Jikse, in Freefall
Diana was used to zero-g, comfortable in it. You would actually be hard pressed to find a human who hadn’t spent a significant amount of time in zero gravity these days, with the Fort in orbit around Bellona and the other orbital construction projects, but Diana had literally grown up in it. But flying in weightlessness was a lot different than what she was doing now: diving into an atmosphere with nothing more than a few layers of the most advanced ablative material science had ever developed to protect you from the ravages of re-entry.
The material was rated for ballistic planetary insertion, meaning it would protect an occupant from a descent at a faster than orbital velocity around an Earth like planet. It had been in development by the Martian military during the war to land troops on Earth without the need for a ship. Launch a soldier from the magnetic rails in orbit of Mars, and within a day they would have been on the ground on Earth, nearly undetectable until the moment of atmospheric contact where they would be engulfed in a ball of plasma so intense that no targeting system would be able to lock onto them with any accuracy.
“Everyone remain calm. The automatic systems will deploy if you pass out, but you have a better chance if you guide yourself in!” Young called out over the communication channel. The channel was still open, although it was likely going to cut out at any moment; atmospheric entry blackout was something that, despite the several hundred years of experience, remained a challenge just as much as it had to the first insane astronauts. Plasma liked to disrupt all communication methods.
The first inkling that she had hit the atmosphere was a slight pressure, the suit pushing itself more comfortably against her body. Shortly after that, it became far too snug. Diana grit her teeth as the g-forces continued to climb and the pressure grew.
The remains of the doomed shuttle suddenly shot past her; she was already slowing down compared to the wreck. Diana locked her eyes on it and watched. The control surfaces were still madly moving and rotating, and jets were pulsing from what reaction systems were still functional. Not that it did any good, the amount of damage was too great. The orange glow of re-entry was already forming underneath it and the mass of metal began to slowly rotate. Within moments it was in a deadly flat spin, and without the inertia reduction systems it would be a miracle if the pilot was still conscious let alone in any capacity to fly.
With a cold dispassion Diana watched the shuttle disintegrate. Her mind, enhanced to operate well under stressful situations, catalogued the time and the angle at which the vessel had disintegrated. The fact that the pilot was now most likely dead was only another data point in her calculations. From the point of disintegration and the amount of armoring the standard shuttle had, as well as the atmospheric properties of the planet, she would be able to construct a rough estimate of the power of the Imperial weapons. Those calculations not something she was going to do at the moment, however.
Turning her mind back to her own descent, Diana played with the controls. She wasn’t afforded much in the way of maneuverability at this point, not with the shock cone of plasma forming only several inches in front of her face. Diana idly recalled the gravitational and atmospheric statistics for the planet that she had glanced at on the bridge of the Canada. The gravity and atmospheric pressure were extremely similar to earth, with 97% the gravity and 105% of the pressure. With those values and her weight taken into consideration, Diana would be able to safely open the parachute at a little under 200 meters, with time to react and pull the emergency chute if her main chute failed.
Confident in her calculations, Diana turned her mind back to her companions as she slowed past Mach 2, the cone of plasma around her beginning to fade. She was in the upper atmosphere now and still slowing down, but it would still be several minutes until sound returned.
Focusing, Diana looked at the HUD in her helmet. The HUD, like most human ‘windows’ in space, was actually cameras wired up to a screen. Putting a piece of weaker material directly in front of her eyes just to see would have defeated the purpose of the enhanced orbital armor.
Despite jumping second, Diana was the lowest. As the smallest of the group by a fair margin, drag was not having as much of an effect on her as it was on Young. Switching to a rear camera, she could see Minerva and then Bruno above her, Minerva tumbling slightly and the larger man trying to streamline his bulky body to get down to her. Young was not in her field of view, but once communications were re-established the HUD would identify his location.
Bending as much as she could in the suit, Diana tilted herself forward and streamlined her body – head pointing straight down towards the planet, reducing the amount of drag on her body even further. They had no time to lose.
The Canada, Breaking orbit of Jikse
“Reinforcements! The IFF Identifies the vessel as the Imperial, Flagship of the Empire!” Arik shouted through the comm channels of all those on the bridge.
“Time to go! Tactical, spool up the Ace in the hole!” shouted Stagg.
