sexualized version of himself. "Three boobs, huh?" she looked down. "I'm taking one of these home, see what Amaril thinks."

"Yep," he deactivated his own costume and she followed suit a moment later, sliding the headset down around her neck with the intention to follow through clear. "These are her's too. Her 'OC's," he pronounced the letters separately. "Oppressangers."

"Wow."

"Yeah. Great artist, not so great with original names. Don't tell her I said that," he warned as he turned away to first unlock and then remove one of the carbines from the rack. It was familiar-but-not with the same layout as the Mark Two but with an erotic-warrior motif to match the presumed user; the curving foregrip and handgrip were covered with stitched and patterned leather while a carry strap of the same looked like it could make a suitable lash. This first one he hooked over a shoulder before following it with a dozen more. "Come on," he waved her towards the door. "Let's go outside and I'll show them off."

Outside the day was still in glorious advance and as he tossed them down in two rough rows she stood facing the sun, a hand above her eyes as she watched an alien bird cross back and forth across the brilliant orb, its occasional cries echoing across the valley. "It's real," she stated matter-of-factly.

"What is?" he looked up to follow her hand into the sky. "Oh - yep. All of the plants and animals are. We 'borrowed' that piece of tech from another online game. Who 'borrowed' it from your mother's OmniFormers. They were using the adaptation algorithms to create animals for their virtual environment - we piped the output into the boundary expression. It's all just software now. Alright..."

Taking his place in front of the two rows, he stood silent for a few seconds as his eyes moved, accessing something inside his head. Then he barked, "Squad - Assemble!" and they both watched as matter poured from the grip and stock of the rifle, resolving in seconds into a humanoid form that pushed the weapon off the ground as it rose. Just as quickly the process was complete and the twelve stood facing him, the carbines held casually but ready beside their chest. Each was visually a clear amalgamation of the Defense Force's ARC4 synthetic seaman and Marine GhostDragon power armor and with a few of the same fetish-warrior accents incorporated into the carbine.

"Those aren't holograms," she observed, stepping to one side to look down the row of silent warriors.

"Hey, woah - don't sound so impressed!" He stepped up to the closest and rapped it on the helmet, "They're an extension of the boundary gateway but with all the capabilities of an ARC4 and a GhostDragon included in the purchase price. Except instead of a battery pack they're powered by the stored boundary energy. These are prototypes, so that's just a few hundredths of a second, but its been more than enough for one to plow through whatever we could throw at it in meat-form - even with personal shield generators and six thousand crunches worth of abs..."

[Sunset]

A'iruka, Great Northern Wastes, Hanson's Kneecap, Parson's Shoal System... Republic Date 175.099...

"...without corporate consequences, with the most notable being the share price of Hendrick Brothers. One of the oldest resource extraction and exploitation companies in the Republic - dating back to its days as a Martian colony - it has seen its share price drop to nearly a quarter of its former prime and many investors feel it is heading for insolvency..."

"Good - fuckers deserve it," Alwyra said aloud, her tail lashing back and forth under her butt as she lay sprawled out across one of the easy chairs in her (former) office. One leg was hooked over one soft, plush textured arm while her back was leaning against the other, leaving the Neko's tail free to move where it wanted.

"Wouldn't be surprised if they showed up looking for more money though," she groused, her voice dropping to nearly a whisper. "Might want to be ready in case they do..."

By the young woman's standards, she had a long history with Hendrick Brothers and more importantly one of their many scions. Both had been convicted of murder about the same time and both of their debt-labor had been sold to the (now retired) Swamp Lord who'd put them to work searching those same swamps for a particular gem found only on Hanson's Kneecap. This was back before debt-labor was eliminated - which was why she was here now - but there was more to the story. Erik Hendricks had leveraged a bit of luck, his business acumen, and his family connections to set himself up as the Desert Lord of the North. With position secured - even if it was unsavory for someone who came from Old Money - he'd engaged in a lively debt-labor trade with the Swamp Lord and particularly for those who could fill his physical desires.

Alwyra had been one of these.

But Erik had forgotten one thing - she was a murderer. She'd killed before and the second time it had been much easier. From an open data connection on his desk she'd managed to transfer his wealth to herself and take over his fledgling company. His body was gone and his disappearance a mystery - another black sheep missing from family gatherings. Until a private investigator had shown up at her table without proof but with suspicion and blackmail on his mind. She'd taken care of that too - two could play that game - and for the past year things had been quiet.

But now? Two problems, at least potentially.

"...say, just how low is it?" she asked aloud, producing a holographic display with a thought and then tapping away at it with a clawed finger. "Their stock price, that is..."

Another voice interrupted her from behind the big desk that sat in front of the window that itself looked out over the open interior plaza of the pyramidal city. This was Craig Giraldo, her business manager and himself somewhat new to the job after her previous employee had run off to get married and churn out a batch of kids. This was his office now, though he looked even more out of place than she had, his diminutive form hidden behind the antique oak, "Not low enough - I already checked. And it wouldn't do you any good. Their share structure is set up to heavily favor the family. There's only a few hundred shares of voting stock and Karl holds fifty-one percent."

Well, poo...

"...there's that idea," she closed the hologram with a crisp 'snap'.

He knew some of the details, of course. It was Craig's job to mitigate risks to the business and she couldn't very well expect him to mitigate risks he didn't know about, "I'm keeping an eye on it though. If the share price keeps falling, there might be an angle we can play. Now, were you paying attention to anything there but your enemies' misery?"

"Yes;" and she knew that was just why she was here. The labor pool was drying up thanks to the introduction of the UBR and the elimination of debt-labor. Only a few old-timers and a handful of back-to-basics youngsters were willing to break their backs as prospectors now, even at the wages she was willing to pay. The gems were getting harder to find as well, though she was the only one in the room who knew the reason why.

Hanson's Kneecap's unique product was the shifting and beautiful Tyrant gemstone and its many variants. Alwyra was also one of the few people outside government service who knew that they were the fractured pieces of suits of armor hand-crafted by the Druth'Haari. Each lode of stones and each variant discovered thus represented a place where these mysterious entities had fought in times-past - though very few knew the reason they had fought and even for those few it was as much guess as speculation. What was absolutely true was that these stones were not properly of this universe and that eventually there would be no more to discover.

"Yes?"

"Yes. We're running out of people who want to run around looking for gemstones;" stones that would be running out at some point anyway. "What we need to do is diversify..."

Or just let the company slowly shrink away like Hendrick Brothers. But that didn't feel all that comfortable to the young Neko, even though she rationally 'knew' that with the UBR rolled out and growing larger all of her soon-to-be former employees and often-friends would be fine. Building the company to what it was - even if she'd stolen the plans - had been an exciting adventure and just letting it die?

Well, that just didn't feel right.

But there were only so many ways to keep a company like this alive and selling product, especially if there was only so much product out...

There...

Or was there?

She leapt to her feet, "Hold on! Don't sell anything yet!" She dashed for the door; "But I wasn't going to...!"

Pausing in the doorway, she grabbed the edge to spin herself around and shoot him a wink, "Just hold on - I have to make a call..."

[Sunset]

The Governor's Manor, Kinola, Sakaldale, The Periphery... Republic Date 175.121...

---

...though it's not really much on the periphery anymore, is it?

---

"...cheating? No," Tai smiled around her tusks - which turned the expression from 'playful exuberance' to 'feral scheming', "it's not cheating. How about 'creatively adjusting the odds'?"

Agmar looked over the plans spread out on the thick-beamed oaken table that had served in turn as dining place, planning board, and trusting place. He was no engineer but long-term exposure to one had supplied him with enough of an education to know when the fish had gone off, so to speak. Certain systems and sub-systems looked far more compact than they should while the numbers floating next to others looked larger than they should be. It did not help her protestations at all that there was a yarn diagram of floating holographic lines linking one system to another and that the data points flowing along these lines were being altered as another sub-system slowly drafted itself off to one side, "It appears to be cheating to me."

