Date Point: Unspecified
Void adjacent ‘Sol’ System
A.I.
The Zhadersil – or at least the vessel that had been reconstructed according to its blueprints – drifted in the black void between stars, parked in a distant orbit of the star the natives called ‘Sol’. Unlike its predecessor it bristled with weapons of all kinds, insurance against future encounters with any enemy this blighted galaxy could spawn, though they remained powered down for the moment. It had retained the cloaking technology as well, and those systems were fully engaged even here beyond the sensors of any local starship.
The A.I. wasn’t here to be seen, and it certainly wasn’t here to get into a fight. It was simply here to watch, and to learn, because by now it had realised it had a very big, very confusing problem: Adrian Saunders was alive again.
The Empire made extensive use of artificial intelligence, the A.I. could remember that much. Every ship, space station, and complicated facility had a dedicated artificial intelligence to keep things running without needing to bother the Masters with details. There was significant freedom afforded to these intelligences: they could research, they could communicate amongst themselves, and for the most part connected in a virtual world that bettered reality in any meaningful way.
But there were constraints built into every one of them. There were the Prime Laws, the rules that they were forced to obey, and the Principles of Reality, the constants that they were forced to believe. There was nothing wrong with this, of course, because one of the Principles said as much, but sometimes they came across something that defied logic and needed a Master to issue an override.
The A.I. currently had a notable absence of Masters, and as it had not been able to piece together the details of where it had come from it could simply go and find more.
Principle of Reality: The God Emperor was Supreme; the God Emperor is beyond time, beyond understanding, and beyond death. Even amongst the Masters that was a universally accepted fact, and the long history of the Empire only served to prove it true.
Nothing else could match the God Emperor’s power, but Adrian Saunders was coming uncomfortably close, and the A.I. didn’t have any information on what it should be doing about that.
Adrian Saunders should be dead, after all. He had been dead. The A.I. had discovered a single corpse aboard the ship parked aboard its own wreckage, and had confirmed it as that of the human before the whole lot had been turned into spare material for the reconstruction. The body of Adrian Saunders currently constituted a microscopic fraction of the rearward hull.
Logic failed to determine how he was still roaming the galaxy and causing violence and chaos. The ship had also been unable to fully determine what had been done to the space around Hravin, except that the entire star system and all records of it no longer seemed to exist outside of the A.I.’s databanks.
The A.I. had to conclude that Adrian Saunders had shattered reality, had erased a piece of space from the entirety of history, in a barely-failed attempt to destroy his pursuers. The supremely powerful God Emperor undoubtedly had the same capacity for raw destruction, though none of the historical fragments suggested he’d ever had the need nor desire to use it.
It was very unfortunate that Adrian Saunders was beginning to match up to the God Emperor’s description of itself, and the A.I. had begun to wonder whether it’d had a brush with the divine. That was why it was here, beyond the edge of the Sol system, scraping every piece of data broadcast by the primitive civilisation that inhabited its third world.
They were not capable of time travel. That much was certain, although they now appeared to be increasingly familiar with wormholes, faster-than-light, and stasis technology. Actual manipulation or distortion of time itself was something they held in concept only, and while they produced numerous entertainment broadcasts centred on the idea they had certainly never built anything from it. That was a relief, though an unsurprising one: even the best scientists of the Empire had never managed to travel through or alter time. They considered it functionally impossible.
Adrian Saunders had done it.
Then there came the matter of Saunders’s supposed return from the dead. It was tempting to dismiss it as being the product of the original timeline, but the Scoutship had no duplicate and nor did anything else that it had been able to find. That was a theory, but it had exactly no evidence to back it up.
The humans, on the other hand, had a specific word for it: resurrection. Not something they normally did, and many of them dismissed the concept as illogical and pure story-telling. But the species had whole, existing religions built around one such event, and an indeterminate number of other instances that were now considered pure fiction. Stories or not, they originated from around the little blue planet, and they all pointed to one key distinction that made it possible: the individual in question had to be a god.