The Canada turned, her main gun bringing the alien flagship into its sights. The Imperial had to be at least a kilometer long. Glistening and full of smooth contours, it was reminiscent of the one that had attacked Earth, only much larger – and at the same time, less threatening. The ship that had attacked Earth had been scarred, and yet still sinuously powerful, like a scared and vicious predator. This vessel was gleaming: polished and without a scratch, not a thing out of place on her hull. It looked as if it had just rolled out of the shipyards. She had no sign of wear or strife.
Still, Humanity had learned. The massive size of such a ship only made things easier for the Canada.
“Ace in the hole ready, weapons ready!” reported tactical.
Stagg looked at the alien ship for a moment and smiled, giving the order. “Activate the Ace. All weapons free!”
The Canada’s main gun fired, and once again a small lump of metal was atomized and flung at the enemy as a cloud of plasma energy and mass. Calling it an object once it had been flung from the magnetic rail was pointless.
The shot flew directly at the enemy vessel, but the plasma would not impact the shields of the alien ship. At the moment, there were no shields protecting it.
After Bellona was founded, researchers quickly determined that attempting to replicate the Empire’s technology as a means to defeat them would prove disastrous. The aliens had been using and developing their own technology for at least several hundred years, after all. Any attempt to retro engineer an improved version of the shield technology or particle energy based weapons would lead to defeat.
The decision made by the Council had been to instead further branch Human technology. Humans knew how to develop ships with armor and kinetic based weapons. They only had to be modified. The hulls of Humanity’s newest ships were able to absorb energy blasts as well as kinetic impacts, relying on matter as a shield instead of a layer of superheated plasma contained within two delicate magnetic fields.
The Canada’s ‘Ace in the hole’ was a pulsating magnetic field. Instead of following a natural progression like an astrophysical phenomenon, it constantly and randomly fluctuated in such a way that any attempts to contain magnetic plasma in anything but the most tightly controlled environments would fail.
The Human magnetic bottles for strange matter and antimatter had been upgraded and strengthened to deal with the fluctuations, but for the aliens to do so with their shielding technology would mean dumping a nearly exponential amount of energy into their shields.
Human ships had no need for shields, so it was only fair that the enemy fight on an even battle ground. The Ace in the hole leveled that playing field. The alien weapons would still operate and bypass Human armor, but the alien vessels were not designed to take even the smallest of kinetic fire without their shields and would be similarly disadvantaged. The disadvantage to the Ace was that its power requirements were enormous, and the intense magnetic fields it generated tended to melt the internal components of the device. It could only be maintained for a minute or two before it had to be taken offline and most of it repaired.
The rounds that were fired from the Canada on the order of Captain Stagg slammed into the alien vessel with a carnal vicious glee, shredding the hull.
Stagg watched as compartment after compartment of the alien vessel was exposed to space. In a glorious chain reaction, compartments not even hit by the rounds started to vent as well. The alien ship was massive, though – for the Canada to critically damage it would take a significant amount of time.
Stagg heard the hull rupture alarm and winced. While they had eliminated a significant advantage the enemy had, the empire ship was still perfectly capable of firing her weapons, which was exactly what was happening
“Arm a nuke,” said Stagg, her voice calm even as her eyes watched the amount of destruction rippling across the different sections of the enormous alien vessel.
“Nuke is armed. The limiter on the range?” asked tactical.
“Remove the limiter.”
The tactical officer smiled. “Gladly.”
“Give it a twenty second count. Helm, as soon as the bomb is clear, jump us to the nearest beacon.”
“Roger!”
The Imperial, Orbiting Jikse
“Our shields are failing!” shouted an engineer at his console, even as a relay behind it exploded, sending out a shower of sparks.
“What!?” shouted [Vann].
He turned just in time to see the alien craft lining up, its engines flaring, pushing into a fast approach. Small guns protruding from the ship’s otherwise smooth surface quickly turned and began to fire. [Vann] watched in horror as the rounds passed through the space where the shields would normally have easily stopped them and impacted the hull of the Imperial.
Reliant on shields for protection, and designed to take hits from energy weapons afterwards, the Imperial was taking heavy damage from the kinetic weapons fire. The tungsten rounds accelerated to several percent the speed of light tore through the delicate structure of the ship like it was hot butter.
Massive decompression gripped the Imperial, and [Vann] watched as huge amounts of her internal volume were vented to space. The emergency shields and force fields that would have normally prevented the breaches from being anything more than cosmetic failed.
[Vann] and the rest of the bridge crew watched in horror as the forward sections of the Empire’s flagship exploded outwards, sending stunned and doomed crewmembers and equipment hurtling into open space.
