Before - Legends Heritage, Encoded [OCs]

Title: Heritage, Encoded
Author: Mechalich
Timeframe: Ductavis Era (~9,900 BBY)
Characters: Yasen Rost (OC), Decima (OC), Tan (OC)
Genre: Science Fiction, Adventure, Genetic Engineering
Keywords: Near-human, Genetic Engineering, Space Station, Gang, Archaeology
Summary: Recovery of a fragmentary record sparks a race to uncover lost technologies that could reshape the face of the galaxy.
Notes: The timeframe field is not an error! This story is set almost ten thousand years before the OT. It's going to have some...pecularities...as a consequence. There will be some unusual technological variances and of course, all characters will necessarily be OCs because there are no canon characters from this period. Comments and criticism are encouraged.


Prologue
Expansion Region
Athallia Sector
Maenali
9907 BBY

I.
“Numerous parties familiar with the project have raised to me the question of responsibility. The idea being that undertaking such extensive terraforming and bioengineering as we intend accrues some special burden. I disagree. The only responsibility that we acquire in this course is to fulfill the project to its intended completion. At that point the results, though manufactured, shall be no different than those produced by natural processes and shall be treated accordingly within the structures of ethics and rights that we consider to be just. To do otherwise would be to preemptively admit that our goals are impossible, to forever forbid true completion. Sapient beings must be capable of taking responsibility for themselves.” – Doctor Elima Kaier, Memoirs


Doom announced itself in the form of an intense electronic siren. Not ambient this noise, it generated within internal speakers, a sound birthed from the embedded helmet feed. Shrill and hurtful, it grabbed attention instantly; irritating beyond all capacity to ignore.

The military programmers behind the system claimed every warning signal was unique, that soldiers could differentiate between frequency and pulse rate to determine meaning in the absence of visual input. This, and any survey of the troops proclaimed the consensus universal, was utter bilgecorp. Yasen, though technically excluded from this category by the officer’s bar on his shoulder, agreed wholeheartedly. He made no attempt at all to parse the signal audibly. That particular bit of training had long since vacated his memory. Instead, he immediately subvocalized a command to silence the hideous alarm and then commanded his HUD to visually display the warning icon.

The optical graphics package possessed a greatly superior design to the audio one. No reading required; a single glimpse of the symbol sufficed to invoke recognition. The numeric countdown allowed no doubts.

Yasen blanched beneath the faceplate cover of his helmet. He sacrificed half a heartbeat for a swallow, desperate mitigation against the wave of fear that charged up his spine in response to those symbols. Just long enough to let training assert itself. Air exploded from his lungs, shaped into an urgent warning. “Cover!” he bellowed. “Incoming bombardment! Take cover!”

He need not have shouted, the internal helmet microphone captured this message and transmitted it electronically to every member of the platoon.

But instinct demanded every fraction of force he could summon.

He did not yell orders alone. Master Sergeant Inomyc lashed out commands of an identical nature, albeit slightly variant in tone. Yasen’s surging panic broke momentarily to record a point of pride that he’d gotten his message out only a word behind the veteran NCO. No time could be spared to bask in that achievement. The ticking clock projected in front of his right eye demanded immediate translation of words into action.

Regrettably, few good options existed.

Dovica was not a fortress, it was a city optimized for botanical research. Vast greenhouses, delicate laboratories, elegant housing, and wide parklands filled its orderly metro. Structures stout enough to offer protection from the incoming barrage were neither common nor easily identified.

Lacking an obvious shelter, the soldiers improvised based upon gut instinct and raw desperation.

Yasen ran hard behind squad A. He trusted their honed survival skills above his meager training courses to discern such shelter as might exist. With only seconds to choose, the sergeant led his eight troopers and his nominal commander to huddle upon a stairwell; recessed down below street level as access to a sunken parking lot.

No overhead cover, some part of Yasen’s mind noted as he dove into place among the squad members. Solid substrate below, no cushioning, facts queued into a totally pointless recitation in the absence of physical activity. Side walls are concrete composite, strong, defensible. Recessed position offers protection against airborne debris at a low angle of approach.

“Ten seconds,” Eromyc, the squad sergeant, declared. Names, at least, remained firmly lodged in the lieutenant’s mind. “Heads down, brace positions.”

They braced. Yasen mirrored the motions of the others. His body curled around his rifle, head down till his helmet faceplate brushed against the rough conglomerated cement below. Posture united them all in the face of descending devastation.

Bombardment struck.

Yasen’s officer training had included a presentation on modern rocket artillery. They were not shells, not anymore, but missiles. Huge sky-cutting monsters that vomited forth a hail of self-guided precision-maneuvering sub-munitions packed with powerful explosives and advanced targeting programming capable of pin-pointing a target small as a landspeeder. A single barrage event might unleash a hundred thousand impacts obliterating everything not hardened against their wrath.

Stairwells, concrete or not, manifestly did not qualify as protected.

The troops, caught outside dedicated defensive entrenchments, could only brace and pray. No action to oppose the barrage remained to them. Any direct hit meant annihilation.

Detonation descended in unison, maximum combined dynamic impact.

The air split open. Eardrum smashing sound cracked through the skull; helmet audio protections overwhelmed by this unimaginable cacophony. In the same moment waves smashed through solid ground. Shaking earth hurled Yasen upward, bodily, a full hand span. The city bucked with the blow. Collapsing structures would unleash aftershocks for minutes to come.

He landed awkwardly. Sudden pain intruded upon his overwhelmed mind as bruising spiked across his left hip.

Only then did the true madness begin.

Explosive bursts detonated everywhere throughout the city. Tens of thousands of superheated bubbles expanded, overlapped, merged, and ultimately popped in the heart of genteel urbanity. They did not stop at the edges of their initial spheres of devastation but triggered a cascade of havoc.

Displaced air unleashed howling winds. Shattered structures rose into this wrathful gale, sharp and hot. Sleets of deadly shards ripped across the sky. Burning sparks sprayed every surface, flat and vertical alike. Buildings, weakened by the opening round, collapsed entirely. Their smashed matter served as fuel for raging hurricanes of glass, metal, and plastic.

Ten soldiers pressed down as the howling wrath raked across their aural membranes. Bodies sought flat oneness with the cracking concrete below. Desperate motions curled them against the walls, against their fellows, anything that might shield them from the razor-saturated atmosphere. Desperate prayers, all coherence gone and reduced to wordless mumbles, filled the squad com channel.

The composite ceramic of Yasen’s faceplate clattered against the gray stone conglomerate as his neck jerked and shuddered. Fear shivers seized command of his muscles, demanded he burrow through solid stone to safety. His visual feed spat only useless images of shuddering stone beneath shaken camera feeds. In the absence of ocular data other systems within his helmet feed shifted to prominence. Critical information swam through to the clear skies beyond the storm.

And found horror.

Short-range transponder signals linked every member of the platoon to the lieutenant. Their existence a crude proxy of the living and the dead.

Static played havoc with the signals while the world shook and the air whirled with the scattered shielding of ten million refracting fragments, but the system did not glitch out. Yasen glued his eyes to the flickering cluster of little boxes regardless, pressed all his hope and prayers into that set of tiny indicators. All desperate desires condensed to one urge, one need.

Let his troops live. Let them endure this fist from on high.

It was a poor day for hopes.

Squad D’s row of contacts vanished the very moment the munitions struck. With each second that ticked by without even a single reconnection his mind slumped further and further toward the black certainty of their loss. A direct hit, completely outside survival, loomed large as the obvious cause. His mind knew, but refused to fully acknowledge, that nothing recognizable would remain.

He sought to gather, to unearth from deep down, some miserable fragment of solace in the knowledge that it was a quick and painless end. One burst and then nothing. The battlefield offered far worse.

Such thoughts mitigated his grief not at all.

Squad B’s fate unfolded far slower, and without such cleanliness.

One by one their signals flickered and faded. Nine lives slowly bled to nothing by damage he could not see, could not know. Audio feeds were scrambled, lost to the howling static. Requests for updates did not reach no matter how many calls he dispatched. Some failure of protection allowed the howling wind to lash through them, again and again, until nothing remained.

It felt an eternity. But the HUD chrono mercilessly proclaimed that the time lapse between the loss of their first and last signals encompassed a mere forty-three seconds.

By the time the world stilled half of Yasen’s command had ceased to exist, utterly obliterated by the pressure of overwhelming force. Only mourning remained.

Amazingly, the other two squads emerged largely unscathed. “Casualty report,” he gave the order as soon as the ground steadied sufficiently to allow a low squat. Even that limited motion unleashed a set of aches. His muscles felt as if they’d been worked over with hammers, but a quick visual scan suggested no serious injuries. This beggared further questions, but the sparking com chatter pushed him past all such concerns.

Reports came in rapidly. Squad A was broadly whole. Only one soldier, Lomero, had fallen. A freak projectile had dropped down from on high to pierce her helmet and skull in an instantly fatal impact. Yasen took one look at the remains before turning away in a vain attempt to preserve the energetic youth’s bright living countenance in his memory instead. Beyond that the survivors’ injuries were limited to minor bruises and lacerations from bits of shrapnel. Sergeant Eromyc proclaimed the squad ready to fight. He too avoided any persistent examination of their lost comrade.

The fortunes of squad C were less buoyant. Though they’d endured the initial blast front well, having actually found a sturdy building for shelter, a particularly large and slow-moving piece of debris collapsed one of their protective walls at the last, turning it from salvation to destruction. Yasen was forced to mute several audio channels manually as sounds of pain threatened to overwhelm his focus. The cries squeezed his chest in phantom agony all the same.

Worst of all was the silence from the feed that should have featured the sharp orders of Master Sergeant Inomyc.

As this brutal realization and all its terrible implications struck home, Yasen gave the only order he could imagine. “Form up. Rally to Squad C’s position. Go! Go! Go!”

The sky hung quiet above, filled with gray haze, all missile warnings quiescent for the moment.

Soldiers charged up the stairs into the remains of the city.

Yasen halted mid-stride as he crested the sheltering edge of the stairwell. The sight struck him stock still.

Minutes earlier he had been in the center of a prosperous, elegant, and renowned research campus, a shining example of the planet’s prosperity and even the whole sector's. Even its previous emptiness had modeled efficiency, for the ability to conduct and clean and comprehensive evacuation was something the government could point to with considerable pride.

Now it was wreckage. Missiles shattered everything; laid down wasteland in the heart of urban achievement. Only fragments and debris greeted the survivors. Color drained away from the landscape, obscured by the heavy coating of dust, save where the orange and red flickers of growing fires smoldered and spat. Once clean streets and walkways lay covered in a loose layer of devastation decor, all the little pieces of the built environment crushed and strewn at random. Abandoned vehicles, those unable to evacuated, lay shattered and rolled over on the corners. Ghostly walls stood alone, sentinels to lost companions. Empty eyed holes gaped within them, windowless against the flat light of the red-tinted sun.

The city of Dovica was gone. Only the battle of Dovica remained.

Yasen fought a sudden surge of desire to be somewhere, anywhere, else. His stomach clenched at the futility of it all. Hands felt numb within the shelter of his gloves.

The persistent blinking of his HUD drew him back to immediate needs.

Squad C’s chosen shelter had been a small block-shaped structure in the center of a park, the same one whose recessed parking area had offered a blessed stairwell. Little remained of it now, only a pair of walls and a slumped corner. Water coated the ground and puddled around his boots, flowing freely from shattered pipes. This liquid mess offered a key clue as to the structure’s identity, the remains of a public bathroom.

A wise choice, nominally. Such municipal constructs were overbuilt to minimize maintenance, but that decision turned hideously against the soldiers when those robust walls lost integrity and became a weapon against them.