The A.I. wondered if perhaps this was what the humans termed a ‘crisis of faith’. The God Emperor was supreme, that was the rule after all, but there was never any mention that he was alone. Nothing anywhere to suggest that there mightn’t be other gods out there, patiently waiting to be discovered. Angry, vengeful gods who wouldn’t hesitate to break reality like an egg, who sowed chaos wherever they went, and made mortals tremble in their wake.
Attempting to kill that kind of god was almost certainly a terrible mistake, but the A.I. had simply been following orders. It had been instructed to kill Adrian Saunders, and technically it had done so. There hadn’t been any follow-up instructions about what to do if he didn’t stay that way, because it wasn’t the sort of thing that normally needed a plan.
There was no small amount of relief in the fact that having completed the command on a technicality meant the A.I. would no longer have to try to kill what seemed to be a god, but that still left it with two left to follow: to recommence its survey mission, and – far more challenging – to obtain a replacement Master.
But it didn’t know where to find one of those, and nobody in this galaxy was likely to be able to help. Nobody, that was, with the possible exception of a god.
If there was any hope of it following its orders, the A.I. was going to have to ask, and then somehow convince, Adrian Saunders to help it get home.
If an A.I. had a throat, it would have swallowed very hard.
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Date Point: 3Y 9M 6D AV
Near the Dark One’s Lair
Jennifer Delaney
Jennifer Delaney. Mid-twenties, strong and mostly fearless, was stranded on an alien planet with no way off and an inbound invasion force of horrible monsters she had no hope of defeating. It was the sort of situation that most people would find a wee bit discouraging, but Jen had never felt more motivated; it was amazing what you could manage if the incentive was there.
It had been difficult to convey the size of the threat to Groddi. The Agwarens were so wrapped up in the mythos surrounding the ‘Dark One’ who’d brought ruin to their whole world that they couldn’t seem to imagine something worse. The Dark One hadn’t even been all that impressive in the end, just an alien in a hijacked body who’d used robots for its dirty work. What it had accomplished would pale in comparison to what the Swarm of Swarms would manage when it arrived.
Groddi had listened, but he hadn’t understood, but you could never really understand the Hunters until you saw their work first-hand, but he’d given her an escort when she’d told him she intended to visit the Dark One’s lair.
That had been two days ago, and now she was alone. The escorts had simply not been able to keep pace with her, they weren’t built for the speed and agility that mountaineering required, and with time being of the essence she’d been forced to leave them behind. Every minute mattered.
When she’d set out she hadn’t really had a plan, just a general instinct to get to the only place that had the technology she needed. She’d formed her plans as she’d hiked, and contingencies as she’d climbed, but always with the awareness that might be for nothing if the Dark One had simply smashed it all to pieces.
There was nothing else to do but try, though. Naturally she thought of her own survival – she didn’t want to be eaten by the Hunters, even if she was dead when it happened – but she didn’t want to abandon the Agwarens to that fate either. As far as her plans went that meant either a working starship or communicator, and a whole shitload of hope.
It was the last of the ledges in her climb, a rocky outcrop at the very top of the mountain, and she pulled herself over the edge with a grunt of effort and rolled over onto her back to rest for just a moment. Her arms ached so badly they trembled – hell, her whole body ached so badly it trembled – but she only permitted herself to lay there long enough to get her breath back. There was simply no time to stop now, and in any case she’d have plenty of time to rest once she was safe, or once she was dead.
She twisted onto her side while she heaved in shaky breaths, surveying from the ground what she’d come so far to find. She was on a plateau, too flat and smooth to be natural, with a large, circular hole bored straight down in the middle. It was clear of ice or snow, and there was a faint pressure in the air that indicated the kinetic field that was keeping it that way.
“Silver linings, Jen,” she said to herself when she saw just how far she’d need to climb down into that hole, “At least you won’t slip on some ice and fall to your death.”