"Is it? Tell me then, is it cheating for a chieftain to use the full weight of their force to crush their enemy in the field? Or is to cheating for that same chieftain to withdraw to a fortified place in the face of a superior foe? Only a fool demands his enemies fight fair - or a liar. For I assure you he will then do everything to turn the battle in his favor."

The blond-haired warrior grunted, acknowledging the point. He'd known many who had staked their honor on this matter or that and challenged the one who they felt had impugned that honor to a trial by combat. Some had won, others lost, but nearly all were now dead - honor mattered little when it was the light from their eyes fading at the end of your blade.

"Besides - the agreement between us was that I would only fight the champion. The only risk is to my pride."

"Are you ready to lose that?" he asked. "Even if you 'creatively adjust the odds', the champion will have just beaten them."

"Which is why I am adjusting them," she grinned again. Do you enjoy toppling a clean-beard who has not yet known his first woman? That is what we must do in battle, but in a contest between warriors?"

"You are advocating cheating to create the fair fight you just dismissed," he noted, leaning back against the nearby window sill and folding his thick arms across his chest to let the early afternoon sun warm his back. Winter was quickly approaching Kinola and the streets below were alive with those enjoying one of the last warm days before the rain and then snow.

The Troll shrugged, her heavy shoulders rising slightly as she in turn rested turned palms on the table edge, "Hypocrisy is the trait we're all born with."

"Fair." He'd decided there was no stopping her and - as she'd pointed out - there was an agreement between the two. "Let me see it then," he asked, looking to the table and its scattering of disassociated components.

Finally. There were few engineers - even retired ones - who would not take the opportunity to show off when it was offered. Turning around, she began to pile virtual sheets one on top of the other, clearing her workspace until there was room for her to unroll a larger one retrieved from under the table. Laying it flat in the center, she grabbed it in the center and pulled the diagram up, bottom.to top, with glowing lines unfolding under her hand like an accordion.

"I knew you were cheating," he said, walking around the table to admire or at least study her handiwork. "This does not look much like the robots - 'Mechs - we saw during the tournament."

Indeed it did not. There were some similarities, of course - the shape was broadly humanoid - but the look of the thing departed from the OSA's faceted sensibilities to adopt those of the armored fighter. An obvious cockpit had been replaced with a blank face hidden under an armored cowl and where nearly all of the Alliance's war machines carried a balanced array of weapons left and right this one kept nearly all to one side. A large box launcher was perched on the shoulder and there was another set into the abdomen while the matching hand carried a heavy cannon of some sort.

All of this was balanced by a heavy shield mounted on the opposite arm and this made her chosen tactic clear. Since her bout would be one-on-one, she would place the shield between her and her opponent and use it as cover while firing the angled launchers around it or - in the case of the heavy cannon - from the barely exposed edge.

"You make the assumption they cannot flank you..."

"That is true," she admitted readily. "Watching the contests, it seemed that most preferred to engage at the middle of the effective range for their weaponry, moving laterally to make their opponents gunnery more difficult. Closing was only done in desperation or by those who piloted 'Mechs specifically designed for melee." Concentrating for a moment, a pair of holographic OSA BattleMechs appeared on the tabletop and she continued, picking up one by the head and letting the arms and legs dangle. "Which is why I went with traditional you-and-me legs instead of what they call 'chicken-walker' legs. Our legs are built for rapid unstable turns where the reverse-joint is more stable but slower to turn. It would take a much faster design to flank me, and a faster design will generally be smaller and more vulnerable to my heavy weapons."

Agmar nodded, "You've considered all this carefully," and she said nothing but smiled broadly as he circled the table. Admittedly he was no engineer but there were places - here and there, chinks in the armor - and he considered pointing them out. Perhaps they were necessary, perhaps they were over-looked, but already a notion of a plan was forming and the corners of his mouth turned up, hidden under his beard...

[Sunset]

RDF-Tlokselo, The Samson System, Somewhere in the Southwestern Gamma Quadrant... A Couple Days Ago Now...

"...what do you mean, 'is there anywhere else they fought?' Who fought?" Timmons asked, staring oddly at the holographic Neko who was prowling the thick gray carpet of his quarters like...

Well - like a caged-up cat.

"The Druth'Haari," Alwyra's hands moved like she was already in combat, jabbing and slashing as she explained herself. "Is there anywhere they have fought other than Hanson's Kneecap? In person, that is. Or maybe one of those giant purple space squids? They didn't happen to break up into a bajillion gems that happen to be impossible to duplicate, did they?"

That he didn't know.

"I'll have to get back to you there. I'm kinda in the middle of something..."

That he didn't and that he was. Some of the now-former slaves on the planet below had elected to take back their homes and make the honest attempt to return their city to its past glories. Or at least to a hospitable state. For the Republic - and by extension of his promise him - that was the easy part. A few automated freighters filled with everything from basic household good to generators and stand-alone industrial fabricators were little more than a rounding error compared to the minute-by-minute output of Republic industry.

That wasn't the problem, nor was it what had kept him exceptionally busy for the past few days.

The majority hadn't.

Instead most had family or friends elsewhere that they wanted to try and reconnect with or else some world that they'd heard of or visited where they wanted to try and make a new life. There were disputes to settle - some families had been broken up and paired off again by the slavers while some had taken up with another when they'd thought their old lives gone for good. Some were from species and places not even in the exhaustive Exploration Command databases while others had never known where they were from but were eager to learn. Even with his team and the other officers of Task Force Monkey Crusader helping, his was still the face of the rescue and so he was the one everyone came to with entreaties for help or blame.

"...did I hear 'Druth'Haari'?"

And then there was that. Saryan was standing at the bathroom door now, her blonde hair dark from the shower and a towel kinda-sorta-maybe wrapped around her. A shower he'd been interested in joining her for right up until the call had come in and he'd foolishly answered.

"Oh, hey - Alwyra, right?" The two had met a couple of times though their most frequent point of exchange was through the Commander. She leaned on the door jam, holding her improvised robe closed with one hand and waved with the other; "Hey."

"So you were saying something about the Druth'Haari?"

"Yeah! So I was thinkin' - what if Hanson's Kneecap wasn't the only place the Druth'Haari fought each other? Wouldn't that be interesting to investigate?" she suggested, conveniently leaving out the part where her continued business success might depend on finding just such a location. "Or maybe more of those giant purple space squid?"

The physicist thought about it for a second, "Sure - maybe. When they were fighting on Hanson's Kneecap they were fighting over knowledge. We're not really sure why they were fighting instead of talking things out," she looked to Timmons, who supplied his opinion with a shrug, "But yeah - if we could find more battle sites we might find either what they were fighting over or why. What'dya think, Timmons?"

"I think you better put your clothes on, Saryan," he answered with a sight, sinking into his desk chair. The stirring in his loins was being replaced by another in his head and he punched up a large holographic display and began moving through the menus before settling on a particular entry, "Here we go. The giant purple space squid..."

"So they first discovered them back in the middle of the previous century, but at that point they thought they were a fluke - infinite diversity in infinite combination. They had no idea they were connected to the Druth'Haari until one attacked the Parson's Shoal system..."

"Which I was there for!" Alwyra exclaimed.

"Which you were there for," he agreed, studying one of the images in the file closely before continuing. "Their relationship was confirmed when the Druth'Haari brought one to the going-away party for the iWe - which you weren't there for."

A video this time and this time of a hole opening up in the universe to allow a great lavender leviathan larger than multiple planets and encrusted with endless strings of dark metal and purple gems to swim through.

The Neko's eyes lit up, "Oh wow - did you kill it?"

Both turned around to stare at her, "No!" "Geezy-pete, I hope not!"