The survivors lay on the scorched and blackened lawn, away from the spreading outflow. They’d extricated their comrades from the rubble. Those capable of receiving help, at least. The count stood at six standing, three on the ground, and one left inside. All looked battered, though Yasen supposed he sported a coating of debris and impact stains just the same. Blood seeped through every uniform, though perhaps most of it did not belong to the wearers.

“First aid,” Sergeant Eromyc ordered Squad A, though the troops were already rushing to assist.

Yasen did not join them. His medical training had been abbreviated; a piece cut out of the accelerated officer’s training program. He trusted their hands above his own to patch their fellows.

Instead, he walked slowly to stand beside the third fallen form. Telemetry confirmed what he already knew to be true, even with the face completely obscured by the protective front plate of his helmet. The unmoving form belonged to Master Sergeant Inomyc.

Despite the lack of proper first aid training, it took only a single glance to recognize that the sergeant would not be getting up again. No one had removed the helmet due to a bloody shrapnel-induced gash across scalp, but though that injury stained the earth crimson it was not the critical point. That mark lay on the chest. The armor plating there lay buckled and smashed, caved in by some epic impact. Shattered ribs pierced through the skin at two points on the right side.

Someone had cut through the armored vest and green uniform there in the forlorn hope of helping, but only blood covered it now. The few bits of skin still uncovered were terribly pale, wan and dull. All vitality stripped away from the gray-brown surface.

Squad C’s corporal, a lanky woman whose name Yasen recalled as Oropho, knelt by the fallen veteran. Still helmeted, and therefore faceless, only four points of camera lenses graced toward the world, the tilt of her skull made it clear there would be no last words. The master sergeant would spend his final moments in obscured bliss, drugged past all external awareness. The very least he deserved, no matter how inadequate.

Unwilling to watch further, Yasen turned away and scanned the others. One of the two remaining fallen soldiers had suffered a swift battlefield amputation, left leg sliced away just below the knee, but was conscious and appeared to be stable. The second lay on his back, unconscious. His helmet was off, straw-like fringe of blond hair matted with blood. Skull fracture, the guess sprang fully formed into place, survivable with proper care, but beyond any field assistance.

Wounds to the others varied, but none reached the severity needed to pull further soldiers from the fight.

He could not avoid an instinctive tabulation of the sums. Eight effectives retained by squad A, five preserved from squad C, not counting the squad medic who would have to stay with the wounded. Counting himself, that left fourteen.

A blubbery outcry followed this bit of mathematics. Expanded helmet-generated peripheral vision made it unnecessary to turn. Oropho’s bent over sobbing form provided all the information necessary.

The master sergeant was gone.

In the next moment Sergeant Eromyc spoke words that cut through all other emotions to freeze the core. “Orders Lieutenant?”

Yasen blanked. The world vanished for an interminable interval. Later, when he had time to think again, he retained infinite gratitude for the helmet’s opaque faceplate. Perfect concealment against any revelations unleashed via expression. He dropped into a dreaded state, trapped amid the whirlwind.

What remained could not be dodged. No one else remained. The impossible fell to him. Lead the remnants of the platoon. Survive the day.

Absurd. Never mind the circumstances. He was not the platoon’s leader, whatever the organizational chart proclaimed, and all knew it. His lieutenancy was a comforting bit of data fiction, a means to appease nervous politicians. A lie revealed by the very uniforms the troops wore.

Every soldier in the platoon dressed in dark gray coated in splotchy forest camouflage. Save only Yasen, whose uniform featured a dull tan base and a staggered desert fatigues pattern.

His was the uniform of Athallia’s human soldiery. Every soldier in the platoon wore the fighting garb of the Maenalis, the native species of the Maenali; the planet upon which they stood. Bitter politics and old suspicions demanded one species give orders to the other. The demands of military reality reduced the junior lieutenant, alien to his troops, to a paper officer. The master sergeant was the unit’s true commander.

Except Inomyc was dead. Three of the other squad commanders had fallen with him. Only Eromyc, just as green as the lieutenant, remained. Someone had to give orders. Yasen realized he had to do it. No one else was left.

A fragmented, half-strength, shattered platoon, hardly worth of mention, but a quick query to the message queue revealed their orders stood unchanged. They were to secure the block, prevent any enemy advance through the park and surrounding roads. Post-bombardment offered no updates.

Desperate to defer to a higher authority, any authority, he tongued clicked over to the company command channel and signaled the captain. However angry and begrudged new orders might be, they represented a lifeline, a buffer against the overpowering tide of command pressure. Ordered to regroup, to reform into a new unit, the burden of leadership might find its way to another.

The channel returned only static to his questions.

“Enemy jamming,” he spoke aloud simply to fill the silence with something, anything. Words presented an illusion of knowledge, of authority. “Long range radio’s blocked.” This announcement rebounded against an idea, a tiny sliver of hope, or at least action. “Sergeant send a runner to the last known positions of squads B and D, with no contact someone might still be alive. We can’t avoid checking.”

“Sir,” Eromyc raised a fist to his shoulder in assent.

A simple order, but it felt good. If not the correct order at least a reasonable one. Something to build upon, find momentum. He took a breath and took another small step in the next moment. “Medic,” he addressed the young soldier applying an intravenous drip to the amputee. “You’re detailed to care for the wounded. If coms come back, call for evac. If the enemy appears, surrender at once. Understood?”

“Sir.” No affirmation this time. Yasen didn’t begrudge this one her doubts. Intel regarding prisoner treatment was limited. In the absence of solid knowledge, the rumor mill generated all sorts of horrors. Space knew the Maenalis had more cause than humans fighting for Athallia.

Leaving the wounded behind hit hard, but everything he knew demanded it. They couldn’t be moved, and the ruined bathroom couldn’t sustain any sort of defense. Walls shattered, it lay totally open and orphaned. No retreat possible across the surrounding park lawn. They had to find shelter, a place to manage a stand.

This determination brought with it recognition that the survivors needed to move out, now. They needed a strongpoint, and they needed it before the surely oncoming enemy thrust reached their position. Dread blossomed in Yasen’s stomach. The attack must have launched immediately upon the heels of the barrage. It might already be too late.

Desperation demanded action, discarded doubt. “Corporal,” the command jumped off his tongue, surprised everyone. “Strip the wounded and the dead of ammunition, meds, and supplies. We’re moving out the moment the runners return.”

“Right sir,” it seemed she was not blind to their vulnerability either. “Which way?”

Yasen feared it would be a hard choice, but in fact the post-barrage devastation spared him any decision. Enemy bombardment had leveled the block with sufficient thoroughness that only one structure within reach offered any prospect of shelter. “There,” he pointed to a bloc-like, heavy-looking construction in an ancient architectural style full of brutal concrete columns at one corner of the park. A source of aesthetic misery on any other day, all narrow-slit windows, hunched walls, and barren facings, in the firelit gloom of the battlefield it extended the glorious promise of protection.

He prayed it was not an illusion.


Technical Notes
The conflict in question here is the Ninth Alsakan Conflict. There's no canonical date for this war, but it is known to have happened after the Pius Dea Era.

Athallia is a sector in the expansion region, it has no canonical star systems aside from the sector capital. The sector, as understood at this time, would not match the boundaries of the sector as designated by Galactic Empire astrogaphers thousands of years later, but there is considerable overlap.

The artillery fire used here is conventional, which is a consequence of the date. While artillery-scale energy weapons do exist by this time, they are cumbersome, expensive, and temperamental. This is by no means the most significant front of the conflict, and the equipment in use is distinctly not cutting edge.

 

II.

The city map in Yasen's helmet database claimed the building served as municipal archives, but one glance up close told him that could not have been its original purpose. Stout and solid in every possible way, its hulking squat bulk loomed utterly out of place alongside the elegant and spare designs that had, until minutes earlier, dominated the city. Even its material composition differed. Rather than glass and composite skin wrapped around a metal skeleton, this structure had been extruded and stacked using tensorcrete block construction.

No one built that way anymore, they hadn't for centuries. Wind and rain pitting on the incredibly durable advanced concrete and polymer surface suggested this specific foundation could be thousands of years old. It might have been laid down at the city's founding over four millennia in the past.

Any design capable of enduring Maenali's brutal monsoon storms for that long unscathed ought to be able to endure at least a few minutes of battle, or so he hoped.

The bombardment had not left the structure untouched. Every window and door had been blown apart by pressure waves and the upper stories were completely unstable and ruined. The ground level frame though, that stood solid. It would have to serve. Nothing else remained.

The lieutenant ordered a runner to find an escape route. He held no illusions that they could hold out against any assault for long. Everyone could sense it. Yasen had no intention of attempting any sort of heroic fight to the last. The bombardment had already inflicted more damage to his command than it deserved. They owed no one anything further.

He resolved to engage long enough to justify obeying his orders, nothing more. Those who survived could face the dogs of Coruscant another day.

The reduced platoon occupied the building's northeast corner, crouched down below shattered windows and impact holes. Eromyc and the mostly intact squad A faced out to the east, toward a smoke-tinted sun still rising toward noon above the main roadway. Presumably the enemy, rushing towards a hoped-for breakthrough, would charge down that route. Given the mass of vehicular ruins and bulky debris Yasen could not see any large force easily navigating some other path. Even the wide blacktop thoroughfare remained barely passable at best, clogged by the smoldering hulks of shattered buses, carts, and traffic signals and gored by oil-slicked craters.

He wished there were more craters. Holes, primitive obstacle though they were, remained an effective means to halt heavy equipment. His rough guess suggested that the remaining route was narrow and winding, but still passable. Too many of the barrage-inflicted gouges were, as designed by cunning munitions engineers, too small to impede the tracked treads of enemy war machines.

The other position was the northern side, where he joined in the firing line beside the survivors of squad C. They faced out toward remnants of the park. Burned and blackened now, all verdant scenery and botanical beauty erased, it lacked any recognition of its former purpose; only loss and wreckage retained.

“Simple plan,” Yasen explained over the platoon short-range channel. He tried to sound confident, though his gut wrapped and coiled around the icy core of his fears with each word. “Squad A engages incoming forces. We blunt their advance. They'll send flankers through the park. Squad C suppresses their initial advance. When they mass for an assault, we pull out.”

He threw together this basic outline in seconds, mixed together instinct with the jumbled memories of officer training courses and old strategy games. He had no time to consider whether it would work, or to search out a better option. The enemy chose that moment to appear.

Or rather they chose that moment to engage. Still well beyond visual range, their presence manifested itself through a warning whine inside Yasen's helmet as their handheld perimeter grid detected incoming high-speed projectiles.

“Everyone get down!” he shouted, utterly unnecessarily, as the first impacts hit.

The ground shook. The building crackled and groaned. Dust filled the air. Razor sharp fragments of concrete and metal spun and zipped in every direction.

Yasen crouched on his belly, his head just barely raised to peek over a bricked edge and cram his rifle forward. He subvocalized magnification through his helmet cameras, bringing the distant world closer through false eyes. He repeated the command several times, focusing on dark points far in the distance shrouded beneath the clouds of destruction.

Incoming fire, a chaotic mixture of ballistic shells, wire-guided missiles, and thermally-seeking rockets, rained down upon the building. Low and electronic, their scramjet motors filled the air with sustained banshee shrieking. Sharp cracks snapped out with each impact offered a staccato contrast. The high octave outcries of injured men and women cut in irregularly in bitter accent.

Though the shifting clouds of smoke and dust obscured even enhanced camera vision, a few brief flickers of clarity among the swirl offered enough to parse the incoming onslaught.

They came up the road, as anticipated. A great snaking columnar formation of enemy forces. Troops in stark white armor glared beneath weakened sunlight at the forefront. Here and there a splash of color broke through their monochrome presentation, but the overwhelming emphasis was chalk white, polished to shimmering gleam and reflective in every movement.