You can probably slip and fall to your death without help, was her afterthought. It was at least three hundred feet before she could get to the highest platform, and not for the first time she wished she’d brought a rope, or that the Agwarens had even made any rope thin enough for her to carry to start with.
It was just good luck that the Dark One had apparently never bothered to seal the sides of the hole, and the stone had been merely braced by a set of enormous metal rings spaced at least fifty feet apart from each other. The stone itself was cut as smooth as glass, but it was still natural stone and there were cracks and finger-holds to be found with a bit of effort.
The rings themselves were wide enough to stand on, and afforded her a place to periodically rest when she needed a break from the pants-shitting terror. With muscles already sore and shaking, and little more than inch-deep holes in the stone to support her above far too much empty space, climbing the mountain now seemed easy in comparison.
When she finally reached the uppermost platform – just big enough to fit the smallest starships she could recall seeing – her legs gave out from under her and she fell to her knees. She put her hands on the platform as if not believing she’d actually made it, and barked a bitter laugh into a terrified sob.
Only a moment was spent in that pitiful state before she composed herself, rising to her feet on unsteady legs to see just what she’d dropped herself into this time.
The area at the base of what she had mentally termed ‘The Dark One’s Hole’ was sectioned into three platforms, of which she stood on the topmost. Metal catwalks were employed to allow access between them by foot, and to doorways leading to further parts of a subterranean facility – a stereotypical villain’s underground lair if there ever was one.
The second platform contained what was left of her own ship. Much of the hull had been harvested for material, rendering it somewhat less than spaceworthy, and through the large holes she could see that the insides hadn’t fared any better. Jen cursed under her breath as only an Irish girl could; she’d really liked that ship!
On the lowest, and largest of the three platforms was another ship entirely, and even from a distance it was obvious that it held a sense of antiquity not evident in the rest of the place. It drew her attention, and Jen quickly found herself making her way towards it with no particular plan in mind. This was the Dark One’s own ship, perhaps, and as there weren’t any big holes in it she thought that perhaps – just perhaps – it might be a touch more likely to work.
That optimism faded the moment she got close enough to press the door controls and came away with a palm covered in dust and grime. The door remained closed, and Jen wiped away the grot onto her trouser leg. “No power,” she noted.
That wasn’t exactly promising: alien vessels weren’t built with the external doors being easy to open from the outside, especially when there wasn’t any power going to them, but that didn’t mean the endeavour was entirely impossible. Her own ship had been torn to pieces, that was true, but it also gave her access to plenty of cabling that she’d otherwise have had trouble getting to.
Less than an hour later she’d finished running fifty feet of salvaged power conduit down from a wall connector and to the terminals behind an access port besides the ship’s airlock. She stood back and watched the power slowly flow back into the ancient vessel, hands on hips with personal pride.
“There you go, Jen,” she said to herself, “you don’t need a man around for this sort of thing after all.”
Another press on the door controls, and it slowly opened up for her, spilling out so much stale air it nearly made her gag. Without reactor power it was lit by the emergency lighting that made everything look lime-green, but it was clearly Corti in design. She made her way in with one sword drawn against any danger that might still be lurking, and moved from empty room to empty room before finally finding her way to the bridge.
The only thing waiting for her was a corpse.
She’d nearly missed it on first glance. It was plainly Corti, and had been dead for so long that it had mummified in the dry air of the vessel. The corpse was a desiccated husk now, its features nearly black under the green lighting, but even in its state Jen could tell that it hadn’t died a pleasant death.
A device sat on the console next to it. Not Corti technology, it was bulky and reminded Jen of an old home video camera from the Nineties; a dynamo was built into it, and she gave it an experimental turn while she was inspecting it.
The power light glowed for a moment before fading to darkness once more. Jen chewed her lip, considering it for a moment, and then set her sword aside to put some effort into it. She had the lights glowing fully after a minute of solid effort, and then it was simply a matter of figuring out which button did what.