“Open fire!” shouted [Vann]. “All weapons fire!”
The Human ship was now directly over them, looking almost as if it intended to ram them.
The guns of the Imperial turned and let loose their concentrated energy.
In lieu of shields, the Human vessel absorbed the hits, and within half a second its hull was glowing a vibrant red. [Vann] watched as a compartment of the vessel was ruptured, or at least exploded outwards. There was no telltale atmospheric haze from a decompression, and despite the size of the explosion [Vann] didn’t see anything drifting out of the section.
The Human ship tilted in space, and angling towards some far away star, [Vann] saw its frame shudder and then disappear in a flash of red and blue light. Not the sudden blink that he had been told was a part of the Human FTL, but rather a familiar tachyon jump.
Before [Vann] could even think, another alarm superseded the hull breach alarm. It was a low, continuous whine, something he had only ever heard in the direst of drills, the scenarios where nuclear weapons were involved.
“The alien ship has dropped a nuclear device!” shouted tactical.
The main view screen focused on the device. It was slowly drifting towards them in space. Under normal circumstances the shields of the Imperial, and indeed any ship in the Empire’s fleet, would be able to hold back the force of the explosion. Without shields, the Imperial was exposed.
“Jump!” shouted a hoarse voice from behind [Vann].
Turning, [Vann] saw [Charles] stepping out of the lift.
“We have hull breaches! Jumping now will-“
“Jump now or we’re all going to die!” shouted [Charles], his voice full of the weight of command. The man who had stepped out of the lift was not the drunk that [Vann] had come to know; there at the entrance to the bridge stood a commander. A commander who had experience making the difficult decisions, who no longer hesitated to order men to their deaths, even as he wept for them afterwards.
“Helm, perform a staging jump!” said [Vann] turning back around.
The helm officer moved to carry out the order, even as all eyes locked onto the device floating in space. [Vann] was knocked off of his feet as the ship performed an emergency tachyon jump, locking onto the largest source of tachyons in the system.
The trip was short, with only five light minutes to cover in distance, they were in transit for scant seconds.
The Imperial dropped out of FTL, in orbit of the roiling primary star of the Jikse system.
[Vann] slowly got to his feet and sat down in his chair.
“Put the patrol vessels’ telemetry up.”
“We haven’t been able to establish a tachyon link, we’ve only got optics,” said [Sam] from the console she was working.
“Fine, put that up,” growled [Vann].
The main view zoomed back in on the planet they had just left orbit of, which still showed the Imperial and the alien vessel in orbit of the planet. With the time lag of [five light minutes], they were out of sync, looking at a moment in the recent past as if watching a recording.
Ignoring the damage around him even as the other officers rushed to repair and contain it, [Vann] stared at the screen. The Human threat, something he had only just discovered was a symptom of something malignant in the Empire, was far worse than he had feared or even suspected. If they were brazen enough to attack the Flagship of the Empire, they were a threat unlike anything his ancestors had ever faced.
Bellona Colony, Eridani
Sitting down on the side of the bed, Ben yawned.
“How do you think she’s doing?” asked Megan as she carefully pulled her right leg off and tossed it onto the floor. Sleeping with the cybernetics was not something Ben had enjoyed after being kneed in the groin with unforgiving metal while he was sound asleep.
“Diana?”
Megan nodded.
“She’s fine. They’re in the most advanced warship Humanity has ever constructed, with a few retro-engineered alien systems and enough weapons to glass a continent added on for good measure.”
Megan leaned back into the headboard and nodded. “Still, we thought we were prepared back at the Ark’s flight. We though our weapons and technology were the pinnacle of advancement. Turns out we were just learning to play with fire.”
“They have the magnetic field disruptor!” Ben pointed out. “Want to imagine what the look of the first alien captain’s face will be when his shields suddenly don’t work? I’m betting the Canada could ram one of their ships and go straight through it, if the design principals of the fighter are an example of their work.”
“They’re tissue paper, reliant on shields for protection,” Megan concurred, recalling how thin the walls of the fighter they had recovered were. At first she hadn’t been able to fathom how someone would be willing to fly around in a ship with so little protection, but after realizing it was a difference in doctrine that ran deep through the Empire’s technology, it was something she and Ben had taken advantage of.