Republic colors; an army possessed of such confidence in its might and superiority that its soldiers need never conceal themselves.

Yasen's helmet programming counted up on his behalf, but he needed no numeric summary to identity the enemy numbers as immense. They'd come in massive force, white armored soldiers, vehicles, and droids; a sprawling swarm slithered towards his tiny platoon. Regimental strength at least, fully one thousand soldiers, supported by a heavy armor unit.

He'd seen the estimates, the projected strengths. The assault that rumbled toward them now represented the very heart of the enemy's strength.

To stand against such a force, outnumbered nearly one hundred to one, was madness. It lacked all semblance of possibility. Yet Yasen knew, felt it bound to the core of his bones, that running offered even worse odds. They could not withdraw while those guns advanced, could not even surrender. No signal would penetrate the chaos without.

Survival meant they must blunt this thrust.

“Hold fast,” Yasen called out orders over the local link, barely aware of his own voice. “Prep anti-armor countermeasures. We have to disable the lead vehicles, create an opening.” Instincts screamed at his body to turn and run, as the rain of shells redoubled and missiles cratered reinforced construction mere meters away. Reason fought that animal impulse, demanded that he stay. “Sergeant, engage at three hundred meters, combined fire, one united volley.”

As he gave the order symbols sprouted on his HUD that offered the barest glimmer of hope. His meager command extended across a mere thirteen lives, but between them they possessed fully eight anti-armor pieces. Four man-portable rocket launchers and four of the precious wire-guided anti-tank missile tubes; weapons normally allotted at one to a squad. More durable than human or Maenali flesh, it seemed they'd survived bombardment and quick-thinking runners had retrieved these powerful devices from the grasp of the fallen.

Their ghosts stood beside them now.

The next fifty-four seconds were sheer pandemonium. The earlier bombardment did not even compare. Advancing armor poured hundreds of shells, dozens of missiles, and thousands of tracers into their position.

Some distant, detached part of Yasen's brain understood this attempt to utterly overwhelm his unit as a solid choice on the part of the enemy commander; a calculation to trade ammunition for time.

The rest of him cursed as death reached out talons thousands of meters long and ripped through his tiny contingent.

Three soldiers of squad A would never see the opportunity to fire their weapons at the enemy. Incoming fire claimed them from beyond infantry range. One of the squad C survivors, likewise, perished when a missile strike burst above his head. This impact detonated close enough that hot blood sprayed across Yasen's back following the shock wave.

The rumbling thunder of the assault grew steadily, till it exceeded the filtration capacity of their helmet guards. At that point the world shifted to a nightmare landscape; automatic safety systems switched cancellation blockers in place and collapsed all inputs to nothing.

Sound vanished.

The first and only stage of joint engagement unfolded in total silence. Horror lost in a painting.

Heavy tracked behemoths weighing a hundred tonnes at least and bristling with armor plating and red-glowing weaponry, the leading enemy tanks resembled monsters out of legend. Lumbering and heaving with effort, they plunged forward at full speed. At three hundred and fifty meters their anti-personnel rotary guns unleashed a river of high-velocity slugs into the atmosphere. Only the chaotic interplay of debris across the rapidly eroding building facade and the vehicle's own momentum spared the handful of defenders. Pushing forward at full blast their guns struggled to depress to ground level, and their deadly spray wrought damage across the empty galleries of the second story.

Had they stopped and allowed their batteries a moment to aim properly, Yasen knew the end would come in seconds.

Truthfully every second of survival counted up on his internal chrono stunned the him with its shear implausibility. How was the building still standing? He'd seen bombardment videos at officer's school. Fusillades unleashing not one part in ten of this ordinance could break a full-fledged fortress. No conventional construction could endure this level of attack, but somehow it stood strong. He wondered if it had been hardened against the possibility of orbital weaponry, and, in a piercing intrusion of thoughts from far beyond immediacy, why any such building existed here and now.

Unknowable the reason, the unalterable fact of the building's endurance changed everything.

Sheltered beneath a frame that absolutely refused all demands to collapse, the platoon lay ready by their weapons when the front two vehicles hit the critical three-hundred and fifty meter mark and the kill zones overlapped at last.

Four rockets and three missiles launched. Five projectiles registered hits.

Two deflected uselessly off sloped armor plate. One scored a glancing strike against the tracks but failed to fully disable motion. Two missiles, guided by Maenalis steel-eyed and bleeding beside the black tubes of their launchers, cored turrets.

One tank simply stopped dead. All lethality vanished from the great machine at a stroke. Only an inert hunk of metal remained in its place.

The other, struck through to a magazine, blew apart. A second sun blossomed amid city streets.

A moment of glorious hope erupted in Yasen's heart.

One moment only.

White-armored troops picked themselves up from where the blast tossed them, grasped rifles and carbines, and ran for the stout cover of their shattered tanks. Form there they took aim and unleashed a storm of slugs at the defenders.

“Return fire!” He shouted the order, knowing even as he spoke that it was completely unnecessary. The Maenali soldiers were already shooting every weapon they had. Yasen crouched low, raised up his rifle, and joined its fury to the unsteady volley.

Armored figures half-obscured by swirling dust and rippling smoke scrambled and crawled amidst any form of available cover as the attack now switched to them. Ruined by the earlier artillery barrage the road offered a plethora of craters, hulks, and fallen masonry to serve.

Within seconds both sides settled into a repeating volley of low efficacy. Hundreds of rounds per second struck chips from concrete, clanged off metal, and bit deep into soil. Flesh remained unscathed.

Yasen ignored the ordinary motions and scanned across the battlefield. Camera-sight caught the glint of a broad barrel to the north. Guided by some unnamed instinct he shifted hard enough to wrench his shoulder and poured the complete contents of his magazine toward the obscured silhouette behind, round after round until the rifle clicked hot on an empty chamber.

The sight of a fallen body, white stained red, and a dropped rocket launcher, represented his grisly reward.

As he reloaded, grappling with a magazine on his belt, the lieutenant struggled to see widely, to retain awareness beyond the tunnel of his gun barrel that command demanded. Points assembled into loose structure inside his rattled skull, slowly bolted together toward conclusions, to choices that must be made. Orders were coming, if only he could find them.

Ruined tanks halted the armor column. The Republic soldiers displayed no desire to charge an active gun nest. Some were shifting towards the park, but slowly, too slow. Enemy motions were sloppy, hesitant. They had not expected opposition, reactions were clumsy, late.

Time stretched out. Seconds expanded to nearly infinite, just long enough to allow Yasen a grasp on the least fragment of initiative. “Corporal, shift all guns to the north,” he ordered Oropho's handful to reinforce the survivors of squad A. “Fill the front with fire. They want to flank slow, let them.”

Defense blurred time further after these words were spoken. Ten shooters remained, set against dozens spilling across every speck and divot of cover the road offered. An absurdity, an impossible stand, but the seconds ticked upward on the helmet chrono all the same. Lights flicked out alongside it, casualties growing with the number.

The first floor windows and holes used by the defenders were slightly elevated above the road cut. Less than average humanoid height, they nevertheless offered the defenders a massive angular advantage. Yasen spared nothing, unleashed all remaining anti-armor weapons against the infantry advance. This killed no one, but filled the roadway with a sea of flame, suppressed enemy fire for precious seconds. Enemy fire continued to make a ruin of the battered building, but little told against those sheltered behind that blessed concrete.

But the numbers were inexorable, and they made themselves felt in time.

Twenty-two seconds; Myromit took a round through the helmet.

Thirty-five seconds; Elapha's entire right side disintegrated beneath a grenade blast.

Fifty-one seconds. Dolomaryc lost both legs when a mortar shot dislodged a section of ceiling directly above him.

One minute sixteen seconds; Sergeant Eromyc shot through the shoulder by a sniper spotted one trigger-pull too late.

“Retreat!” Yasen ordered, haunted by the inevitable thought he'd left it too long, condemned each and every one to the fates he'd watched in impossible silence and they'd held with impossibly steadfast resolve. “Back into the building!” Dread constricted about him as he watched for those few souls left to follow.

One minute thirty-two seconds. Kevophala and Tasmydac killed by guided missile detonation.

The lieutenant turned and ran back down the corridor to the blackness within. He left visual contact with only Corporal Oropho and the younger runner Vasomyc still alive.

He wanted to vomit. Anti-nausea agents taken before enemy contact forbade this release. Sickness weighted his stomach like lead instead, heavy as the world.

Seven lives sacrifice for a minute and a half. Grief rose black around the edges of his vision, threatened to swamp him under.

He stumbled, and at that moment some system in his helmet calculated the ambient decibel level now sat below critical. Sound roared back into existence. The din of battle wrapped him within its howling winds, set him on his feet, and demanded his body run.

Grief would wait. The day was not done.


Technical Notes

Blasters were not invented until almost 4,000 BBY, and even their predecessors, pulse-wave weapons, not until 7,800 BBY. At this early date the only man-portable energy weapons are beam-tubes, which are far too cumbersome and fickle for use on a battlefield of this nature. As such, everyone is still using firearms and explosive munitions.

The tanks mentioned here are tracked vehicles. It's not clear when repulsorlift technology was developed, but tracked vehicles remained in use through the Imperial Era, so heavy vehicles of this type are to be expected.

 

III.
The internal corridors of the strange fortress-like building were broad and level, but followed a twisting, complex layout that made no obvious sense. Perhaps signage once led confused visitors down carefully plotted paths, but if such guidance existed it failed to function without power. The inner corridors were broadly light-less as well; shadowy and haunted. Helmet amplification caught what it could from emergency fluorescent panels and holes carved in the roof. This allowed for sight but tinted the interior a sickly green.

Rubble, fallen furnishings, broken glass, and other damage dogged every footfall here. Only slash-resistant boots spared them from terrible lacerations. As it was, they still had to force bent doors open and hurl aside drunkenly positioned cabinets to make headway.

Yasen fought back tears with every step. The impulse threatened to overwhelm him and cloud all input. He supposed the Maenalis, with liquid filtration supplied by tiny pores rather than broad ducts, were spared this. Their grief manifested instead in clenched fists and frightful shivering spasms of the shoulder blades.

Far to their rear, a distance that grew with every step but nowhere near rapidly enough to spell security, the boom and snap percussive chorus of enemy fire gradually faded as the Republic forces recognized their opposition's retreat. A new auditory menace arose in the absence of the explosive cadence; sharp-edged and high-pitched, the persistent whine of powerful electrical motors and turbine fans.

A sound dreaded by the ears of all flesh-and-blood soldiers.

The Republic commander chose not to send his white-armored soldiers into the bowels of a mysterious building after an unknown number of foes. Instead, extermination had been detailed to a droid detachment. A wise choice, the role suited amoral machines.

Just as this incoming sound reached proper audibility Vasomyc, leading the scramble-dash toward some semblance of safety, abruptly halted. “Holes!” he swore viciously in Maenali.

No explanation was necessary. The massive pile of concrete, clearly once the walls of several additional stories above, lodged across the hallway made the issue perfectly clear. Shelling had finally collapsed a portion of the building. Not enough to destroy it, but enough to block their escape.

The last spark of hope, the flickering candle flame of flight, guttered out.

Surrender was not an option. Combat droids were programmed to shoot the moment they recognized a target. They would kill before their processors managed to recognize the white flag.

Even as lost hope drained the adrenalin from his veins, Yasen found his voice. “Any other paths?” he asked. An officer cannot profess despair. He knew this truth in his bones. Even if naught but that remained, the troops deserved leadership to the bitter end.

“There are stairs down one turn back,” the runner signaled quietly, not trusting his voice in the dark. “But I don't think there's any way out below ground.”