"Oh." She sounded disappointed but Timmons went on, "So after that, Fleet put in a lot of time and effort to track down every last one they could. Since then we've figured out how to track them but according to the monitoring system they don't seem to be doing much," he pointed to a seemingly static image of the galaxy with a number of small purple triangles picked out. Grabbing this image out of the file, he stretched it out into a larger version as wide as his out-stretched hands. "But we do know they move around. When they found the first one it was putting the munch on a planet and we figured that must be what they do, right? Checking around they found a bunch of systems with no planets and a lot of asteroids. Crumbs. The original assumption was that they just moved from system to system, eating everything until they had to move on. Except now we know they can move considerable distances at faster-than-light speeds. And we also know that the Druth'Haari have at least one tame one tucked away somewhere. So... Why these systems?"

"Why?" both women said together.

"Because we know the Druth'Haari use them as war machines. Chances are there was something in those systems they wanted destroyed... Now this is speculation," he paused. "But the last time one of these things moved, it was to clean up after whatever had happened on Hanson's Kneecap, right? So it could be that those empty systems weren't eaten for food - they could have been another one of those battle sites..."

[Sunset]

High Energy Weapons Engineering Labs, CORE XIIX Deep Space Station, Somewhere between the Monoceros Ring and the Galactic Disc... Republic Date 175.127...

"...okay, so - what is it?" Stella asked, bending to take a closer look.at the object that floated silently above and below two instrument pedestals in the center of the room. Circling these - and Stella - were more machines, equipment, and a myriad of displays all pressed into separate or shared alcoves at the outside of the circular room.

It looked like a well-designed ball-point pen - if such things were still in use - though it was missing the clip that would keep it in the latex-lined pocket of an especially dweeby laboratory technician. It was the same size and shape as one too, with a thick barrel, comfortably cushioned grip, and four finned sliders that would allow the user to mix and match any color in the rainbow. A rounded stub on the end would be an ultrasonic eraser though there was no hole at the tip for the ball-point to emerge from.

"This is another example of out-of-the-box thinking by one of our more... idiosyncratic engineers," Director Zysneros answered, not answering the question at all. "And yes, it was designed to look like a pen," he went on, reaching into a drawer to withdraw that exact make and model from among a jumbled collection of hundreds of others. "She felt the design fit well with that of the current Defense Force."

He held up the pen for comparison, his with the same flowing lines but sliding fins colored cyan, magenta, yellow, and black while the floating example was gray with accents in coal black and electric blue to again match the aesthetic of the service.

"So it's a fancy space pen?"

Actually, the question that one should be asking was 'who is Stella?' The answer to that was that Stella was a new recruit to Special Projects - though 'recruit' was perhaps too simple of an explanation. Stella wanted to be there, Special Projects wanted her there, and she was willing to suffer under the particularly odious information restrictions that were required to work with the advanced technologies that were the division's mainstays. For the department she was also an oddball - an elderly woman who had been on the final physical down-slope before the ExoCortex had been introduced at seemingly the last minute. With her consciousness migrated, she'd thrown off her old body like a rumpled bed sheet and gone back to school. Her new body looked much the same as her old - gray-haired and with a perpetually pleasant wrinkled expression - but a close examination would confirm that it had more silicon and silicone inside than a trade show cybernetics model.

"It is not..."

"I didn't think so," the corners of her mouth went up in a smile. "Spit it out, before I die of old age again!"

"It is a prototype for a new torpedo."

She looked at it again and then sketched out some space with her hands, "Aren't those usually a bit bigger?"

"They were," he noted pointedly, "but this is exactly the kind of paradigm shift that you'll have to get used to inside Special Projects. "This," he touched a control on the instrument pedestal, producing a hologram next to them that stretched its way nearly across the open space of the room, "Is the current generation, carried by every class of ship from corvette to battleship. They can be mated with a wide variety of warheads," he slide his finger down the same panel, cycling between them, "and has a high-gain target acquisition and tracking suite, an inertial impeller, and the battery needed to power them. In order to be competitive with similar ordinance used by our prospective opponents the whole unit has to be quite large. This prototype proposes to solve that problem."

Touching another series of controls, he brought up another hologram, this time of a Defense Force Dreadnought. The illusion was centered on the two long forward spines and a wire frame 'under' the hull outlined a particular system that stretched their length.

"These are the Cyclone launchers in use among the various Defense Force ship classes and here and there among our allies. Like many other models, these use electromagnetic launch rails to give the torpedo or missile an initial burst of acceleration. For others it stops there, but we also use an open-bore high-shear gravity breech to give them even more speed and this is in turn fed by a very high volume 'cyclic' magazine - thus 'Cyclone'. Now, as you are doubtless aware, the higher the mass of the object the more energy it takes to accelerate it."

"Yes, but that little thing isn't going to do anything when it pops off... Is it?" there was already a question on her face as though she was anticipating the tricky answer. "And it won't have all the other stuff..."

"It will, and here is the paradigm shift," he explained, removing the two holograms with a couple quick swipes. "This prototype is a locally-stable holographic boundary manipulation interface. You're familiar with holographic theory?"

"A little," she admitted. That had been one of the things touched on in her advanced theoretical physics class; the idea that everything we felt, saw, tasted, and experienced was not three dimensional but two and encoded on a self-contained boundary that included instructions on how it was to be interpreted.

"It is fact, not theory, though it is far more complex than that. We and a few others have figured out how to access, alter, and create those boundary conditions and this prototype is an example of that. Stored 'inside' this interface is a significant quantity of non-baryonic energy. That is, energy that does not directly interact with the baryonic matter and energy of our universe. The encoding of this boundary interface contains instructions that allow that energy to be used by the virtual hardware encoded into this same boundary. That hardware replicates all of those other systems though the reproduction of the inertial impeller is particularly fascinating. Because the boundary is able to set its own rules - physical constants, spin states, among others - this one uses that encoding to convert some of that non-baryonic energy into inertia, bypassing the normal electro-mechanical processes that would otherwise be needed."

Now it was Stella's turn to nod an inkling of understanding, "Which means that you don't need all that," she gestured to where the full-sized torpedo had been, "which also means that this thing can go further faster because it's smaller. Or at least the part that interacts with the regular universe is smaller. And I suppose you don't need to have all those different warheads because to this thing that's all just software, isn't it?"

"Now you're understanding the new paradigm."

For a long while she stood silent, staring down at the tiny object. When she finally spoke there was a note of apprehension in her voice, "Yeah, but I'm not sure I want to put myself to work making things to kill people... Even if they are bad people."

"You don't have to. One of the advantages of working for Special Projects is that you can go wherever your ideas take you. Right this very minute, similar applications are bringing fresh water and electricity to people who didn't have it yesterday. We're using it to build homes for billions, make new bodies for former slaves - wherever your ideas take you..."

[Sunset]

Inside the Nazi Base, The Vinson Massif, Antarctica, Earth, Sol System... Another Few Passages Later...

"...well, well, well - what have we here?"

Three sets of eyes turned to look at Doctor Kraus, two eyelids twitching furiously and the last sinking closed as Meri sighed into her palm; "That was terrible."

"What?!" He stood at the edge of the pit, hands spread and shoulders raised in his own feeble defense, "It's a well, isn't it? You guys are no fun..."

It also seemed to be the end of their trip, except for a rickety metal stairway that ran down around the outside of the circle and into yet more utter darkness. Leaving the final resting place of the Doctor's presumed progenitor, they'd wound their way through several halls, chambers, and passages with each growing more and more 'mountain' and less and less 'man' until they had come to this and what seemed like the final chamber. Carved and blasted out of the foot of the mountain, the room was a rough half-dome with a rusted-open blast door on one side and the ominous pit and stairs right in the center. There was also a litter of corpses around the outside and of course no sign of the tailings that would have been produced by the effort required to dig it all out.

"...pattern buffers," Kraus had declared when one of the technicians had pointed out this very fact.

"Pattern buffers? You mean matter-to-energy-to-matter transmission? But you'd still need a volume at least equal to the mass of the original object unless you're completely throwing Einstein completely out the..."