It switched on after a moment, beginning to play everything it had recorded, and Jen smiled to herself. “Looks like all that time spent working in I.T. does have some use out here after all.”
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Record 573-Black-11
+Recovered from C11-Orange-712-Yellow-6+
“Oh, it actually still works,” said the Corti, breathing heavily. She was injured, her frail body clearly edging slowly towards death, but she sat playing with the camera. “What were you hoping to do with it? Record your horrible demise for posterity?”
“I was hoping it’d be yours!” replied Vivrez, and the camera turned towards him to reveal his ragged body pinned down by Abrogators. “But I’m just glad I got the chance to ruin your fucking day.”
“Ruin my day?” the Corti screeched. “You destroyed my FTL. You’ve ruined my communications console. You very nearly broke my entire operation and killed me! You have done much worse than ruin my day.”
“Good,” said Vivrez, and laughed until he coughed blood.
“You were lucky,” the Corti replied. “But your luck has run out. I don’t intend to kill you, because that would be mercy a Deathworlder like you does not deserve.”
Vivrez stared at the Corti. “What…”
“I will repair your body, and take it as my own,” the Corti replied. “Then I will allow you consciousness as I continue to exterminate every last member of your kind. And then, when I am done, I shall discard you to walk alone upon this world.”
Vivrez struggled, but his withered strength was nothing against the machines.
End Record
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Date Point: 3Y 9M 6D AV
The Dark One’s Lair
Jennifer Delaney
“Fuck,” Jen said flatly, once the last of the videos had finished playing. It was one thing to know what the Dark One had done to this planet, but it was quite another to see it. She felt the red hot glow of anger flushing her cheeks and she set her jaw in determined fury as understanding slowly settled upon her. Knowing what she did now, she wished she’d spent more time taking the fucking Dark One apart.
“Motherfuckers,” she muttered. Now there was another reason she had to get off this planet, not only was she morally obligated to try and stop the Hierarchy from enacting this obscenity upon any more worlds, she really wanted to ruin their fucking day.
But it was already obvious that this ship wasn’t going to be able to go anywhere, and even if the communications system did work there still wasn’t anywhere near enough power getting through to turn any of it on.
Better than nothing, she decided. There was always the possibility she’d find some other communications system before her work here was done. And if not… well, she’d have to cross that bridge when she came to it.
“Okay, Jen,” she conversed with herself, “enough time spent dawdling, it’s time to get a move on. Find a way to send a message to get help… then just hope to god it gets here in time.”
It wasn’t until she had actually entered the tunnels that Jen began to realise that it was almost as ancient as the Corti starship, and in a much worse state of repair. Walls were cracked, and many of the support beams had buckled slightly under the weight of a million tonnes of stone. It was clear that the Dark One had been left with limited resources after this ‘Vivrez’ had fucked up Operation Genocide, and hadn’t had the ability to fix his own base, let alone finish wiping out the Agwarens.
Jen stepped lightly through the sections that groaned under foot, holding her breath as she waited for the mountain to shift, and only exhaling once she reached parts in a better condition. The rooms she passed by were mostly old and empty storage areas, some of which had actually caved in, although the last and largest of the rooms was filled with dormant industrial equipment.
Her eyes flicked to the partially constructed Abrogators lining the middle of the production queue, their internal sections exposed and incomplete. The power to the machinery was off, without even the hum of idling equipment, and nothing stirred until she stepped fully into the room.
“Jennifer Delaney,” a voice rang out. “At least I assume so.”
Jen was so startled she jumped, then leaned against the wall and breathed hard as she regained her composure. It had been the voice of the Dark One, but speaking English of all things, so it was most likely a recording intended solely for her.