“More defensible than here,” Oropho grunted, voice grim as death. “Blow a few cans before we go.”

“Let's move then,” Yasen acknowledged. He had no better plan. Embracing pointless vengeance offered as many steps as any other path.

The sound of the approaching drones closed in, but none appeared as they dashed to the corridor and vaulted down multiple flights of stairs into the lightless depths.

The passage threw out strange impressions under Yasen's examination. The floors were empty and coated with dust. Emergency lighting was long burned out here, to the point that the soldiers had to activate their helmet lights to proceed. Each level was blocked by heavy security doors. Though unlocked, they were wrist-thick metal and devoid of windows. The fleeing troops discovered whatever locking mechanism had once secured them was removed long ago. By the apparent rust on the surfaces Yasen suspected centuries. They thrust emergency firefighter gear, the only objects remaining in those ghostly halls, through the handles in a makeshift barricade.

Yasen cursed the droid pursuers. Humans might have given up faced with those doors. Machines surely would not.

They stepped out at the bottom into some long-lost sub-basement and faced an abandoned security station. Though stripped and coated by ages of neglect, the height and make of the desks, the placement of the lights and cameras, and the narrow choke-point access through the middle revealed its purpose with perfect clarity.

Beyond this stood a single door, one that confirmed all such suspicions.

“It's a vault,” Oropho snapped out the words. “What in sludge is it doing here?”

Huge and circular, secured by an array of bolts forged of some icy gray alloy into cylinders thicker than Yasen’s legs, the portal loomed before them. Sealed and locked, its outer surface revealed nothing of its purpose. He’d seen such barricaded repositories before, but only in banks and casinos. He could not imagine why anyone would expend the resources needed for such a barrier in the basement of an archive. His wrist display offered no hope of information. With the com lines jammed, he could not even search out the true owners of this construction.

“Not important,” he recognized after a moment’s quick consideration. “What matters is if we can get it open. Anti-personnel weapons might not be able to punch through.” These words rekindled the buried embers of his hopes, banished grief behind a layer of action.

“Sir there’s no power,” Vasomyc crouched behind one of the security desks. He’d spread his remaining weapons and ammunition out before him atop the surface. Each ready to jump into his hands when needed, prepared for the final stand. His helmeted skull jerked back in the direction of the mighty metal disk. “That thing must mass a thousand kilos. Even if we unlocked it somehow, we couldn’t move it without heavy equipment.”

Before anyone could respond, a dull thump echoed down the stairwell. A second pulse followed the first. A regular rhythm of impacts built swiftly towards a perpetual backdrop thereafter. Utterly steady intervals, a strike every two seconds, the kind of sequence only machines could produce and sustain.

Above, assault droids battered against the security doors.

“There must be emergency power, a switch, a generator, something.” No one with sufficient wealth to build a buried repository like this allowed a minor inconvenience like lost power to bar access to their riches. Yasen knew this with absolute certainty, clearly informed by buried old memories. “Check everywhere, we still have a chance.”

The percussive pulsations of droid bodies hurled against portals grew closer as the search commenced. Doom increased in volume across clear differentials as each door in turn failed before implacable metal might. It wore upon the mind, this auditory dread. Focus and energy stolen away from the desperate search with each gonging impact.

The room concealed half-a-dozen hidden switches. All, once flipped, did nothing, useless without lost power. Perhaps they enabled alarms or empowered security measures, but disconnected and lifeless they offered no succor. Each false discovery only redoubled mounting despair.

Yasen plunged his knife through one wall panel after another, scraped seams through the thin polymer surfaces in a vain search for a hidden pocket or concealed control panel. Vasomyc, tallest among them, stretched out atop the counters and ravaged the ceiling in the same manner. Oropho crouched down with her entrenching tool unfolded and pried up the floor tiles one by one.

No one found anything.

The droids began to bang away on the final door, the one at the bottom of the stairs. The racket pulsed through the air and vibrated through the floor in counterpoint.

Furious and desperate, Yasen scrambled across the counters. His hands roved over every surface, sought any irregularity for hidden buttons, switches, any sort of out-of-place indicator. Rage surged in him. Frustration boiled over as his mind slammed against incompatibility. The failure to reconcile his certainty that some trigger must exist with the inability to discover it grew to torment. In his fury and fatigue his body frayed past the limits of military discipline.

Unwilling to accept this end, he indulged anger through a violent kick at a cabinet lodged below the central security post.

A low, abortive whump echoed across the metal surfaces of the vault atrium.

Oropho’s head turned. “That sound,” sharp edge inflected her syllables; stalker poised. “What was it?”

“Kicked the cabinet,” ridiculous as it was with doom staring down from mere meters away, Yasen felt chastened all the same. Such emotional petulance was unbefitting of an officer, especially one about to face the end. No matter how much he might be embarrassed, and no matter how ridiculous the feeling, he lacked the strength to lie to the survivors of his command.

Her response did not match expectations. “The sound’s wrong.” Remarkably swift, she surged from the floor to his position. “Not empty.”

His ears heard no difference, but Yasen trusted the Maenali’s instincts. He reached down, grasped with both hands, and tore each drawer out to its maximum draw. Oropho leaned in next to him, a second pair of camera eyes added to the first.

Both grasped the truth at once. The depth of the drawers did not match, the lower one came up a full decimeter short.

Frenzied by explosive hope, it took mere seconds for Oropho’s knife to shred through the thin metal plate that formed the false backing. Once removed, the hidden gap revealed a flattened, compact power cell array. A thin square no longer on a side than a forearm, but heavy with the promise of solution.

“Plug it in,” Yasen ordered at once. “We’ll dissuade the droids.” The thumping at the door had by this time reached nearly overwhelming volume. A snarling, grinding accompaniment indicated that the imminent failure of the metals forming their improvised barrier.

As the corporal moved to bolt the power supply into the silent vault’s control panel, the lieutenant rose and stood beside Vasomyc. He held his rifle at the ready. Downrange, a short ten meters at most, the heavy security doors buckled and bent. A growing array of cracks spider-webbed down the length of the fire axe they’d wedged between the door handles. Creaking and warping suborned the hinges too. Failing fast, it appeared the inevitable break through would strike both down at the same moment.

As the center buckled steadily, a gap opened in the middle of the hallway between the door panels. Through this aperture previously unseen mechanical specters were at last revealed under the overlapping circles of pale-yellow illumination produced by helmet lamps.

Yasen had seen new, highly advanced droids cast in humanoid shapes at an exposition. Friendly and generalized devices, they could conduct a wide range of household tasks. Elegant demonstrations of advanced design and engineering achievement represented tools anyone would wish to own, assemblies of gleaming plating and sharp joins.

The machines on the other side of the collapsing portal bore no resemblance to those sleek models. They were not humanoid. Nor were their vehicular forms advanced in aesthetic architecture. Their bodies were simple wedge-shaped hover-units. Blunt-ended things wrapped around directional turbofan engines. They fronted black armor to the world, a cluster of sensors peeked around the edges of their bow plating that they might find their prey. Eyes forged of edges, baleful and red. Simple turrets sat mounted atop their clunky propulsive frames. One or two long and deadly black tubes topped out at the apex of each unit.

Their structure spared nothing; it made no concession to aesthetics at all. Brutal efficiency ruled every part of their existence. For all their technological advancement and considerable processing power these mechanical implements of death were weapons along, nothing more. No different than the cold rifle Yasen held in his hands.

Six of these deadly drones, apparently their organizational scheme grouped them that way, battered at the door as one. Wedge-shaped bodies shot forward in simple combined wave charges. Each chassis sported an impressive collection of dents and scratches across their front plates, evidence that the doors had not gone quietly. This damage, to the defender’s regret, appeared entirely cosmetic. It did not impede the machine’s functionality in the least. Durable beyond the capacity of any organic opponent, Yasen looked out into their unblinking indicator lights and saw only death staring back.

He did not submit. Death might be inevitable, but he recalled those who had already gone ahead upon that path and found the resolve to retain opposition, to fight even without hope of victory. “Grenades,” he ordered Vasomyc. “Roll them through the central gap together, concentrate the blast. On my mark.”

Carefully, he placed his rifle down atop the empty security counter. Grenades traveled from his belt to one in each hand. Fingers clenched in place over the actuator buttons, nervous and twitchy. Without turning the head, vision slid along the enhanced peripheral zone provided by his helmet cameras and confirmed the private had done the same. Eyes returned straight ahead thereafter, fixated upon the growing gap.

The droids slammed. Strained past all endurance, the fire axe handle bent almost to a right angle. The opening between the barriers expanded to nearly half a meter. One more push would smash the doors aside completely.

“Now,” thumbs jerked down as Yasen armed his pair of explosives. With a swift scooping motion, he bent down and sent them gently rolling forward.

The assault droids possessed highly advanced evasion programming. They could dodge and weave to evade shells and slugs alike and identify and move to effective cover when exposed. Slowly rolling objects had not been included among the list of dangers their designers identified. Whatever the reason behind this oversight, perhaps they’d expected any opponent to perish long before they approached close enough to launch such an attack, the machines made no attempt to move aside as the grenades tumbled along the floor and passed through the gap. They simply repositioned to slam forward once again.

Four explosions blossomed beneath them.

Helmet protections slammed up ear-sparring noise cancellation and eye-shielding opacity within milliseconds of detonation. Destruction unfolded in eerie blurred silence as a result. Yasen struggled to parse fuzzy clouded imagery as wedge-shaped mechanisms were launched upwards, tumbled through the narrow space of the corridor, and spun about amid a storm of shrapnel.

Only hard-learned training, instinct pounded into muscle and bone, insured that he brought his rifle up as the droids fell back to the floor.

Combined into one blast and with their explosive power amplified by the confined space, the grenades were powerful weapons. Their anti-armor capabilities might be limited, but raw force magnified by solid walls to rebound their concussive burst many times over served to shred the cores of the two droids directly above the detonation. The next pair outward was riddled by a torrent of needle-sharp fragments, pierced at a hundred points.

All four collapsed to the concrete, motionless. The baleful threat they bore when operational faded instantly upon shutdown. Only broken bits of industry remained, all sense of function forgotten.

The outermost two, though battered, were sufficiently shielded from their fallen fellows to survive. Squeaking and squealing with the agony of overcharged turbines, they maneuvered to advance again. Driven by the merciless purity of mechanical reasoning, they flowed over the top of the shattered remains of their cohort and pressed towards the central opening. Broken by the discharge, the doors hung bent and free; offered no barrier at all to the droids’ advance.

Fan-driven motors hurled them forward into a storm of projectiles.

Kneeling behind the security desks Vasomyc and Yasen fired full auto at their mechanical foes. Dozens of high-powered supersonic impacts tore across composite plating to stich seams of holes across the hulls. Most deflected away uselessly, ricochets lodged in the walls or ruined doors. Armor proved proof against small arms even at point blank range; critical systems lay buried too deep for slugs to reach.

But some missiles, perhaps a mere single shot apiece, found a crack, a suture, or a damaged patch cut through by shrapnel. These random events, dictated by the cold laws of probability, pierced through the multi-layered mixture of defensive chemistry and tumbled about within the delicate electronic circuitry housing machine consciousness. They sparked, smoked, and spat electronic growls as the breakdowns cascaded through their systems.

By the time the soldiers clicked over to empty magazines and dared drop the smoking barrels of their weapons off-line of target the droids were still. The handful of shots the machines managed to launch during the brief engagement had not even approached flesh. Their marks traced a suite of holes along the ceiling. A new dust cloud descended in the aftermath, but nothing further registered.

Yasen slammed a new magazine into place before he dared to breathe. He tried not to think on the grim realization that no others remained on his belt. “Status?” he called out, mostly to try and fill the scarred space with speech. An offering grasping for calm.