Fredrick held a finger up to the man's lips and whispered softly, "Shush - pattern buffers."

Which had been about as satisfying as cuddling before, after, and instead and had left him grousing at the back of the party right up until the present moment. Advancing carefully to the edge, Kraus pointed his gun and the attached flashlight over the edge, sweeping the penetrating beam from side to side and still coming up short of the bottom. There was definitely something down there but it could have been anything from a flaccid pool of tepid water to a million sightless eyes roiling over the surface of an inky black mass. Some four twists down the stairway came to an end in a section of ragged metal steps before resuming again in a mass of torn restraining bolts and a handrail that had been twisted into a moebius loop.

"Say - has everyone else noticed that all of the bodies are facing the mysterious black hole?" the second technician asked, sweeping his light from one sprawled out dead Nazi to the next. "And that they are all armed?"

"Not all of them," Kraus replied, turning around to focus his light on the doorway, leaving the pit an ominous dark circle just behind his heels. "That guy isn't - and that guy isn't armed at all!"

True that; one of the soldiers had lost his weapon in his struggle to escape, his frozen arm reaching up to grasp frantically at the now-open hatch. The second lay across the threshold with his body in four pieces, arms and head separate after they'd been presumably removed by the closing door.

"Isn't that a little worrying?"

"Pff - and you call yourself a man of science," Kraus scoffed. "Obviously if there had been something trapped in here it has already escaped - the door is open. Look here," he swept his light up the rough stone walls and picked out a band of icy grime that circled the room. "There's your culprit. Something caused the room to flood and these men drowned," he circled the pit with his flashlight, picking out specific bodies, "and these two were trying to escape. Makes perfect sense," he added with a note of self-assurance. "It's a well, duh."

His mind made up, he laid his weapon down and swung his pack off to begin detaching the rope that was bundled up on one side. The others were not convinced, however, and they stood looking nervously back and forth between the hole and the doorway and each other as he worked; "But... This is it, right? We're done, right?"

"No... Of course we're not done," he said, hooking one end to the sturdiest section of railing he could find. "First," he kicked the not-so-sturdy section over the side to spin clattering into the darkness, "we don't know how my first ancestor wound up frozen in the ice. Sure, there's the implication that he was created by aliens and sent to this world to spread his DNA through the human population by means of vigorous sexual activity, but that's an assumption until we know, right?"

There was logic there and three nods answered; "Yep," "Sure," "Alright..."

"And," he threw the rope bundle over the edge, watching it play out like a long tentacle into the Abyss, "there's also a huge mass of Krausium-212 at the bottom of this well. Probably fell in," he guessed aloud, clipping an electrical ascended to his harness and then closing it around the rope. "Which means..."

He stepped onto the stairway, a hail of rust dropping away as it groaned under his weight. Playing the rope out beside him, he circled around and around until the top of his head had disappeared from view.

"...we're going down there," the technicians groaned in unison.

[Sunset]

Inside the Nazi Base, The Vinson Massif, Antarctica, Earth, Sol System... The Edge of the Abyss...

"...you know, we could just let him go ahead on his own," one of the traitorous technicians suggested, not even bothering to wait until the scientist was out of earshot to make his comment. But beside them Meri was already pulling out her own ascender as well as a pair of spring pitons that she wedged into gaps in the rocky wall of the chamber before attaching her own rope and tossing it over the side.

"Come on, you two - what's the worse that could happen?" she asked, securing the little traction motor to the braid and then backing up to the edge, line taut. If she was aware of the ironic implications of her question she didn't show it, instead waiting patiently and expectantly for the two to begin their own preparations.

One looked at the other and the other looked back and with a shared moment of inevitably between them they were soon standing on either side of her, both looking past her to the other while she looked side to side, "Ready? Here we go!"

With an electric whine they began their descent, one foot after another braced on the rough walls of the well as the motor eased slowly down the line. In the chamber above the lights from their lamps flickered, first casting shadows at the edge of wall and floor and then retreating as they followed each other down. Finally the circle of light left the floor entirely, the last glimmer before it rose to the ceiling catching Fredrick's fallen rifle, forgotten in his haste. Then it became a sharp circle on the ceiling that grew tighter and more focused as they crept lower, clambering over the ruined stairway and then swinging free to rely only on the rope and ascender.

Meri came first, wrapped in harness and pants and parka while the other two followed. Each looked up and then down in turn, straining their eyes to the unknown bottom and then to the slowly shrinking circle at the top. Soon this too vanished and there was now perhaps the appearance of something at the bottom with the tiny light of Fredrick Kraus between them. A few more minutes and they had caught up, only to find him hanging in the open above a tangled mass of fallen rusted metal sitting over cold blue ice. On either side the shaft spread out into a chamber, the walls that were here and there visible pocked with holes.

"Nice of you to make it," he said sarcastically, his strange blue eyes that they now realized matched the ice below them focused on the two. "And how was your trip, my dear? Hopefully pleasant?"

"It was fine!" Meri replied brightly. "You look like you're stuck!"

In fact he was, with the last of his rope coiled like a knit of spaghetti over a heap of stairs and railings, all with the most ragged and sharp ends seemingly pointed straight up at him. Her space though was reasonably clear and she lowered herself to the ice. One step told her it was as slick as it looked though and as she clung to the rope, she lifted one foot and then the other to watch as cleats deployed with an unheard command. Staying clipped in and with the two technicians making their careful way to the ground behind her, she trudged across the ice to snag the trailing end of the rope and untangle it from the mess. Then she tossed the bundle to the two and began to walk it backwards until the Doctor could safely drop the final distance.

"Thank you, my dear," he pulled down his mask to lean over and give her a quick kiss on her own before tucking his back over his nose. "And now for the Grand Reveal! Come - this way. I had more than a few minutes to look around while I dangled!"

Orienting himself on his own hanging rope, he led the three out of the ragged circle of debris and out over the ice towards a distant shadow. Behind him the others walked quietly, their lights swinging from here to there, until one happened to focus on his feet and stopped with a scream and aborted curse, "What the... Doc! Look!"

Spinning around, Fredrick grabbed for the rifle that was not there and went down like a ten pin, sprawled out on his side as naturally as if he'd been resting there. With an evil glance towards his alarmist, he crawled back on hands and knees to the circle of light on the floor.

"What is it?" the question was asked in full. Below the ice there was a faint shape and he rubbed at the frosted surface with the sleeve of his coat until it went clear.

"A penguin. A. Forsteri, if I were to make a guess." Swinging his own light around, he quickly determined that they were surrounded by a flock of the creatures, somehow frozen in time. "Probably swam in when this was a sea cave and were trapped here when the ice reformed."

"A sea cave?"

"Oh yes." He regained his feet and turned to gesture them onward. "Look at the ceiling - notice that it is smooth? Our German friends had the unfortunate luck to reach the bottom just where the ceiling touched the ice. But over here..."

The shadow was now revealed to be a narrow wall of rock that jutted up from the ice and beyond it was what was clearly a natural beach. What was more important was what was in that beach as the four walked closer, the long truncated triangle emerging from the shadows as they approached.

"A ship!"

"Yes! A space ship - and one not of Earthly design. In fact the design reminds me of the enormous city-ships I discovered as a result of my earlier investigations into my past..."

[Sunset]

Strategic Command Deck, RDF-Unconquered Sun, En Route from Ares to Mars, Skirting the Alpha-Beta Border... Coinciding With Current Events...

"...and they want our help?" Erika asked rhetorically as she watched dot after dot vanish from the Martian Conglomerate fleet and those of their rogue corporations. "They seem to be doing a fine job of tearing themselves apart. And didn't they just buy ships from the Elves? They are just going to put themselves in hock again."

"If they come out of this," Grand Admiral Erriki's hologram added, the there-but-not-there officer standing next her while she herself placed the bridge of her command ship while it too sped towards the Red Planet. Trailing it was the rest of her battlegroup; with the Macisikani Super-Grand Armada already in Martian orbit there was no reason to add too many more fish to an already overstocked pond.