The Empire’s technology was power intensive and delicate. It made fighting less developed civilizations easy, and almost carefree. Human technology, on the other hand, was hard and built to operate even as a ship crumbled around it. A gunnery compartment from the Canada would be able to operate for nearly an hour even if it was torn from the ship, for example. Hardened and difficult to maintain was the doctrine for Humanity.
Ben nodded. “Yeah, a stupid strategy if you ask me, but it must work for them. Works out good for us.”
“For now, sure. For all we know, they might have ships with armor better than our own.”
Ben rolled his eyes, turning over onto his side to look at his wife with a raised eyebrow.
“You’re pessimistic all of a sudden. What’s up?”
Megan hesitated, glancing down at the stumps at the end of her legs.
“We’ve been avoiding it, Ben. I’ve got neural patterns that by all medical doctrine should have taken me six months or more to form. The scans show that it looks like my implants have been in place for a year! Hell, even the telomeres show that the cells in my legs are a year older then they should be. Meanwhile, the cells in my chest are three years younger than they should be!”
“I knew about the legs, but I guess the deviance in the chest explains a few things. I thought you looked a little perkier.”
Grabbing her link from the side table Megan threw it at Ben hitting the poor man squarely in the forehead with it.
“Ow!”
“Be serious!”
Rubbing his forehead, Ben relented. “Alright, jeez. I’m trying not to think about what it means!”
Megan sat back against the headboard in a huff and slowly closed her eyes.
“Can I just say something crazy?” asked Megan.
“You always do,” Ben deadpanned.
“Time travel.”
“Nope, not time travel,” said Ben.
Megan turned to look at him. “Why not?”
“It’s the nano-machines reacting to the Squeaks or something. An error in the control software for the things, or some other freak accident from an interaction of radiation and the healing properties inside the skin of the Squeaks or something.”
“You don’t have any proof for any of those things,” said Megan.
“Hell of a lot better explanation than time travel, because honestly if it is time travel… I don’t want to know.”
“Why not?” asked Megan, curious.
“Because I don’t feel like breaking the universe, and if someone went to all the effort of time traveling to give you a few neurons that was kind of a waste, why not send a message back to Earth a decade ago or something?”
Megan nodded in agreement. “Still, nano-machines can’t touch the brain, and the neurons in my brain readily adapted to a cybernetic implant. They can’t have anything to do with it.”
Ben shrugged. “We’re going to have to figure out what’s messing with the telomeres, though. At the moment all of the effects have been beneficial or at least benign. I doubt they will remain as such.”
Ben sighed and tapped at the harness he was wearing, the latest attempt to try and mitigate the effects of the subspace radiation.
“I should probably get scanned then, see if I’ve got some weird telomeres.”
“Probably, yeah.”
“Medical tests. Fun.”
“I get to deal with Night tomorrow, if that make you feel any better.”
“It does.”
Megan picked up her pillow and, winding her arm up, knocked her husband off of the bed and onto the floor.
Jikse, in Freefall
Diana heard the warning just moments after she fell below Mach 1. With the wind suddenly roaring in her ears and clawing at her suit, she almost missed it even as the helmet played back the sound at deafening levels. The alarm was for a nuclear strike, with maximum electromagnetic interference expected. Who had detonated the nuke was immaterial at the moment.
Diana winced as her HUD went black, plunging her into darkness as her suit automatically entered a self-preservation state. The system’s only chance of surviving the forthcoming electromagnetic pulse was to completely power down. Leaving the electronics operating while inside the pulse radius was guaranteed to destroy them, but with all power cut there was a chance for survival if she was far enough away. Too close and the EMP would cause a surge whether the systems were on or not. All of her equipment was hardened for combat, but making everything impenetrable to an EMP was an impractical.
So at several thousand meters above the surface of an alien world, traveling at almost the speed of sound, the world in front of Diana went dark. She wasn’t looking through glass, after all, but through a camera and high fidelity display.
Swearing, Diana began to slowly count. The rate of her deceleration would be consistent at this point, as the atmosphere thickened. Fighting against the aerodynamic forces, Diana moved a hand to the latch on her helmet. Releasing it now in the 500 mph winds would cause injury, if not actually put her into a state of shock from the thinness of the air around her. So in the darkness, even as the torrent howled around her, Diana counted.
“Thirty, twenty nine,” she slowly continued to decrement the numbers, counting down how long she calculated it would take to get below 9,000 metres altitude. At that level, Diana would be able to discard the helmet. The height would be lethal to her companions, but Diana would be able to easily survive the elements thanks to the illegal genetic enhancements graced to her by the woman who had basically owned Mars.