“No injuries lieutenant,” Vasomyc’s voice huffed and puffed brutally as the Maenali panted desperately. “But I’m down to my last mag.”

A retort worked its way up his throat, only to be swallowed again when Yasen regained awareness of the puddles of sweat at the base of his socks. Maenalis, he belatedly recalled, lacked that particular trait of cooling physiology. Panting kept them alive.

“I’ve got the door powered,” Oropho, steadier, though only marginally, called out. “But you’d better come see sir, there’s a problem.”

It was a mere three steps between stations, but Yasen’s mind flipped over as he turned to face the vault door. A problem indeed, but a different sort of issue. Not a military matter, not anymore.

Oropho had spliced the power cell into a preset recess between the massive bolt hinges, one clearly prepared for the purpose with connectors already in place. She stood aside as indicator lights on the door danced through a multi-colored pattern, charged with electrical potential. The door functioned again, aged mechanisms green and ready to operate.

Unfortunately, this restoration of functions included a small yellow-glowing keypad at the center of the heavy disk.

“So even in an emergency relying on limited backup power we need an authorization code,” It took little to deduce this, obvious as it was, but no less crushing for that. “Makes sense,” he grumbled. “I suppose, wouldn’t want any thief with an EMP grenade to open the vault. At least it’s a numeric code.” He bent down and examined the keypad. A simple three-by-three panel, nine digits only. Analog too, he suspected, locking mechanism tied to the depression of individual buttons in sequence, not dependent upon the power supply at all.

“Nine-digit code sir,” Oropho noted, and eyes saw that there were indeed flip-stock cylinders for numeric display above the pad. “I don’t think we’ll get many chances. Can’t just guess.”

Privately, Yasen disagreed. He suspected the lock reset after each nine presses, but it made little difference, the odds of guessing such a number at random were close enough to zero as made no difference. Before he could speak, Vasomyc interrupted. His slowly stabilizing voice added more bad news.

“Thermal readings from above sir,” he announced. “I think there’s another batch of droids on the way down.”

The way was open now. No doors to halt the advance. The time limit on this puzzle dropped to seconds.

“Any ideas corporal?” Yasen asked aloud. He expected no answers.

“No sir,” Oropho replied, equally fatalistic, then paused. “Well, just one thing.” Her helmet blocked any chance to see expressions, but her voice acquired a sudden unexpected hesitancy. “There was a maker’s mark on the power box. It said, ‘custom manufactured for the exclusive use of the Nacla Corporation.’”

“Nacla…” At first it seemed impossible, but even momentary reflection unlocked a wave of supporting evidence. The building itself offered the primary pieces: out of date architectural styling, absurdly robust construction, erratic internal organization, security divisions. Nothing else in the city was built remotely similar. It spoke to a creation out of time, a relic from an earlier age. Government ownership, repurposing such a structure to anodyne archival service rather than sale to any other concern, also suggested such intimidating origins.

Few names held such power on Maenali, or anywhere in the Athallia sector. Yasen immediately wondered why such a building had been placed here, what it’s purpose might have been. He shook his head sharply thereafter. No time now for such academic concerns. Only the passcode mattered, the choice of numbers used by bioengineers and terraformers to protect their secrets.

“I’ll try to buy you some time sir,” Oropho spoke softly.

He barely heard her footsteps as they receded behind. The spinning whine of the incoming droids’ turbofans faded as well, lost to a false distance outside the intensity of contemplation.

Leaning down, he stared hard at the keypad. Age, the heavy weight of time gathered over this place, extended a lifeline down the optical enhancements built into his helmet cameras. Precision optics capable of detecting the supremely thin film coatings used in poisons and trigger webs isolated signs of smudging, additional dust bound to the human skin oils left behind the last time the keypad was activated decades or centuries ago.

Someone who’d forgotten to wear gloves.

There were nine keys on the pad, but only four bore the telltale indication of human contact. Gears turned in Yasen’s mind. He couldn’t calculate the exact math, but surely the chance of any random nine-digit code utilizing only four numbers was tiny. It wasn’t chance, he refused to believe that. The choice had to be deliberate.

Four numbers. A ridiculous choice, one that made no sense. It lowered security drastically. There had to be some reason, something stylistic, a word, a slogan, something that translated using only four symbols.

Symbols, not numbers.

Four symbols only, used by geneticists.

Yasen’s education was considerable, mandated by his station, but science had never been his strength. History, by contrast, represented a personal passion. In the history of commerce, the arrogance of Nacla reigned high among the firmaments. Their agents had been obsessed with leaving a mark upon their works, in the most fundamental way possible.

And they were on Maenali.

With this the letter to number conversion became obvious; the code was a piece of trivia he’d memorized long ago.

He punched it in. One-Three-Three-Two-Four-One-Two-Two-Four.

AGGCTACCT.

The genetic tag keyed to the Maenali species, inserted into their telomeres by the Nacla genetic engineers who designed them.

The little keypad blinked once as the final number registered. I glowed green after that and a soft audio ping. Then it wiped clear.

Bolts began to turn at the same moment rifle fire tore through the room.

Yasen dropped to the floor. His hands scrambled to bring his rifle to bear, fought straps and the cumbersome edges of his chest plate.

Slowly, one interminable second at a time, the vault door opened.

Six droids poured down the stairs, hovered over the bodies of their fallen fellow constructs, and opened fire with their rotary cannons. Powerful weapons above their compact bodies filled the air with hundreds of rounds. The storming percussion of their discharge overwhelmed all other sounds, all other possibilities.

Oropho’s grenades, rolled low as before, blasted a brief pause in this deluge, but it spared no more than a bare handful of seconds.

Yasen added such return fire as he could, peering through swirling smoke and shifting shadows. He knee-walked across the floor, slid into the gap that emerged behind the massive moving metal disk. Took cover there within the bounds of the aperture.

The door itself, multiple tons of composite alloy, laughed in the face of small-arms fire. The small-caliber projectiles wielded by the droids, designed for saturation rather than penetration, ricocheted off its surface like so many ball bearings, barely even left scuff marks to mark their passage. Even the hinges and pneumatic actuators responsible for motion ignored this fusillade, built to endure the ages.

Such impervious defenses did not come without consequences.

The defenders managed to core two droids and disable the turret on a third, but even firing from covered and hardened positions the confined space confirmed vulnerability when pressed with such an immense volume of projectiles. Undirected, the dynamic storm of metal ripping through the air battered and sprang, sought out any substrate soft enough to absorb its deadly momentum.

A deflection struck Vasomyc in the back of the chest, just below the right shoulder blade. The bullet, having already smashed vault door and ceiling before it connected with him, lacked the force to penetrate body armor. The impact itself inflicted no more than a modest bruising to the flesh beneath.

His nerves betrayed him. The bullet impelled an automatic reaction, body jolted upward a short span of critical centimeters for a pair of equally determinant seconds.

Single-minded and limited through the droid’s processing centers might be, they made their decisions with the brutal speed of microprocessors.

Faster than any human or Maenali mind could react the droid adjusted. Its turret tracked the exposed target, shifted its aim, and fired.

Four shots intersected the space Vasomyc’s skull occupied even as his brain raced to relay to his muscles the need to descend, to crouch down.

He never saw any of the shots fired.

Two missed high, droid aim being decidedly imperfect on account of fan stabilization and sensor grid limitations.

The other two slammed against the faceplate of his helmet. Armor, never designed to block such high-speed impacts at a range of five meters, shattered.

The first bullet shattered his teeth, clipped his jawbone, and carved a bloody exist hole through his left cheek. The second pierced carbon composite plating, skin, skull bone, and finally brain matter before it came to rest against the inside of the cranial bones deep in the center of his occipital lobe.

Shredded by such utterly catastrophic damage, the brain ceased function instantly. Vasomyc perished before gravity even began to drag his suddenly limp form down to the floor.

Yasen watched this unfold down the barrel of his rifle, firing desperately through it all, helpless to do anything, to protect his comrade in any way. Their survival was slaved to the vault door’s glacial opening sequence. Time had run out first for the valiant trooper.

“Fall back, into the vault,” Yasen ordered Oropho even as his command dropped to one last soldier. The imperative to save her, to see anyone at all survive this mad ordeal, consumed all thought.

A single second made the difference. The door expanded wide enough to permit a humanoid body access.

Oropho scrambled back as Yasen desperately laid down covering fire. The corporal turned, ran, and ultimately slid across the tiles. Casings and powder dust coated her passage. She burst into cover behind the door belly first, motions wild.

In extremis the droids tracked her, rotary cannons screaming crescendo to the zenith of their attack.

A bullet skipped the floor and sliced through the fabric of Oropho’s right boot at the final interval to gouge through her heel. She rolled to safety behind a burst of blood.

Crouched behind the massive portal, Yasen slammed his fist down with painful force on the close button. The door mechanism responded. Machinery whirred; its direction reversed. The gap at the edge of the vault slowly narrowed.

One droid, perhaps cursed with a particularly aggressive programming package, charged the narrow opening. Turbofans whirled in harmonious counter to its unceasing fire.

Yasen turned to shoot it, the machine’s composite frame close enough to reach out and touch. His finger depressed the trigger, sight lined up directly with the vulnerable join between cannon mount and body. At this range he could not miss.

The rifle’s receiver clicked impotently, magazine empty.

No time to reload, no time to think. His body acted on its own, relied on primordial reflexes of the long-lost savannah never fully beaten from modern humans. Elbows tightened, shouldered clenched, and he jabbed the weapon forward to spear his foe.

Heated to furious temperatures by sustained fire, the barrel thrust hot into the compound plating. Jerked by muscle action it ruptured joins and bent contacts beneath the blow. The four deadly barrels of the enemy’s weapon suddenly acquired an extra fourteen degrees angle toward the vertical.

The machine never ceased fire. Yasen followed the descent of his weapon down to the stone hard floor.

Bullets shattered everything above waist height as the droid futilely sought to destroy targets below the point its guns could now depress.

The vault door, still closing, bit into the edge of the combat unit. Mighty pneumatic pistons designed to move and secure several tons of metal bit into the armor plate like a vise, bent and pressed it aside as if it was nothing. Crunching compaction slowly tore the machine to fragments.

Torque twisted the droid as it died. Cannons detonated their destructive payload in a vast circle around the innards of the vault. Receptacles and servers and all the materials they contained shattered beneath this fiery barrage. A slow rain of depleted ammunition mingled with ravaged fragments of data storage to cover the floor.

The door finished its passage with a single loud crunch. The droid separated into two halves. A soft thump followed by a monstrously polite click sealed the gate.

All fell silent.

 

IV.
Oropho’s injury proved painful, but not life threatening. The slug tore through boot fabric, skin, and the muscle and ligaments of the heel, but it exited clean. Maenali skin, thicker and tougher than human dermal tissue and with severely restricted pore types, responded extremely well to the sealing foam and composite bandages found in the tiny personal first aid kit every soldier carried.

She gritted her teeth against the pain and tapped her fingers incessantly against the floor while Yasen examined the injury but remained fully conscious. Moments after the foam solidified bleeding reduced to a thin trickle. Shortly after that it stopped completely. The only lasting impediment, beyond the doubtless severe pain, was that the heel and ankle swelled up massively. Even with the most minimal of medical knowledge it was obvious that the leg could not support weight. Oropho would not be walking about unaided for some time.

Long enough to vanish beyond the event horizon of imagination.

Sound-absorbing panels covered the ceiling of the vault. This imposed an eerie quiet upon the small oval space comprising its innards. Combined with thick walls forged from advanced alloys, all external sonic input completely vanished. The incessant pounding of droid bodies against the door as they sought to reach their prey could not be heard.

Instead, this brutal pursuit retained constant presence through feeling. A steady thrum vibrated through the floor with every impact. Yasen’s toes tingled with each strike.