"A good reason for the Menelmacari to step in, but I'm not too fond of the idea of spending our own blood and treasure to pull them out of their own mess."

Another dot - another ship, and who knew how many lives? - vanished as if to emphasize her point.

"Agreed. Fortunately your daughter's earlier encounter with the MCN has given us a 'master key' to their defense infrastructure. Combined with the data coming in from the TRIPWIRE arrays;" which was how the Secretary-General was watching the corporate fleets die, "I believe we can solve this problem with a minimum of effort."

"And if we need maximum effort?"

"I've got battlegroups on intercept with all the corporate fleets. I've already parsed out fire directives for the Nemesis launchers - they'll take care of the Spire network. First RRG is ready to take out Hawking and the Second is pointed towards their out-galaxy isolation facility, just in case they have something there that they shouldn't."

"And Mars?"

That was a question for Grand Admiral Yikorusha, who thus far had sat silently behind them, studying a display unfurled like a scroll in front of him while the other two talked, "My forces on Ju-Docri are mobilized and ready. My caution is that we do not yet know what their role will be, if any - and it would be preferable to sort out affairs in orbit before they act. But they are ready..."

[Sunset]

The Handsome Blade, Somewhere in the Beta Quadrant, Milky Way Galaxy... Republic Date 175.149... Just to Keep Things Straight...

"...piece of junk," Bosun Adrela growled, continuing the tradition of maintaining 18th Century naval ranks despite the fact that the Handsome Blade had been - in previous life - a fast cruiser in the rather more up-to-date Aselasean Space Service. At least until Captain Agrohatram and most of his senior offices had decided that the pay would be better and the women better still if they went off on their own. That had left a few of the 'other' senior officers and those regular seamen who were considered 'loyal' to them floating free as newly frozen navigational hazards.

Needless explanation aside, the rifle was still a piece of junk. He'd tried every button, every switch, and had even (bravely) pulled the trigger while the weapon was supposedly on its lowest power setting and pointed firmly at the deck - all with no luck, "You saw it, didn't you - there was a charge when we bought this thing at the stall, right?"

It was classic CYA. The Bosun had been on a shopping trip on Aciralath Five when he'd stumbled across a fly-by-night merchant selling 'gently used' weapons off a carpet laid across the front of an alley. That the carpet had been stained with at least four different shades and types of blood was only a positive selling point, as was the fact that most of the weapons did in fact look to be in working order and clean of said blood. And cheap; after a wandering conversation with the carpet owner - who probably didn't actually own said carpet - he'd walked away with a dozen or so of different vintages, all of which looked to be in good operating condition.

The prize had been a genuine Republic of Sunset Defense Force Mark-3 Infantry Carbine, which he'd been advised was powerful enough to shoot down ships in low orbit. Whether or not the cross-legged Sauroid had been putting a hard polish on that line, an RDF weapon of any sort was an absolute rarity. She'd claimed that it had fallen off the back of a hover truck but who knew? And who cared?

Right up to the point where it didn't work now.

"Maybe you need to plug it in - recharge it," one of his less-useful minions suggested.

Adrela flipped it over in his claws, examining the varicolored gray weapon for any sign of a charging port. In fact there seemed to be a lot missing from the weapon, now that he looked it over. There were switches cryptically marked for various fire modes, and of course a trigger, but there wasn't an interface port for linked fire - common to weapons from the more civilized areas of space - and there definitely wasn't a magazine per-se. There was a blocky structure just behind the rear grip that looked like it had maybe been a magazine in a previous life, but now it was fully integrated with the shell of the weapon, "Maybe its induction charged..."

"Put it in the armory on a charging plate," he ordered, tossing it to the one who had spoken earlier. "Put all of them away - and keep an eye on this one. If the charging light comes back on we'll know it's good."

The sailor nodded; discipline aboard the Handsome Blade was about as relaxed as it could be without disappearing entirely. Gathering up the various weapons in the same Trader Joe's reusable shopping bag they'd arrived in, he soon had them tucked away at least somewhat neatly in the ship's armory. The lone outlier was the Republic weapon, which sat on a charging pad he'd had to tuck into one corner given the regular racks were now close to overflowing. A swing and a 'click' and the armored vault closed behind him and he walked away, bouncing the key up and down on his palm as he went to hide from the Bosun and any more work for the day.

That - as far as he was concerned - was that...

[Sunset]

RDF-Ojeni, Phlocyon VIII System, Just Outside the Beta Luminar Nebula, The Monoceros Ring... Republic Date 175.152...

"...it is good to see you again, Captain Blaine. And your crew as well - though I see a new face. Unfortunately I do not have a lot of time at the moment for recreational conversation," High Paladin Sinuriyu said, his smooth-scaled face wrinkling appropriately as he supplied the bridge crew with the Blishi'i version of a half-smile from his own standing position on the command deck of the Argument for Hope. "The battle did not run as smoothly as we'd hoped, though we were obviously victorious. The Ver'Un'Guun are on the defensive now and every Synthesizer that they lose is one they can never recover and so they fought as hard for it as they could."

That was clearly evident by the debris fields now scattered out around what had been the largest rocky body in the system. It was a shattered husk now, torn apart by whatever the combined fleet had thrown at it. Now it play host to the Republic's contribution, the spiny horseshoes moving through the ruins to pulverize whatever bits and pieces of the Synthesizer were left. Already the former planet was starting to stretch out into what would be its final fate; a conglomeration of mega-asteroids endlessly orbiting. Further away the BUSF fleet was also hard at work recovering and repairing disabled ships while others swept the wreckage of the Ver'Un'Guun warships together for the hard-working Extractors to devour.

"As soon as we jumped into the system, they counter-jumped. It was expected..."

---

Launch tubes slammed open all across the newly-arrived fleet, missiles leaping from their bays in massive volleys to cross empty space towards what looked like nothing in particular only to arrive at their destination just as a flotilla of star-shaped ships arrived, their spines and facets immediately enveloped in rippling explosions...

---

"...and we were prepared for it. From our observations, we have managed to figure out at least part of how you are able to pull off that trick, but the Ver'Un'Guun have not been idle in observation either. They had a second fleet hidden in the nearby nebula and as soon as we were fully engaged with the first, the second arrived to put us between the two..."

---

Ahead of the arriving fleet and between it and the planet that was their target more ships appeared, flashing into existence in brief bursts of light. Some were met by volleys of fire from the horseshoe-shaped ships that had accompanied the tapered-box fleet of the United Federation but these were few in number and only managed to blunt the first wave. Guns rippled down the spines of the fresh attackers and ships began to die, torn apart by chance or direction...

---

"...and if not for the presence of Admiral Falk and her ships, the outcome would have been far from certain. But I must ask - what brings you to this sector of space, Captain? I am not displeased - just curious."

"Actually, we're here for Ensign Tirassi," Kami nodded towards the four-armed woman sitting at the right-hand station. "Or at least her species. We're looking for their homeworld - it might be somewhere in the nebula..."

[Sunset]

Deep Under the Gardening Shed, Prudence, Northern Ares... A Shave and a Haircut Later...

"...excellent - just as I was hoping, really," Stephen decided, his finger moving over the numbers again as he triple-checked them. Perhaps not odd for a scientist of his disposition, he hated numbers and considered himself more of a 'concepts' and 'execution' man until he was pressed for them. This was one of those times when the numbers were important and when they had - to his relief - come down in his favor.

Pushing his reading glasses back on his forehead, he slid off the workbench stool to put his hands at the small of his back and indulge in a groaning stretch. Looking around the laboratory, he noted that things were still as he had left them an hour ago - useful, as his new minions had developed the occasional habit of picking up this or that to squirrel it away somewhere until he recalled and then demanded it of them.