In theory, at least. She had never actually put any of her gifts, save for the enhanced intellect, to the test.
Reaching zero, Diana took a final breath and pulled the latch. The air clawed its way into the small gap on the front seal, and the helmet was gone before she even had the latch completely undone. The bun holding her hair in place was ripped away with it and Diana winced as hair was torn form her scalp.
Squinting, she looked at the planet below. The city and the Bravo extraction point were to her right, but attempting to change her course at the moment would be more trouble than it was worth. Without the computer controls, she was liable to go into a flat spin that wouldn’t level out until a couple thousand meters above the ground.
Scouring the air in front of her, Diana couldn’t see anyone else. Were it not for the EMP, they would have been able to re-establish radio communications now, but at the moment that was impossible.
Continuing to slow, Diana relaxed. She had made it through the atmosphere and the Mach barriers; at this point she was safe. As safe as a genetically enhanced human could be on a seedy backwater planet after being attacked by an alien patrol vessel and most likely abandoned by her mothership.
At least she was still alive.
A Memory
[Charles] slowly stepped into the room.
Unlike the medical ward he had been placed in, this was not a solitary room. Beds lined both sides, going back to a divider that [Charles] could not see through.
The beds were not empty; in each of them lay a class C man or woman. Towards the end of the row on his right, [Charles] even saw the small frame of a child beneath a mass of blankets, bandages, tubes, and monitors.
Several eyes turned to look at him as he entered, but there were no sounds besides the sterile equipment. None of the humans had the power to move.
The man [Charles] had seen in the monitor was closest to the door. The thin gauze over his face was translucent, just like all of the other bandages on his body covering the burns and injuries. Seeing him up close, [Charles] couldn’t help but marvel that he wasn’t dead – he looked as if he had stood in front of a plasma engine.
Raising his hand, [Charles] looked at the vial and then back at the man. He was already responsible for killing billions of these creatures, killing one more out of mercy might even alleviate some of the guilt he felt. He DID feel about it, but in service of the Empire, he would gladly shoulder it again rather than let another man bear it.
Taking a step forward, [Charles] hit a small medical cart, jostling it and sending a small collection of tools to the floor. He winced as the sound echoed around the otherwise quiet room. The injured man opened the eye of the side of his face that still had some amount of flesh. The eye locked onto him and widened in surprise.
The two of them looked at one another for a moment, silent. The man’s eye flicked down to the vial [Charles] was holding. Pointing it forward at the injured man, [Charles] took another step in his direction.
A heavily bandaged arm rose up from the bed, and the single eye turned cold. Feral, even. His hand slowly lifted to try and stop [Charles], to hold him back.
[Charles] swallowed. The man, despite his injuries, did not wish to die. Killing him out of some sense of decency or humility was out of the question. Half of the man’s flesh was gone, and even with the most potent of painkillers, he had to know his life was going to be nothing but agony.
“Why?” asked [Charles].
“We don’t submit to death. He has to come and wrench us from the world, so that like when we are born, we go out kicking and screaming.” Emily stated as she stepped out from the door and up to the man’s bedside.
Carefully, [Charles] held the vial out to her.
“I can’t.”
Emily took the vial from him. “Why not?”
[Charles] looked back at the visage of the injured man. His single eye was already closed and it looked as if he were once again sleeping.
“He doesn’t want to die.”
“Neither did anyone on Earth.”
[Charles] was silent for a moment. “They did not suffer.”
“I cannot kill a man who does not wish to die, and who cannot even defend himself. Your planet had weapons and defenses – you simply lost!” [Charles] said, attempting to justify his actions to the woman… and to himself.
Emily sighed. “Survival of the fittest? If that’s what it comes down to, Humans will win.”
Spinning the vial around in her hand, the woman stabbed it into the chest of the man and pressed the plunger. The man gasped and then stilled; the medical monitor next his bed flashed red and died.
As Emily straightened back up, [Charles] stared at her. The healer had just preached to him about fighting until the end and then summarily killed her patient.
“What was that?” asked [Charles] as he took a step back from the woman.
“We have no supplies, no medicine, and no machines to heal him with. I could have kept him alive, but all he would have done was taken what little medicine I have left from others who might make it. We won’t starve down here, but with amount of injuries we’re taking – especially with those new illegal weapons your people are using – we’re going to die a slow, agonizing death. A death by a thousand cuts. We lose people in every attack – much fewer than your people do, but it adds up.”