“Which one would you bet gives out first?” Oropho hissed; an attempt to generate something resembling levity. “Door or droid?”

Yasen turned about, taking in the scattered bits of circuitry, fan blades, wiring, and other assorted droid parts that joined the ammunition casings and ruined vault components coating the floor. Np piece larger than a clenched fist was left of the droid that had attempted to force past the door. “Evidence suggests the door wins,” he decided. A momentary shiver of positivity compelled an addition to this. “I suspect we’re safe unless someone calls for a unit with industrial cutting gear.” A second consideration, far less comforting, followed on the heels of this engineering observation. “But I’m worried about the lack of air vents. We’re going to face CO2 buildup in a few hours.”

“Helmet filters won’t protect against that,” the corporal murmured. After this, she reached up along her skull and carefully detached the clips there. The faceplate slid back first, pushed to the top of the head. The rest of the helmet assembly came loose momentarily. As the armor clattered to the floor, her face stood bare for the first time since breakfast.

Technically this was a disciplinary infraction. Army code stated that, while engaged with the enemy, helmets were to be worn constantly. The only exception was gear rendered unusable due to damage. Not that Yasen had any intention of reporting this action should they somehow survive to be debriefed. In solidarity, he slid his own faceplate up, blinking through the dimness of a vault illuminated only by green emergency lighting. He kept the helmet on in the wan hope that enemy jamming would dissipate. Restored contact with command would allow him to call for help.

Oropho appeared haggard and worn, or at least Yasen interpreted her appearance that way. Truthfully, it was difficult to tell. Maenali faces, with thickened skin obscuring muscle twitches and pore-free smoothness, tended to appear doll-like and fixed in place. Her barely existent blond hair, trimmed down in a mandated military crew-cut, left only sharp eyes to convey expression. The naturally dark skin tone, gray with flecks of earthy brown, did little to help.

“This has been the worst,” she groused. Sharp chin and cheekbones lent her expression a funerary air. “I expected a hole-drop, we all did, but not this deep. We passed bedrock a long time ago.”

This comment, though phrased in the gritty patois common to all soldier’s complaints, slammed a hammer into Yasen’s guts. Oropho, he discovered as his mind moved beyond the demands of immediate survival and regained the ability to consider more than a few seconds ahead, represented the only remaining member of his command. Counting himself, which felt nauseating at this juncture, they were two out of thirty-eight; practically ninety-five percent casualties.

An abomination.

“I’m sorry,” he offered pathetically, shoulders stiff with a warring mixture of grief and shame. “I led everyone to oblivion, I should have done something, anything, else.”

Oropho turned and spat. Saliva mixed with the dust on the floor instantly, darkened and swirled. “Mash that,” she crunched the words between clenched teeth. “I can count too. Most of us went down to the sludging missile barrage, and then the whole sludging armor column jumped down our throat.” She breathed in slowly; stared up toward the ceiling. Some time passed before she spoke again. The droids thumped the door twice in between.

“There’s always a bad hole,” she spoke softly, but the words stood firm in the dark. “Turns out we were the ones who got that drop today. Besides,” she turned back toward him; face twisted into an unmistakable scowl of pure hatred. “It’s not like command expected any of us to survive.”

Yasen blinked. The force behind this declaration brooked no doubt, but the substance of the assertion matched none of the buffet of rumor and scuttlebutt he’d heard. “What?” he blurted before his brain could catch up and restrain him.

“Two regiments worth of light infantry. Divided into platoon strength and deployed as skirmishers,” the teeth-grinding accompanying these words could have woken the dead. “All Maenali units. They sacrificed us to absorb the barrage and disrupt enemy coordination. We were meant to die, of course we were. They never trusted us to stand in the line, expected we’d defect or something.”

The urge to object, to defend command’s decision-making out of officer solidarity, arose quickly. Reason quashed it at ten times speed, long before the tongue could form words. The deployment had been, described generously, extremely high-risk. That much he’d known. The second piece of data was new. It sowed the seed of something terrible in his guts. “It was really all Maenali units?” The words resisted formation. It took deliberate effort necessary to bring them to audibility. He made a point to meet the corporal’s dark gray eyes.

Eyes that widened at this question. “You didn’t know?” Oropho’s utter surprise could not have been feigned.

“The order of battle access permitted to lieutenants doesn’t allow view of individual trooper names, just unit designations and officers,” Yasen explained, jumbled thoughts sorted through vocalization. “And all the officers are human. To find out the species composition of any unit you have to dig unofficially. I never thought that was important.”

This drew a short laugh, heavy with bitterness, from the injured soldier. “Coming from you, I can actually believe that. How’d you, an LT somehow worth the rifle he’s carrying, get stuck with us anyway? All the other platoons have idiots, wastrels, and screw-ups in charge. Everyone knows we get the leftovers command’s trying to dump. You, well, you’re green, but you’re not stupid. You actually listened to Eromyc; we didn’t have to threaten you into letting him run the platoon like so many of the others.”

Yasen struggled very hard not to grin madly at this generous assessment. For a flickering instant, it almost patched the gouge of failure sitting in his chest.

He knew the answer, of course. The inevitable deduction sprang to mind at once. “I was too honest on my application,” he mumbled.

The piercing glare supplied by the corporal mandated elaboration.

“Toch ayc vaso na osalap Maenalyc,” he unwound the rote phrase, textbook straight.

“Holes,” Oropho blurted. “You speak Maenali?” Her stunned expression acquired a perfectly manikin serenity, as if she was part of an advertisement. “All the things we said behind your back…”

“Honestly, my slang is pretty poor,” Yasen shrugged. “I had no idea what most of the camp talk was about.” He did not add that his language lessons had been provided by droids, not an actual Maenali teacher, and slight shifts in pronunciation over the past few decades made it hard for him to understand the spoken form at all. “Anyway, I guess there was some rule or other in the joint forces agreement to prioritize assignment of bilingual officers to Maenali units. I suppose most of my peers lied about that.” The language was part of the principle planetary educational curriculum. An errant thought struck him, as old memories washed over his thoughts. “Or maybe I just did better in those classes than most.”

“Why’d you join anyway?” Oropho sounded slightly amused at this point, some measure of camaraderie unlocked by shared misery. “You obviously weren’t drafted.”

He had a ready answer for that question, one deployed many times, though this was the first time a Maenali showed interest. “Some combination of a misplaced sense of duty and a childish desire to live up to the stories of distant ancestors,” he grumbled around the old and familiar words, still true, though less so than in the past. “And,” the amendment was new, drawn from some once buried place now excavated by enemy fire. “Probably because I was mad at my father. Stupid reasons,” he was not too proud to admit this. “But I suppose few choose to go to war for good ones.

“Still,” recent events forced further reflection, punctuated by the slowly weakening thumps massaging his glutes. “Perhaps it was the right thing to do anyway. The draft was imposed on Human and Maenali citizens alike, having rich parents isn’t a good reason to be exempt.” He would have added that he shouldn’t have been granted lieutenancy for the same reason, but the words died unspoken. At present, rank conferred no privileges. His future, even should the droids beyond somehow be defeated, extended no further than a looming inquest.

“What a human answer,” the Maenali corporal managed to laugh and grumble at the same time. “Guess I should have expected that, asking a human. There’s no point in blame,” she added, suddenly serious. “At least not over us. We died the moment our draft numbers came up.”

“No,” the protest shot out instantly, driven by pure instinct. “That’s not right. Command used you brutally, criminally even, the wretches, but surely some will survive.”

This drew a short, terse, head shake. Lips tightened into a narrow line across the ashen face. All gruffness vanished. “You do not understand,” she chose her words with clear care and deliberate clarity. “We died when drafted, legally, in the full sight of our people. Oropho is not my name, it is a placeholder. My real name is on my grave, which is already raised. Even if my body lives out this war I will never go home. I will simply find another hole to descend. Eventually I won’t come back up. All those levied by the Athallia draft are the same, severed, a sacrifice paid so that our people can survive.”

Fatalism unfeigned; she left no cause to doubt the declaration. Though Yasen’s studies had never spoken of this specific practice, he knew well that sacrifice exclusion represented a critical pillar of Maenali culture. The brutal and capricious swamplands covering the majority of the planet’s low-lying landmass they’d been engineered to occupy demanded such cruel adaptations.

A natural piece of cultural evolution? Artificial genetic programming? A mixture of both? He had no idea. Instead, he looked up at the ravaged walls, the repositories torn apart by weapons fire. Sudden fascination sparked in him to know the lost answers they’d once contained.

He turned to Oropho and asked no further questions. “I hope you don’t mind that I wish I could have saved everyone anyway.”

“Why reject kindness because it’s misplaced?” She shrugged, then winced in pain. “Okay, enough boring talk. Any idea how we get out of here?”

Yasen put one ear to the inner face of the vault door. He listened carefully, waited patiently to tease out the pattern of the thumps. “Only two droids still at it, and one of them is off the pace, moving slow,” he discovered he was smiling, somehow. “They really are battering themselves to pieces.” A quick examination of the door confirmed his intuition. “There’s an emergency manual release here. So long as the blasted machines manage to smash themselves before we die of carbon dioxide poisoning, we can just walk out.”

“And if not?” Oropho’s impression did not sound positive.

This seemed an appropriate opportunity where an officer could get away with a shrug. “I guess we wait until the red line and then rush them. Do you have any ammo left?”

“Six rounds.”

“Right,” he tried to convince himself this was a significant improvement over nothing. “I’m out of rifle rounds, but my pistol holds six shots.” Such were the privileges of rank, the obligation to carry an almost completely ceremonial weapon. “Not designed for droid armor, but with the door softening them up, who knows.”

“This deep down a hole-drop I wouldn’t bet on it,” grim as this response was, it carried a significant measure of gallows amusement along.

“Maybe we can find something in here to help,” it was not a true hope. Yasen said the words mostly to fill the silence, to provide the illusion of activity, of control of their fate. Despite knowing this, he found himself searching the walls diligently, scouting for any possible artifacts that might possess even the least utility.

Oropho lapsed into silence through the course of this scan. Her breathing steadied to a deliberate measure, a classic pain management effort.

Yasen’s first discovery, one that prevailed almost universally, was that while the contents of the vault’s many deposit boxes possessed any number of protections against natural decay, high-speed projectiles and their corresponding shrapnel bypassed almost all such measures. Hundreds of little cubby boxes lay shattered inward, filled only with shredded archival tapes and punctured data disks. Everything lodged more than half-a-meter above the floor had been irrevocably ruined by the droid’s attack.

Nevertheless, this left a solid fifth of the vault mostly undamaged. The Nacla designers had not wasted space. Repositories extended all the way down, with the lowest boxes no more than a centimeter above the tiles. These, however, having evaded the penetrative punishment of fast-moving metal, remained sealed. The thin metal doors in front of each receptacle with their double-lock seals were nothing compared to the outer door, but they still represented a barrier. Yasen doubted any could survive a bullet to little copper alloy tumblers, but he had no rounds to spare.

Efforts to smash through those panes with the butt of his rifle or pry them aside with the blade of his entrenching tool made no progress at all. It was exactly this sort of improvised attack they’d been designed to repel, and they were sufficiently robust to suppress the limited damage of one human without proper tools. A drill might have unlocked any box in moments, but all his efforts obtained was a bemused giggle from Oropho when she raised one eyelid to examine the racket.

Ultimately, he would find his way into only one of the little receptables. An errant ricochet from above had knocked loose the hinge, just enough to bend a crack between the door and the backing, not so much as to shatter the contents. He managed to squeeze the leading edge of his entrenching tool into that gap and slowly and painfully pry it wider. He had to twist and contort his body to apply maximum mass leverage from a truly astounding variety of bizarre angles into order to make progress. Oropho seemed to find this greatly amusing.