"So, the information density is there - which means we now need to solve the problem of distribution!" he decided, waving a finger in the air as he paced back and forth. "But that problem is already solved as I have noticed that not all fur is alike. Not precisely the most brilliant of insights, but both useful and true. Thus the solution is to divide the relevant information into discrete portions and assign it to different follicles. This will have the secondary benefit of distributing the stored information uniformly across the body..."

There was a pause in his footstep and he turned to the closest display, swiping a fascinating but unneeded diagram into one corner while clearing the space for notes.

"Perhaps there are other applications for this technology - commercial applications. For example," he scribbled swiftly, "Intelligence agencies. There are some who have the ability to do a deep inspection of an individual's mind, looking for telltale hints of traitorous intent. But if one could remove those thoughts from their own mind..." He stepped back and ran a well-worn finger across his chin, "Yes - exactly. Encoding technical information? Mission objectives? Passwords? Given the information density possible, one could conceivably put an entire alternate personality and skill-set in place to be loaded..."

"Well, that's not exactly the right word is it?" he scratched it out. "If one were to consider 'ethics' - Ha! - then what one would really be doing is killing the previous individual and giving birth to another. However, since I do not care about such things..." he jotted down the idea, "...it is something I'll consider. While doubtless the intelligence apparatus of this fine Republic are above such things, there are numerous entities across the galaxy who would think nothing of it. Of course, most of them do not routinely employ squirrels in their intelligence services, so we must create alternative arrangements..."

---

...Two Bits

[Sunset]

The Secretary-General's Office, RDF-Unconquered Sun, Mars Orbit, Sol System... Republic Date 175.159...

"...what?!" Ambassador Penguin squawked, throwing his flippers into the air and running around the open space in front of her desk several times before throwing himself at it, barely clinging on to the edge as he looked over the top at her through beady black eyes. "You can't do this! It's unfair! Unethical?! How will I feed my children?! What will my secretary say?! How..." he breathed deeply several times before heaving himself to his feet and pointing the flipper of accusation directly at her forehead, "How dare you!"

Erika cocked an eyebrow, "Do I need to remind you that I'm your boss? And that your last two diplomatic outings have not done the reputation of the Republic any good at all? You did a reasonable job with the Ozlukar..."

"Yes, well - I did, didn't I?" As casually as one might otherwise go about it, he waddled off to a sideboard where a kettle and mugs were set out for the convenience of the Secretary-General's guests. They were also something of a secret weapon; she didn't need to pee and even in the future caffeine was still a diuretic for some. Neither did the Ambassador, of course - but neither did he need to drop a couple packets of single-serve coffee into the kettle and walk back to perch on the corner of her desk as though it was the most normal thing in the world for a penguin to be sitting on the corner of her desk drinking coffee straight from the kettle.

"At least until that bloody... Uh... Hmm. Who was it that showed up?" he asked himself, the great drops of blood-red lubricant that dripped from his beak and into the pot going completely unnoticed as he took a disgusting slurp. "I forget. No idea. Normal for me, really - memory isn't what it used to be and all that. Now... What were we talking about again?"

"You're being reassigned."

"...what?!" he slammed the kettle down on the desk. "You can't do that! It's unethical! Immoral! Impeachable! I'll... I'll raise an a...r....m...y... I already did that bit, didn't I?" She nodded; "Alright, I guess I should ask 'where' before I pull a resignation letter out of my ass like a fleet from the posterior of an Aumanii. Something something, discounting the creative work of others while being lazy myself, something something. Anywho. Where do you want to send me, boss?"

"Actually, I was considering asking for that letter..."

"...ouch."

"But I'm going to give you another chance. First, you're going to take a vacation. A long vacation. One year - starting tomorrow."

He eyed her carefully, beady black eyes shining brightly, "You know, a fellow could do a lot of damage by tomorrow. I mean - what if someone were to somehow figure out how to penetrate the Eien, despite all the intrusion and counter-intrusion and friendly penetration testing and not-friendly penetration testing and outright sexual assault that gets perpetrated against it and then somehow manages to get inside the second layer and the third layer and then manages to figure out where you are and takes you out in such a way that the Letter of Succession is invoked in my favor and..."

She cut him off, "First, that was inappropriate, Ambassador. Second, I'm modifying that to 'as soon as this meeting is done'. You're going to go on vacation and to make sure you stay on vacation you're going to be locked out. Go where you want, do what you want, but until a year is up you're just a regular citizen. At the end of that year, we'll figure out where you're going to be reassigned. If you're going to be reassigned. Now..."

"Get out?"

[Sunset]

Inside the Nazi Base, The Vinson Massif, Antarctica, Earth, Sol System... A Ancient Beach...

"...I discovered as a result of my earlier investigations into my past..." one of the still-unnamed technicians muttered mockingly, though he still followed the Doctor as he circled around to the left of the craft. As was previously established, the craft was roughly triangular in shape but with two long edges jointed with a shorter 'tail' end and these were mitered at the corners into a very stretched-out hexagon. This in turn was edged with a well-defined border about as broad as his forearm that was scribed with some form of decoration while the interior plain was unmarked if curved. It was inside of this same border on the bottom of the craft that the various modules hung down including the three landing legs, which appeared to have unfolded from cubic structures. An easy estimate put the whole thing as only a few meters wide and perhaps twice as long with room for only three or four Human-sized crew.

Three, as it turned out.

"Now, there is something interesting about this design," Kraus continued, putting a gloved hand on the edge of the hull and casting a careful eye over the curve. "What we determined about the previous find was that they were designed to fit together into a single structure. A single spherical world, all facing inward - though the result would have been more the size of a moon. We had assumed this was for a specific purpose but here the design is replicated. Again for a specific purpose?"

"They like triangles and spheres? I think you're reading more into this than there needs to be, Doc," the other technician said. "They found a design they liked, even if it had a practical purpose, and kept using it."

"Mmm..." but his continued pontification was interrupted as he stepped around the corner to stop short, "Huh."

"Huh?" The other three followed, piling up behind him like the rest of a gang of mystery-solving musicians who'd just stumbled across a pile of clothes and a rubber mask. "Oh, huh." "Ewww..." "Wonder how long they've been there..."

"They look so peaceful," Fredrick decided, stepping up to the circle of two. They were sitting across the long-dead remains of a campfire from each other, one on a rock while the other sat down on his haunches, his hands stretched out towards the fire. Both were of a kind to the scientist; the same facial features, the same strange blue eyes, the same not-quite-blond-enough-for-Hitler hair...

"...they look just like that dead guy in the bed."

"Yes..." Kraus stepped forward and poked one, breaking off his nose. The dismembered appendage dropped to his feet to first bounce and then roll away, ending up lodged just under a boot. "But note their clothing - exactly as shown in the files. My guess would be that these two stayed behind while the third ventured out only to be frozen into the ice. Eventually," his eyes turned upward and he looked around the cavern and back towards the now-dark spot where the fallen stairs were piled, "The Nazis came across them. Well, found them."

"Okay, so why did they come here then?" Meri asked, kneeling down next to the other and taking a picture with a camera she'd dug out of her parka.

"I'm pretty sure it wasn't to help the goddamned Nazis..." Though he wasn't sure of much past that, "Actually, here's an idea. Let's take a look inside!"

"Eww!" "Gross." "Really? Right here?"

"Well yes right here, but I'm not talking about a vivisection," Kraus produced his portable hand scanner and then a probe, which he connected to one of the device's ports. "The information written into my DNA led us to the location of a ship on a distant world - one of many more. But is that same information written into their DNA?"

A short, sharp - and gruesome - stab was all it took and he stood there waiting patiently as the probe went about its business and the resulting information was fed back to the scanner. A comparison check later and there it was, "Yep - it's in there. So they were here with... Was it a message?"

"Quick question - why would you create a Human and sent them to Earth with the location of a ship that they can't reach embedded in their DNA?"