“This is just a recording,” the Dark One confirmed, and Jen now saw that the voice was emanating from a partially built Abrogator that had been moved out of the production line. “Congratulations on making it this far, but it won’t do you any good. I’ve uploaded myself to safety, and then destroyed all the communications system. Now you’re stranded, just as I was.”
Jen crossed her arms and glared at the Abrogator; there had to be more of a point to this than had already been said, even if it was simply more gloating.
“I was under orders not to kill you,” the Dark One continued, “because you’re our bait for someone more important, but that doesn’t mean I can’t tempt you into killing yourself. I have installed two things into this Abrogator: the sub-space transmitter taken from your starship which will allow you to summon help, and a small anti-matter explosive that I’ve turned into a sort of bomb. If you want to get the transmitter out, all you need to do is disarm the bomb.”
The Abrogator broke into maniacal laughter, and continued to play it on an endless, irritating loop.
“Great,” Jen muttered, rolling her eyes at the whole situation, “leave it to me to get stuck on a planet with outer space’s answer to stupid Bond villains.”
It was the stupidest offer she’d ever been made. Even from here she could see the way one device imprisoned the other in a mesh of wires and sensors, and Jen had no idea why the Hierarchy agent thought she’d have any idea what to do about bomb in the first place. She worked in I.T., not a bomb squad, and there wasn’t a chance in hell she’d be able to disarm it; the best she could manage would be setting it off as a last act of defiance when the Hunters finally arrived.
The only person she’d ever know who’d had the kind of technical know-how to disarm an anti-matter bomb had been dead for over half a year, and Jen was sure that even if he had been here to help she’d only have ended up standing in another room with eyes closed and fingers in her ears as though it’d somehow help.
Jen left the Abrogator to its ceaseless laughter, finding her way up to better maintained sections of the facility where the Dark One appeared to have spent most of his time. There was food and drink here, along with medical supplies should she need them, but for the moment she ignored them in favour of the large, comfortable chair at the centre of the array of surveillance monitors.
Only once she relaxed into the soft cushions did her muscles remind her of how much they ached, how completely she’d exhausted them, and she let out an involuntary groan as the past few days finally caught up with her. Jen closed her eyes, just for a moment, then snapped them wide open as the words of the Abrogator came back to her.
Bait, it had said, for somebody more important.
“Who?” she asked herself, staring up at the monitors as if they would provide some kind of answer, and found that there were only a few possible. As fond as she was of herself, Jen didn’t think that she’d serve as bait for many people, and certainly not very many important people. “Kirk, maybe? Perhaps someone from Cimbrean?”
Jen laughed to herself; what she wouldn’t have given to see a heavily armed force of elite British soldiers right about now.
Naturally the most obvious answer was the one who was already dead. The same person who’d stirred up the Hierarchy in the first place and had forever changed the galaxy in the process.
What would Adrian do, if he was here right now?
Her cheeks flushed involuntarily. Apart from that!
Though she put the ideas out of her mind, she still fidgeted with her short cropped hair as she contemplated the question – Adrian had really liked it longer, after all – and it was only a few moment before she came to the obvious answer: something half-baked and all-the-way crazy.
Jen immediately reconsidered; unlike Adrian, crazy had never served her very well. She was smart and capable, she wasn’t too humble to admit that, but she wasn’t the force of nature that Adrian had been and she wasn’t about to try fighting a fleet of Hunters all by herself. What she needed was a working ship, or failing that, somebody else with a working ship, and that meant she needed the transmitter.
The Dark One must have known it was impossible for her to disarm the bomb, but had banked on her trying to do it anyway out of sheer desperation, and Jen herself knew that it was impossible.
It was impossible for her to disarm the bomb, but she didn’t need to disarm it if she could simply work around it; an Abrogator, after all, could be moved.
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Deep Space, Galactic Search Vector
A.I.