In the end he managed to open a breach just wide enough to slip two fingers through and probe the back space behind.

His gloves brushing lightly against something small and solid. It took three tries, and several gashes ripped through supposedly slash proof fabric in the effort, to reach around the broken door plate and extract the sole object within.

“All that for a data chip?” Oropho mocked gently, accompanied by a light chuckle. A human would have raised an eyebrow or rolled their eyes, but such expressions were unknown to the Maenali. Shielded and reduced facial muscles locked them into mask-like serenity, unable to mimic such maneuvers.

Despite this, the sarcasm translated without difficulty.

The little object circular object, small enough that he could just barely encircle it with thumb and forefinger, was recognizable as an archival chip. The composite crystalline material wedded to a thin disk design made this clear. Yasen knew of them but was surprised to see one in a commercial facility. Though durable and portable, the optical data storage techniques they utilized required specialized equipment to produce and to read. Absent such gear, they were utterly inert. Most archival systems, especially commercial ones, considered this not worth the effort. Usually only legacy-obsessed governments commissioned such media.

The only ones he’d previously handled personally carried the final testaments of the wealthy and paranoid.

“What’s it say?” Oropho asked as they both stared at the little crystalline object beneath the light of his helmet lamps.

A small translucent engraving had been stenciled into the upper surface of the chip.

“High galactic?” Yasen blinked as his eyes bent around the unusual characters. “Well,” he mused aloud wryly. “I suppose that fits Nacla. One of the most arrogant companies that ever existed to be sure.”

“Some of us have reasons to be grateful for that arrogance,” Oropho injected, cuttingly. “Though it would have been nice if they’d just gone and left after they’d finished the important parts.”

“Right,” Yasen carefully kept his response noncommittal. He’d learned long ago that it was unwise to discuss the Nacla Corporation with Maenalis, or for that matter any of their ‘products.’ If a responsible, non-biased manner existed for discussing their corporate creator with the people thus produced, he had no idea what it might be.

“Let’s see,” he clicked his tongue against his front teeth as he translated alphabets in his head. Thankfully the inscription totaled only a single short phrase. “Memoirs of the Encode Project, Doctor Elima Kaier?” His voice rose across the final two words. No one in the whole sector could fail to recognize that name. Fingers trembled about the edges of the disc, as if it had sprouted spikes all along the rim.

“You’re joking,” Oropho spontaneously attempted to rise to her feet and see for herself. When she collapsed back down with a painful grunt, she added only. “That’s impossible.”

“I know she’s been dead for four thousand years,” Yasen tried his best to say this in complete seriousness, but there was no way to avoid at least a little flippancy leaking across the boundary of such an immense date. “But I’ve encountered older documents, and crystalline optical storage like this can last for millions of years.”

“Not that,” the corporal protested, voice primed by sudden fury to reach back up to combat volumes for the first time since the door slammed shut. “There’s no personal writings of hers anywhere. The corporate contract she signed forbade it; made it so Nacla owned her every word. The only thing we know about her life is the biographical summary written by Nacla lawyers after she died. They enforced silence upon our maker even in death, forever walled away from us,” she hissed furiously. Water streamed down from eyelid pores to cover her pupils and drain across her face. Her cheeks acquired a light yellow-brown tinge as salts reacted with dermal proteins. Literal streaks of sorrow. “Even after the bankruptcy, the estate claimed everything was destroyed.”

“Huh,” Yasen let the moment stretch, tried to absorb this litany. It matched the far drier summary he’d learned in school. He felt no reason to doubt the central truth of the corporal’s words. Carefully, waiting for the anger to bleed away into the darkness, he walked in a tight circle, hands sweeping over the ruined receptacles of this ancient fault. “I never studied the details,” he comments softly, fingers sifted through shards of record tape and data disk. All traces of officer authority extracted from his voice; military mien precisely set aside. The idle scholar asserted alone. “But I imagine they claimed everything was destroyed.” He turned and stared into water-clouded dark eyes. Saw the answer there without the need for words. “A common legal dodge,” he knew this with great regret. “It simplifies certain arguments. A court cannot force you to yield up data you do not possess.

“But,” he forced traces of a smile from his face as he amended this remark. “Corporations never throw away anything they assess might profit them even a single extra credit. We’re in a Nacla Corporation vault, one abandoned for centuries at a minimum.” The dust outside had indicated as much. “If there was ever a place to find such a thing, this would be it.”

Delicately, he stepped over to Oropho. He bent down and grasped her right hand gently, felt the firm flesh beneath the gloves. With graceful sensitivity he dropped the little crystal wafer into her palm. “I don’t know who properly deserves this, but I can say for sure that you’re further up the line than me.”

The complete and utter lack of hesitation with which she flipped her hand over and pressed the disc back into his own palm struck Yasen as a hammer to the brain. It was the most starkly inhuman thing he’d ever experienced from a Maenali.

Somehow that felt appropriate.

“I’m dead, remember,” Oropho spoke with easy calm. “The dead cannot secure the past. Besides,” a quirky smile spread from her lips up toward her eyes. “You’re the rich lieutenant from a noble family. You can spread this far as it must go. We Maenalis are not the only heirs of Kaier.”

He did not understand, not truly, but he sensed the conviction, recognized that objection served no purpose. Fingers curled inward and secured the precious record. He tucked it in carefully within a tiny pocket below his chin, on the inside edge of his vest’s armor plate, next to his code register. No safer place on his body existed. “It’s probably still illegal to publicize this,” he loosened his own facial muscles then, smirked rather than smiled. “But lots of things leak out during wartime.”

“Including us, apparently,” Oropho laughed broadly. “I can’t feel those hole-spawned wedges drumming on my butt anymore. I think they managed to finish up smashing themselves. Took ‘em long enough.”

Yasen could not feel any vibrations either. “Let’s find out,” he pulled his pistol and advanced to the manual release wheel.

It took work to get the mechanism open. Grunting and sweating, Yasen discovered only shattered mechanical frames and a thick pall of smoke when he finally squeezed out past the mighty barrier. Engines driven past all tolerances, the droids lay wrecked in the posture of futile pursuit, unable to defy their programming when faced with the impossible. Yasen might have sympathized with the devices, sacrificed so pointlessly, had not Vasomyc’s ruined remains been found only a few steps further.

As it was, he steadied himself behind his faceplate, grasped Oropho in a fireman’s carry, and grunted and huffed his way up the stairs.

When they finally made their way out of the ancient corporate facility communication channels clicked into function and reconnected his helmet to the rest of the army.

He was completely befuddled to discover that they had not only somehow won, but that he’d been singled out for heroism.

Out of the scores of platoons exposed to the artillery barrage, his was the only one able to offer any meaningful resistance after it. The Nacla building was the only viable strongpoint in the whole of Dovica. Everywhere else the enemy had advanced unhindered, entirely as expected by the Athallian commanders who viewed their Maenali auxiliaries as naught but sacrifice. The few minutes delay bought by the members of Squads A and C against the armor column meant it was absent when the defenders’ main force counterattacked across a city-wide front. Bereft of heavy equipment, the other Republic units were swept aside. The armor column itself was surrounded and surrendered shortly thereafter.

Lieutenant Yasen Rost accepted a commendation and a promotion to Captain while staring into the face of a General he knew had callously dispatched his command to serve as nothing but a sponge for enemy missiles. He offered not even a whimper of protest.

In silence as they pinned the ribbon to his chest, he swore to do whatever it took to survive, to make it to the end of the war. That way he could keep the truth alive.

And bring Doctor Kaier’s words up from the darkness of the past.


Technical Notes
Optical data storage disks are a real-life technology, one developed in the last decade.

 

Chapter One
“The initial proof-of-concept tests revealed many useful things. Beyond proving the viability of our techniques, they offered a window into the operational method of first-generation development and the consequences of introducing sophonts into a previously untouched biosphere. I will not say that these efforts were failures, for they clearly were not, but compared to later efforts they were distinctly unrefined. In particular, the experiments on Maenali and Rucel, where new human-derivative species were produced on worlds with an already extant human presence, represented a distinctly flawed approach. Those results were consequently permanently contaminated.” – Dr. Elima Kaier, Memoirs


The building’s blueprints, both the ancient originals and a modern update dated to the most recent full remodel, declared the northeast corner of the top floor was an office. Any neutral analyst, experienced in modern shared workspace planning and design methodology, would assume based on the overall area that it housed at least four employees, more likely six, and aggressively even eight. They might well have considered it a prized workplace location, as the corner positioning and orientation to other nearby buildings allowed for truly spectacular views of Athallia’s renowned swirling sunsets.

It was not an office, at least not under any typical understanding of the term. In fact, the terminology of modern business architecture did not fit the contents at all. Proper description relied on an older word, one with little place in the parlance of major corporations, a sanctum.

Behind the dark wooden doors, not native timbers but instead off-world imports brought in at great expense, waited a precisely crafted space attuned to the desires of a single individual. The spacious interior was sumptuously decorated along distinct aesthetic lines favoring deeply stained hardwoods and cool yellow illumination. This spectrum demanded the wide windows remain shuttered and blocked in perpetuity, lest ambient light penetrate and ruin the presentation.

Athallia’s sky offended the occupant of this business-modulated throne room. Not for anything it was, but for all it was not.

Many might have passed judgment based upon those shutters, certain tabloids had even dared to do so on record, but Decima was not among them. This world’s sunsets might display pretty patterns, but they were no more hers than they were those of this study’s owner. She counted it one of the very few points held in common between them.

The heavy wooden doors stood at the end of a long hallway. There were no handles or knobs to allow access, only a small code panel slightly to the side. She punched a recognition sequence into the pad, stepped back, and waited. Her eyes were quite sharp, but despite knowing from the angle where the hidden pin camera must be, she could not resolve its resting place above the doors. Its merciless scan, silent and unseen, took no more than a breath.

Once finished the door gave an audible click as it unlocked.

It did not open. Visitors were not welcomed here. The resolve to enter must be summoned internally, willed to breach that wall of privacy.

Having been called to arrive at a particular time, Decima found this simple. She reached out, placed one hand on each panel, and pushed forward. Once a gap had opened sufficient to admit her narrow frame she slid through. The doors closed silently behind her as she strode into the chill environment within. She advanced cautiously. She did not yet know the reason behind her summons here yet, and dreaded the vaporous possibilities thrown out by idle speculation.

Though the windows might be covered sufficiently to block all external illumination, the space within harbored neither shadowy recesses nor dour gloom. Bright overhead lights bathed everything in a sumptuous yellow glow, a spectrum significantly brighter than even ambient noon outside. Additional secondary sconces highlighted various artworks mounted along the walls. Mostly landscapes, they featured forested backdrops and utilized a style Decima considered the absolute height of blandness. She considered this an appropriate reaction. She imagined appreciating human-made artworks as a bizarre sensory misalignment.

The room was well-furnished, filled with a variety of elegant, hand-crafted robust pieces and lined at the edges by discrete storage cabinets formed of wood, not metal. Even the wall niches and the compact servitor droids they concealed managed through some curious manipulation of sight lines and wall angles to remain unobtrusive and refined. All together a picture of classic elegance and restraint, or so the rare journalist invited within to observe generally proclaimed.

Positioned in the center, with clear space on all sides, was a working desk. Broad in surface and sweeping across a wide horseshoe shape, the cherry-wood frame failed to hide its brutish modernity. Technological attachments festooned the upper face. These ranged from the ordinary: a terminal monitor; datacard readers; and a high-end subspace transceiver; to the exotic: a powerful optical microscope, a droid personality imprinter, and a custom nano-shredder. None of the serenity of the outer regions reached there, only continual energy, dispersed across a thousand vectors.