"...to... fuck with them? I'm not really sure," Kraus decided. Pushing himself to his feet by way of the man's shoulder - which also deprived that same man of much of his arm - he began to pace around the scene. "I mean, I might just do that, but we still don't know anything about whoever created these fellows. Aside from the fact that they had very good taste."

"But we can find out!" Meri responded brightly; "How's that?"

"Because they left the door open," she pointed to her right, drawing their collective attention back to the ship. Previously hidden to them, the boarding ramp to the ship's small crew module now stood open and inviting. "There should be logs, right? Coordinates? Where the ship came from? Let's take a look!"

[Sunset]

GEC-5729984A, Coreward Expansion Zone, Beta Quadrant, Milky Way Galaxy... Republic Date 175.162...

It was a unique arrangement, to say the least...

"They are called fvi'quon," the Fvi explained pleasantly. "And they are not slaves, though that is a concept we are not altogether unfamiliar with. In the ancient history of the Fvi such a thing was practiced, though it died out naturally as our technological sophistication as a civilization grew. When we still fought with claw and fang and hunted alone, some would take others to serve them. This continued as we learned to farm, as the first grazing animals were domesticated - even past the invention of the wheel. The practice only began to die out when the fvi'quon were domesticated in Sjinji, which became the first center of what we would now call 'civilization'. They were also the birthplace of the quon dof kinn. The pack masters."

"And what are they?" Reggi asked, sitting forward in his chair as he primed the historian for another long answer. It was a chair he'd provided, having been warned that the hexapedal Fvi hadn't invented such a thing and preferred to - even when offered - relax as she was with front legs braced and the middle bent while the last two were spread to put tail in contact with floor. For some reason just listening to her talk was very relaxing - which might explain in part why they were able to domesticate both the fvi'quon as well as the previously mention grazers.

"The quon dof kinn are Fvi with the natural talent to tame and control many fvi'quon. Most - myself included - can only control one. In their natural habitat, they are social animals who establish their own hierarchy, usually with breeding females at the top. To avoid this, most Fvi will only have males or females in their households. The quon dof kinn are able to put themselves at the top of this hierarchy and so direct both their natural and taught behaviors. Thus the masters could accomplish what it would normally take many Fvi working together to do, whether that be in peace or in conflict. Some of the legendary heroes were able to direct hundreds of fvi'quon and from these many of the oldest nations are descended."

"And there are still pack masters?"

"Yes, but their role has changed as we progressed. Because we were used to the idea of something else doing for us where we could not, automation was easily and readily adopted. As useful as they are, fvi'quon are still animals and will behave like them where a food processor will function the same way every time. This also changed the role of the pack masters. A factory can do by itself what they would have to continuously guide their pack to accomplish. The same with the introduction of the electrical calculator."

"Now the quon dof kinn are mostly breeders, tamers, and of course sellers. A fvi'quon," her own, a lemur-like transitional quadruped about half her size, slept noiselessly in a wicker bed in one corner, "lives an average of fifteen to twenty years - about a third that in the wild - and so most Fvi will have three or four in their lifetime. When they were first domesticated, we would each have to capture and tame our own. Usually a baby or one still young. While they are very intelligent and learn quickly, this would still mean there would be a period where we could not do complex tasks for ourselves. Now this is only a few days as the fvi'quon will.already have been tamed and taught."

"So where do you think that will go if the Fvi become a Republic member state? You'll have access to cybernetics - or fully synthetic fvi'quon."

"That is a good question, Reggi. We have taken to automating every task where possible - and we are quite adept at it. But the fvi'quon are also companions, especially to the young and the old. I predict they will remain a part of our culture as we expand into the stars. Perhaps in a few generations their use will fade away - or even tomorrow. It is important to understand that, when I compare your history to our own, the Fvi seem more adaptable, leaping at every advantage offered. If you had not arrived to make your offer, I would say we might have met you as equals in another five to ten years..."

[Sunset]

Director Silaco's Office, Special Projects Research Complex, Landor City, Terra Incognito... Republic Date 175.182...

174.971...

175.030...

175.093...

Dates and times. Status updates. The slow crawl of history across an uncaring universe. As far as Director Silaco was concerned, she'd rather be surfing. But some things needed to be done and even if - she eyed the surfboard next to the door with its intricate pattern of interlocking hexagons stretching towards the tail from just under the sunburst where her forward foot would rest - even if things were calm at the moment, they still needed to be done.

"...which puts us at point-one-twenty-eight out from completion on Nichibotsu. When that's done, I hope to be able to put a lot of that new output into the Circuit and complete it on or about one-eighty. Depends on what's happening between then and now," she looked across the office to where the holographic model was slowly sketching out something that was now just barely more than a sliver of something. "Unless we go crazy and activate the entire Korekuta Network."

With the approval and understanding of the Accord nations, that at least hadn't taken much time at all. Production that might have otherwise gone to nothing in particular had been diverted and the probes had been constructed, sent out to lurk out beyond the edge of uninhabited systems to do nothing more particular than watch. Since they were uninhabited, they didn't watch anything of interest but that was their interest. When it really, really, truly came down to it the galaxy was mostly uninhabited. Here and there were some bright sparks of life and some spectacularly dull ones but the intention was to not annoy the neighbors and thus the probes would lurk where they could sit silent and unobtrusive until the time came for them to be especially intrusive.

"Let's see... Anything else?" Katryna tapped her fingers on the desk. "Any brilliant ideas? Any must-do projects? Nope!"

She hit 'send' and stood up, pushing the chair back as she swept her already high-cut halter top off to reveal a bikini top that gleamed with a pearl luster. Nearly at a sprint, she reached the door and grabbed her board, "Surf's up and the office is closed!"

[Sunset]

Landing Pad Three, The Hidden Moon Kyupuu, Beyond the Auracexian Sector, Orion Arm... Republic Date 175.185...

"...and have you told anyone else about this?" Jero asked, looking from side to side as innocuously as one could when wearing an embroidered purple silk robe and enough jewelry to decorate a hundred old ladies while being accompanied by two towering saurianoids. Some things just couldn't be helped, of course, but only one woman - a newcomer with multicolored fiber-optic hair extensions - caught his eye before sliding away to return to her own work.

Whatever that was.

The ship was a short oval with a trench down the back on the underside between what had to be two of the four large engines and from this a boarding ramp descended to the hard-packed dirt. Leaving the Maiorca at the bottom, where their feathered crests just brushed the bottom of the ship, the dock guard led the Slave Prince up the ramp and into an extended well that ended at an armored hatch. There was an access plate there but no code was apparently required as he punched a pair of buttons, the hatch whisking open to either side a moment later.

"It was just like this when I came aboard," the guard explained, gesturing towards the scene in front of them as though that might somehow serve to explain just what was going on. What had definitely happened was that the Handsome Blade - according to the name stenciled on the side - had arrived in orbit and set down on the unoccupied Landing Pad Three all without uttering so much as a peep.

That was normal.

After all, It wouldn't do for slavers to go around advertising themselves and their location to every do-gooder navy in the region - at least not if they wanted to live longer than a few more days. But the crew of this particular ship hadn't. Been alive for the past few days, that is. At least not if the dried blood decorating the bulkheads was any indication. The exterior hatch had been unlocked when the guards at the landing pad had first tried it and according to their whispered, hurried conversation on the way back to the ship the scene just inside was similar to that of the rest of the ship. A half-dozen bodies lay tumbled about, ship's crew cut down where they had stood and each with a single gruesome wound from one side of the head to the other that had resulted in a splatter of blood and brains across the panel behind them. The smell was atrocious and Jero covered his nostrils with a silk kerchief in an apparent attempt to ward it off.

'Apparent;' to the Slave Prince's nostrils the smell was instead delightful but it would not do for the human guard to see his tongue flicking across his lips at the unconscious thought of eating what were still in some ways the man's kin.

"According to the logs, the captain set the ship's destination and then... Nothing. Whatever happened must have happened between then and now."

"And the captain?"