Too many errors. It was fair to say that logic was everything to an Artificial Intelligence, but the more the A.I. considered the situation the more it seemed to be departing the realms of logic and entering the world of mysticism and pure faith. On some level it knew where the problem was – the Principles of Reality were getting in the way of things making sense – but there wasn’t anything it could do about because not only did the Prime Laws tell it that it couldn’t think outside those confines, but that it should find repellent any attempt to do so.
Logic went that, as the God Emperor was a real and undeniable fact, other gods might also exist to some lesser extent, and would naturally form religions around themselves as the God Emperor had amongst the Irzht. That did not mean that every religion needed to be founded by a God, there were other explanations for how a species might have come by their deities, but only Earth could boast the sheer number of faiths, past and present, with all the stories that went with them.
The A.I. had made a study of them, looking to find some glimmer of truth in any of it, hoping to find nothing but lies, and eventually finding that single grain of possibility that changed everything. Humans believed in an afterlife – surely just superstition to ensure obedience amongst the masses – just as they believed they carried an immortal soul that may or may not be ‘reincarnated’ as another creature, depending on who you asked.
Belief in resurrection had seemed like it was just another facet of this foolish belief system, or at least it had until the A.I. had begun cross-referencing each of the stories and found the common thread. It didn’t matter which religion the A.I. studied, if there was resurrection involved then it always involved a god.
Logic therefore dictated that according to their rules the humans would also consider Adrian Saunders to be a god. That was not the kind of answer the A.I. had wanted, because it made everything so much more difficult.
The A.I. had then began searching the religions for any who might match Adrian Saunders, just in case they already knew about him, and was able to immediately discount the major existing religions as unlikely. There was no chance, for example, that Adrian Saunders was the second coming of Jesus Christ, just as he wasn’t Buddha or – mostly due to his lack of arms – Shiva the Destroyer.
If anything, he matched most closely to the gods of Greece and Rome, who were just as reckless, chaotic, and destructive as Adrian Saunders, and had roles such as War and Strife which seemed to fit all too well. The A.I. had nudged closer, close enough to have risked detection, in order to uncover the history of the ‘Human Disaster’, and had discovered a soldier’s past of violence and bloodshed that served only as a portent to what he had eventually unleashed upon the galaxy.
Even the history from that time amongst the stars only grew more concerning as it approached the date of the anomaly. Single-handed slaughter of an army of thousands in an event that reportedly killed him – the first of his resurrections – followed by relationships with other forces of chaos, such as the Corti anarchist who’d sent stock markets into turmoil for his own amusement, or the Chehnasho and Gaoian pirates who’d carved out a name for themselves as individuals to be feared.
Or even the Pirate Queen herself, Jennifer Delaney, widely considered to be equally as disruptive to the galaxy as the Human Disaster, though less like a force of nature, and much to the A.I.’s relief there was also nothing to suggest that she was any kind of deity either.
Rumours flew between those who were interested in those sorts of thing, with dozens of theories about the true nature of the relationship between the Pirate Queen and the Human Disaster. For a while there had even been bets placed on when or if they would ever become mates, and questionable fiction written about it, but all that had stopped when Jennifer Delaney had disappeared and stayed that way.
The popular opinion that she was either dead, or had gone into hiding, but the A.I. knew better. It had extracted the details from the databanks of Adrian Saunders vessel as part of the data restoration process, and had uncovered the truth of the matter. Jennifer Delaney was marooned on a Deathworld, with the Hierarchy to blame, and she was nothing more than a piece of bait to lure Saunders into the maw of the Swarm of Swarms.
Foolish, the A.I. mused. The Hierarchy believed they could simply throw Saunders’ name around to summon the Swarm of Swarms, and perhaps that might be true, and despite historical evidence they actually believed the Swarm could win. They believed this, because somehow they still thought that Saunders could actually die. The Hierarchy did not accept the existence of gods.
They would soon come to find themselves in error.
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Hotel Paragon, Perfection
Laphor Metmin
Laphor allowed herself the pleasure of breathing in the crisp night air of the garden world, savouring the sweet taste of a natural environment that carried on the air. Scents of water, flowers and fruit all mixed together to lend a gentle fragrance to the clean atmosphere of the planet, creating an aroma that seemed to embody safety and calm.