[Charles] looked at the corpse of the man, and turned to flee from the medical ward. Humans were insane!
The Imperial, Orbiting Jikse Primary
[Vann] watched as the battle took place. They were looking back in time at what had occurred just minutes ago. He winced as his ship, the Imperial – the pride of the Empire’s fleet – was once again attacked and damaged, once again scarred. This time he saw it from a distance as an outside observer would.
The comparatively tiny Human vessel had absorbed all of the Imperial’s attack, and in response rained down destruction on the Imperial before fleeing in a burst of tachyons. It was odd at this distance that the red and blue shift of the tachyon effect was not visible, but then again the tachyons were not subject to the time delay from relativistic effects.
The bridge had been silent, the alarms had been deactivated and only the flashing indicators continued. The crew was as transfixed as [Vann] watching the skirmish take place. Had they not actually been in the fight themselves, many of them would not have believed that it had taken place. A tiny Class C vessel damaging the Imperial? It was impossible to even consider, and yet it had happened.
A laugh rang out from behind [Vann].
Turning around, the young Emperor glared at the disgraced officer, who was shakily trying to raise a small flask to his mouth. [Charles] looked almost hysterical. The need to command gone, the man [Vann] was familiar with was returning, and a hint of insanity could be seen in the man’s eyes.
“They’re fast!” said [Charles].
He quickly finished off his flask and dropped it onto the deck.
“I was expecting to be dead before they decided to seek us out.” [Charles] turned to look at [Vann]. “You, young emperor, are going to be the first in our history to lead the Empire as we fight for our very survival, our very right to exist. We have been the masters of the sky, confident in our own sovereignty. Our own casual disregard for the other beings alive in this small section of space has created an enemy with one goal, one singular righteous purpose. The revenge for their world. They might have been violent and destructive with one another Emperor, but still there was a kinship between them all. If there is one thing I know about Humanity it is that they are relentless, and ruthless. For our hand in destroying their world, we will have the stars ripped away from us.”
[Vann] and the rest of the bridge crew were staring at the man. His voice was tinged with the conviction of a madman, utterly confident in his assertions.
“Sir, I’m getting a transmission from the C species!” [Sam] reported after a few moments of silence.
[Vann] whipped around to look at the woman.
“What?”
“I think it’s a beacon, automated. The patrol vessel shot down that transport before it was able to dock with its parent craft. The signal is coming from the surface of Jikse!”
[Vann] turned to the engineering station. “How long until we can jump again?”
The man at the station hesitated. “Sir, with all due respect, we need to make haste to a repair facility! The damage to the superstructure of the Imperial is extensive. We have thousands of hull breaches and dozens of sections were exposed to space! Our weapons systems are at minimal functionality, and we’ve even lost gravity in some sections of the ship!”
“I didn’t ask for a damage report, I asked when we will be able to jump!” [Vann] snapped.
The man frowned but slowly tilted his head reading the data on the console in front of him. “[Three hours] from now is when we will be able to jump without causing any further damage.”
[Vann] was ready to order a jump immediately, to hell with the damage to the ship. After a moment, however, he cooled off and nodded. “You have that long to get us operational then, [Sam]!”
“Sir?”
“Send a message to the home world. I want the Sovereign and the Justice pulled from patrol and in this system within the next [72 hours].”
“Yes, sir!”
[Vann] nodded and turned back around to [Charles].
“If there are survivors of the transport shuttle transmitting from the planet’s surface, what are the chances they will surrender?”
“Zero. In fact you’re going to have a hard time stopping them from killing themselves if you try to capture them,” [Charles] informed him.
[Vann] slowly nodded and called out to his trusted officers. “[Reece], [Sam].”
The bodyguard stepped out from the corner of the bridge where he had been silently standing. Several bridge officers tried to mask their own astonishment, as they had not noticed him there. [Sam] stepped away from her console, and they both approached their leader.
“Emperor?” she asked.
“If there are Humans alive, I want them as prisoners. That is the only task the two of you have. Get to work.”
The bodyguard and the aide looked at one another.
“I don’t suppose insisting that I must remain by your side will be fruitful?” asked [Reece].
“The fate of the Empire may ride on defeating these Humans. It is more important than my own life that we do so before they become an even larger threat, understood?”
The bodyguard bowed his head. “Yes, sir. If there are survivors, they will be in the brig within the day.”