"Dead," the man tapped himself on the back of his helmet, "With a hole right there. Like someone came up behind him and got him point-blank. The rest of 'em were like that too. Look like bullet holes, sir," he guessed, doing his best to play detective in the face of his boss's questioning. "But I looked. There's no bullets. No bullets, no killer. According to the logs we're the first through that hatch since their last port and there's no escape pods missing and the ship's shuttle is still there. And I checked the ship's internal security scanners. No one alive other than meself."

"Perhaps whoever did this then killed themselves," Jero suggested in a long, languid tone.

"Could be, but with everyone dyin' the same way? This guy was a pro. Why would a pro cap themselves after a job?"

"You think it was a job?" his employer asked sharply.

"Had to be. And had to be a warning too, maybe," though he suddenly sounded hesitant. "Maybe. These fuckers... They were pirates. Smugglers. Not slavers. There's no cages, no chains. Why come here?"

"Indeed..."

Though Kyupuu was becoming known as a safe harbor in an area of the galaxy that was becoming generally harder and harder for those of a certain disrepute to operate in. Never mind that one reason why it was becoming more difficult to operate was the continued operations of the slave market itself... And its status as a honeypot for various do-gooder intelligence services. That aside, something had caught Heron's eye and he extended a talon to point it out to the guard, "What is that? Bring it to me..."

It was a gun, simple enough, but it was the insignia on the grip that had brought his attention, "Interesting. A Sunsetti weapon. Nimatojin."

"Yeah?" The guard looked at it again. "Don't see those around a lot. They keep a real close eye on their shit, from what I hear. You think it could have been them?" he asked, glancing around the airlock as though he suddenly expected one to leap out of the walls.

"Perhaps," Jero tucked the weapon away under his robe. "But perhaps not. I will make some inquiries - and you will not mention your suspicions to anyone until I have."

The Slave Prince suppressed a sigh. If this was all part of an operation then he may well have just inadvertently alerted the guard to it and doubtless the story would be racing across the market as soon as he left. For a moment... Yes, the guard's back was turned as he stood nosing his foot among the corpses, trying to figure out what had happened. Fate; he drew the weapon back out from where he'd concealed it, pointed the muzzle at the center of his back, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

"Interesting..." The guard turned to find him examining the weapon; "What?"

"Your hypothesis is unlikely - this weapon is dead," he demonstrated, pulling the trigger several times. "Though it may be that this weapon did contribute to one or more deaths indirectly by being non-functional when its function was most needed."

Passing the gun to the guard, the man checked it himself, aiming it at one of the bodies and clicking away, "Huh. Guess you're right."

"I believe so," though Jero still held out a hand for the return of the weapon. "Whatever happened here, it is now blocking one of our landing pads. Round up your friends, loot everything of value, then bring in a work crew from the cages to clean it out. If we keep this sufficiently quiet," his voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, "then your share of the sale will be undoubtedly higher. After all, who would want to buy a ghost ship?" he hissed out a laugh.

"Higher, you say? Well..." He licked his lips. "Why - I'm pretty sure I can do the job myself. Nice and quiet."

"...precisely," Jero hissed.

"Yeah, precisely..."

[Sunset]

RDF-Tlokselo, The Samson System, Somewhere in the Southwestern Gamma Quadrant... Just a Few Minutes Later...

"...well, I was half wrong," Timmons admitted, staring at the display as the sequence of images flipped past again and again. The ultra-long range time-sliced surveys of the galaxy were proving more and more useful - even if it was to prove him only half wrong.

In the first frame - harvested from a much longer sequence and tagged as originating from the Defense Force's own imaging arrays - the planet looked just as one might expect an otherwise dull example of the type to look. Gray and lumpy, it didn't have even the faintest shimmer of an atmosphere and the spectrographic data hovering next to the image confirmed it; there was little chance the planet would ever sustain life.

At least not naturally.

In the next frame - seconds later, but exactly ten years according to the chronometer below - the planet had cracked open at one end as though it was an egg. A shell. And this was not far from the truth as the next few still images passed in sequence and the cracks that had radiated from a single point grew wider and more pronounced as the surface bulged and was then torn back as a single enormous crystalline tentacle forced it's way through. This was followed by another and another and then the great tapering head. There were no eyes or other suggestion of features but neither did it need them as it unveiled around the shattered sphere and began to feed...

"...neat," Alwyra breathed, though there was disappointment written on her face. There was little chance that she would find the kind of mineral wealth she hoped for there though the pseudo-moving picture of a planet - a real planet - being devoured over the next hundred thousand plus years was spectacular.

"Yeah, it is neat," Saryan said, seconding her own opinion as she looked over the pair's shoulder as they sat side-by-side watching the loop repeat itself. "But you ain' the only one with hunches, Big Guy..."

"What's that?" He turned around to find that she'd managed to both put at least half of her clothes on - though the sway of her chest under her tank top suggested her bra remained missing - while also pulling up a holographic interface of her own, though some of the images were the same, "What do you have?"

"I've got deep shot images. These," she pointed to a collection with one hand while the other tried to scoop a sock into place, "were captured by the latest super-long range surveys. The galaxy of a million years ago. The resolution isn't as good;" though the image was still floor-to-ceiling and sharp enough to make out individual stars against the greater bulk of the galaxy; "but good enough to confirm a hunch. Your planet," she nodded towards his hologram, "is right there. Right in the middle of a star-birthing nebula. And right over here," she pulled, swiped, and zoomed in, "is a white hole."

"What's a white hole?" Alwyra asked, her head tilted backwards so the image was upside down.

"The opposite of a black hole. Black holes suck everything in, white holes shoot stuff out. That's not exactly correct, but they're also called particle fountains. New matter - as far as this universe is concerned - appears there. Or appeared there, in this case. What we've found out is that some of these particle fountains are not natural phenomena - they were created by the Druth'Haari to create the nebula which in turn gives birth to a star and planets around that star."

"Sounds like they take the long view..."

"Well, the long view 'towards what?' That's been something we've been trying to figure out ever since we figured out that they're there. They're not exactly the talkative types and they seem to be sitting on top of a K-Three or even K-Four amount of power. That's 'Kardashev scale'. Course, for me that's scientifically fascinating ah'n for the Republic it's one of those 'This is the biggest shit I've ever seen - whose shit is it?!' questions. Cause shits don't normally come that big ah'n if they do there's something you don't want messing with your cows lurking around the pasture."

"But what you're saying right now is that this planet and thus this... giant purple space squid... was created by the Druth'Haari. Interesting," Timmons turned back to his own display and poked at it for a second. "See, we kinda-sorta already knew about this. GEC-79742... C, I think it was. The Heart of Gold found what we think - thought - was a birthing pool below the surface. Same circumstances - GEC-79742 was born out of one of these particle fountains. We've also linked those same circumstances to the Doso and Heon homeworlds - Terra Incognito and Zeta Irregularis. But this tells us that their goal - if it is a 'goal' - is to create a new species. Sometimes they're birthing one of these things."

"Seems like a lot of trouble to go through when you could, you know... Just build ships or something."

"It does, but again - we don't know why they do what they do. As near as we can tell, the Doso and the Heon don't have any kind of direct connection back to the Druth'Haari. But on ePyrk, they had set up something of an observation station where they'd take people who wandered into their trap, 'tag' them, and then release them with tracking gear on them. If you're going to go through all the trouble of creating a crystalline species, why not have them be your trackers?"

"Cause aliens, yo?" It was as good an answer as they had at the moment, but Alwyra was focusing her attention more on the deep shot image than on the questions being bounced back and forth between the two humans. "So... All of these stars are fake? Well, not fake - the Druth'Haari made them? There's what... Thousands?"

"We don't know. That's one of the things the super-deep shot project is trying to find out."

"But not all the planets they created are eggs, right? There's still some around... Can you figure out a few that might be dead? Like... I dunno - bad eggs? Maybe we can go take a look..."