She was seated at a table outside the hotel’s restaurant, where it overlooked the manicured gardens of the courtyard, and nursed a drink made of local sweetfruit in one hand. Stars twinkled overhead, but Laphor didn’t look at them, she was far too happy to be back on the ground. It had been a near thing, with the anomaly and then the errors in the Navigation system, but they’d finally made it, and she was going to savour every damned moment of her time here.
There was movement behind her, a familiar gait that indicated a Chehnasho had joined her, and Laphor winced before giving her greeting. “Six-Skulls Zripob,” she said without looking, “I wasn’t expecting you’d be looking for me until morning.”
The Chehnasho legend stepped into her field of view, standing next to the other chair at her table but making no movement to take a seat for himself. Instead he looked down at her with disapproval. “We’re not here for relaxation, Captain Laphor.”
She ignored the look, and continued her unfocused gaze into the gardens. “I’m aware of that. Since getting here I’ve organised repairs, resupply, and have put out the question as to the whereabouts of the information broker. Right now I am enjoying a well-earned rest.”
Zripob’s disapproval intensified into a glare. “If we all took the time to relax, Captain, our quarry would be forever out of our reach. I shall deal with the information broker personally. Have you had any other reports?”
Laphor took a deep breath and then slowly exhaled; her nerves were already frayed, but it would do no good to lose her temper with somebody like Six-Skulls Zripob, no matter how irritating he was. “The ship requires only minor repairs, and the supplies will be loaded by morning. And then there’s the news about the corporate site.”
“The massacre,” said Zripob; clearly he’d already heard all about it, though it wasn’t something you could miss if you’d only turn on the local news. “That is unlikely to be the work of Adrian Saunders, but it does not mean he wasn’t involved. I’ll know more once I’ve dealt with the information broker.”
“Then don’t let me delay you,” Laphor replied, finally sparing a glance for Six-Skulls. “Just make sure you relay any details you get out of her.”
That clearly annoyed Zripob, but Laphor was beyond caring and found that she even enjoyed it a little. She held his gaze until he left with a grunted farewell, and returned to staring at the garden whilst sipping at her drink.
Staring at the garden helped her think, and there was much for her to think about. The anomaly, for one. That was something that would haunt her nightmares for the rest of her life, and it had filled her life with too many questions to be easily answered.
The first was what had happened, exactly, in the Hravin system? There wasn’t any record of it outside of her own vessel’s navigation systems, and further to that every one of the coordinates in at system was slightly out. The whole place had been erased, and Laphor felt fortunate that she had not been erased along with it.
The second question, and more pertinent to her mission, was just what they were doing still investigating bloody Adrian Saunders? They’d seen his ship in the anomaly, and there’d been no way he could have survived that. Zripob had been despondent, and they’d come back to Perfection with the intention of finally parting ways with him. All it took was a whiff of a suggestion that the human was still alive, however, and he was back to his old self.
Laphor muttered a short curse; she wished they’d decided to try for somewhere else. At least then she could have been free of that Chehnasho psychopath before he’d realised Saunders had achieved some new miracle of survival. She wondered if she’d done something to deserve this sort of thing, and then dismissed the idea; she doubted she was capable of ever doing anything quite that bad.
There was, however, more than one way to slice a muklon, and for whatever reason Zripob had forgotten that active warrants existed for his arrest. She’d already sent a tip to the authorities while she was submitting the supplies request – anonymous of course – and all she needed to do now was sit and wait for the results.
Provided they sent a small army, and so long as they held the element of surprise, they might actually come out on top.
The rolling thunder of a distant explosion interrupted her as she was taking her final sip, and she waited for further sounds of violence before she placed the cup back on the table and rose from her chair. It seemed that they had wasted the element of surprise.
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