That, Decima could appreciate. She approved of bustle. Her dread focused, instead, upon the wide space in front of the desk.

Between door and desk loomed three full meters of depth, and twice that in open width between furniture to the sides. Eighteen square meters of space, not a centimeter less, and nothing but a dark red rug touched them. It was a masterpiece, that covering, a hand-woven portrayal of a scrolling seascape in wonderful detail and aching beauty.

A brutal, terrible temptation, one that sent spikes of fear jolting down her spine.

Decima strode quickly across that expanse until she stood directly before the desk, as close as she dared. Eyes forward, her maneuver sought to hide the space from sight and memory, trick instincts into quiescence. It helped, a little.

Quickly and carefully, without stopping from her arrival motion, she bowed to the desk’s sole occupant, bending at the waist until her face stared at the floor. “Decima of Braid Kirukep, as requested.”

“Yes,” the man behind the desk did not turn away from his terminal screen to acknowledge her arrival. His dark eyes, trapped beneath focus wrinkles, remained fixed upon some high-resolution image the visitor could not see. “Punctual as always, very good.”

The least measure of praise this, delivered devoid of feeling, utterly perfunctory. Knowing human voices as she did now, Decima recognized all these signs, but the words grasped her heart hard all the same. Rarity demanded even meager acknowledgments be treasured carefully, saved against the long gulfs sure to come.

She fought the urge to skip, and a tandem desire to hop side to side. It was not easy. Twinges steaked up her legs and hips as muscles rebelled against such foreign, unnatural commands. Instincts might be tamed, but they never surrendered.

“You recently completed a long-term assignment, correct?” he still did not so much as glance in her direction. His voice offered no sign of familiarity, it revealed only the crafted corporate creation of aristocratic detachment. “The investigation into irregularities in output among the ice miner’s cooperative, as I recall.”

“Yes my lord duke, that is correct,” she measured her response with equivalent professionalism, respectful but unfeeling. It had not been a question. He knew her agenda perfectly, there did not exist any chance at all that he’d failed to review and memorize it prior to summoning her.

“According to your report, you spent almost two contiguous months either aboard starships or artificial space habitats during the process,” only with these words did he turn from his skin and point his lined, stony expression towards her. Dark orbs beneath firm brows, granite hard, fixed her in place. “How did you find them?”

An actual question at last. Decima bent her head to look down into that narrow, elongate, human face before formulating an answer. She took in the sandy-soil shaded coloration and sharply angled nose so characteristic of Athallia. The expression pressed upon those features offered nothing, perfect neutrality beneath gray-kissed temples. Delicately, she channeled a furious mixture of emotion and recollection together and compressed them down into a single word. “Cramped.”

Very slightly, a movement so limited as to be practically undetectable, the edges of his lips turned upwards. This ghostly indication, the barest vestige of a smile, vanished almost before it began. “A succinct summary,” his reply channeled hidden amusement into action. “but somewhat lacking in particulars. You did not have a problem with being in space itself? Or with the distance from planetary surfaces?”

“No my lord.” Space, the endless vastness between the stars, was glorious, and to be on a ship running between them invigorating. She’d even alleviated herself from the miserable compacted confines of one wretched mining outpost by running circuits around the hull, in a spacesuit, on the outside.

“So, you would not be averse to an assignment that dispatched you to a more,” he paused briefly, in search of the casual appearing but in fact tremendously deliberate act of contemplative calm that served to mark Arall Chavant’s trademark rhetorical style. “Expansive habitat?”

“No my lord,” Decima delivered her consent without hesitation, or consideration. She would do as she was bid. That was the only trail in this expanse. Any pain she faced upon the path would be endured.

Just as she would endure against the urge to pace about the carpet, and the bone-deep pain radiating through the center of her legs from the stillness fighting it demanded.

“Good,” he turned away again, his gorgeous blue and purple silk coat and its brocade gold wrapped down the double row of button claps ruffled with the gentle motion; the garment demanded envy by its very being. A single finger tapped the screen, shifted some unseen diagram. “Are you aware?” enforced idleness, presentation not need, constricted his steady baritone. “That four days ago someone anonymously published Doctor Elima Kaier’s Memoirs?”

Had lightning lanced down to the roof, slashed through the windows, and slammed into her skull it would still not have struck Decima with the force to match that faux-casual comment. She froze in place, against all predispositions. Muscles stilled, the perpetual shifting of weight from one foot to another halted utterly. Twitching fingers went numb. In this perfect petrified posture, she could audibly hear the silica nodules wrapped within her hair clatter against each other, a chaotic counterpoint to the roaring percussive rampage of her heartbeat.

“I thought,” she fought for words, for sound, for any means to landmark this impossible proclamation. “That all the crea-,” she just barely caught herself, testament to how unbound she’d become. “The doctor’s personnel records and writings were destroyed long ago, to keep them from the Pius Dea.” Weak speculation this, a hunt for clarification. Childish in truth, but it offered a safe exploration, steady, procedural. “Is this publication verified? Or is it a forgery?”

It would not be the first-time false artifacts attributed to the doctor emerged. An entire class of cons and swindlers had been built around that specific form of blasphemy.

“Your suspicions are reasonable,” it was almost, but not quite, a compliment. Just enough to pull Decima further. “But in this case the article is quite genuine. The publication included direct integration of a coded accession number registered with the optical storage manufacturer who created the archival disk in which it was embedded, which can, and has been, independently verified. Even if, in some unreasonably detailed deception, the falsification extended even to that source, my reading of the document itself leaves no room for doubt. The writing patterns and techniques are time specific, and the scientific knowledge embedded in production is immense, to create a forgery with this level of period accuracy and technical fluency is simply incompatible with a free release for public consumption. No, as unlikely as it seems, the Memoirs are real.”

Decima knew her master to be a deeply skeptical man. If the document provided sufficient proof to surpass his filters, she surely would not find any evidence to the contrary. Despite this certainty her mind, her will, demanded more. Something, anything, to anchor such an impossible emergence in solid earth rather than ephemeral waves. “How and where was this found when so many searches have failed?”

“The war,” Arall, amazingly, sighed, the exhalation a profound shock to the woman standing before him. Boundless cynicism propelled that expression. “It seems unmitigated violence has the power to slice through centuries of legal findings and economic observations. The anonymous publisher has chosen, irrationally, to be vague on the matter, but they imply that they simply found an archival copy buried in some long-neglected archive.” He tapped his screen, hidden images shifted and twisted, motion detected only through shadow play. “On Maenali probably. Bits of Nacla detritus are scattered everywhere in this sector, but the project conducted considerable work there, and the fighting was heaviest.”

Carefully, Decima swallowed a comment remarking that perhaps the war had possessed a modicum of utility after all. Pithy observations of this nature were not appreciated here. She did not need to prove herself intelligent, there were tests for that, only properly cultured. The growing fire in her knees made this latter demonstration more difficult by the second.

Some humans claimed pain helped them to focus. This, surely, was a base lie. Seeking to maximize her faculties before restraint failed, she cut to the core of the presented matter. “The Memoirs, do they have a bearing on my next assignment?” They could not possibly fail to do so, Arall did not engage in idle small talk with his employees. Such fraternization was unprofessional, a trait she knew he considered a high crime against etiquette.

“They do,” casual confirmation carried along unspoken satisfaction. “I have read through the Memoirs in detail since their publication. Truthfully, the text itself is overly verbose and meandering, Doctor Kaier’s writing is serviceable enough, but her genius clearly did not extend to literature. Far more interesting is what the text does not say, but instead implies. Her reflections convey a profound sense of pride and are utterly unapologetic in the defense of her accomplishments. She not only believed she’d achieved an extraordinary accomplishment, but she also had no qualms trumpeting it.”

These words implied some measure of surprise, which Decima struggled to understand. Surely Kaier’s recognition was both true and appropriate.

“I refuse to accept that this woman allowed the Nacla Corporation complete control over her techniques,” Arall continued. “The instruments of creation she unlocked were clearly something she intended to spread everywhere, the messaging in the text is not especially subtle on this matter. She did not limit this to mere prose but secreted a hidden code within the index.” A true smile took hold of his face now, backed in the glow of discovery. “I am utterly convinced that she violated her copyright agreements and hid a complete record of her research outside the reach of the Nacla Corporation and the fools who destroyed all the copies in fear of the Pius Dea.”

This was too much. The idea that the instruments of Doctor Kaier, the creator, might not be lost reached far beyond her ability to process standing still. Even the attempt left her skull ringing in agony. Shame whirled through her veins at the action, but no choice remained.

Feet shifted, knees bent, and with smooth acceleration she slid in motion. Less than three steps into her first circuit around the edges of the magnificent carpet the pain and wretched numbness began to flush from her system. Water rushed down a pipe suddenly unclogged, free to find the path again. Clarity sliced through fog and reclaimed the forefront of her mind.

While physical damage dissipated rapidly, shame lingered. No simple act of will could scrape it loose. Nausea wrapped around her inner organs, empowered by a palpable sense of failure, one that grew with each step. The knot there, birthed by the indulgence of her biology, the body’s victory over the mind, increased stride by stride.

But slowly. She knew this regret, this hideous constricting guilt. Surrender could be postponed, delayed. An hour yet remained before bile rushed up her throat and helpless purging consumed her.

More than enough time.

“You wish for me to find these hidden records and recover them,” despite her circular motion, Decima’s gaze remained relentlessly focused on her master’s face, turned in perfect time with her motion to match the shifting angle. Her head remained absolutely level throughout, never shifted by her steps. “Secure them for you exclusive use.”

“Certainly, I cannot imagine trusting anyone else with such capabilities,” Arall sounded almost amused. “Doctor Kaier unlocked the power to remake the galaxy, to bring life to stone and ice, even vapor, and not simply in theory, but proven robustly through the greed of my forebears. Who has the right to it? Those fools from the Republic? They cannot even stop fighting over which planet deserves to be the capital. Everyone in the galaxy? Madness,” he scoffed here, the verbal tick easily detected. “No, only a very few can ever be trusted with such a potent legacy, with the choices it offers.” He looked at Decima, eyes stone hard.

She faced down that scowl but counted every one of the nearly microscopic signals of disapproval.

“You have served me well as a field agent,” Arall noted without emotion or emphasis. “I hold to confidence that you can carry out this task. The encoded sections of the index are clear in the direction they point. The answers are hidden within the gateway to Doctor Kaier’s project.”

He did not need to say the name, Decima knew only one place could fit that description. She agreed with the assessment immediately. It was the logical place to hide the secrets of the project, secure within the capstone. The Depot, she was to go there.

It was a gift, though Arall would never understand it as such. She had always wished to make that pilgrimage.

“I will copy to you everything I have elucidated to date, and provide updates should the text reveal anything further,” his tone shifted subtly. The volume did not increase, but the syllables now wrapped themselves around a hidden rod of implacable authority. He spoke now not as man, but as Duke. The whole weight of House Chavant, mightiest of nobles on Athallia and in the whole sector, gathered behind every command. “Find me the secrets Kaier hid and bring them back. It is of the utmost import.”

“Of course my lord, it will be done,” he’d never spoken that last phrase to her before, but Decima well knew its meaning. Her heart thundered at the implications. Complete operational freedom, implicit license to break any law, shatter all taboos, everything to be forsaken for the demands of the result. The immensity of the trust behind those words thrilled. The consequences attached to failure terrified.

In a conscious effort to solidify the trail ahead she dared one partial inquiry. “The Depot is quite large,” the specifications of such a critical sacred locale were long known to her. “And hosts a substantial population. A search will require considerable resources.”

Arall did not so much as blink. “I have assigned two million credits to your operational account. If circumstances justify the need, additional expenditures can and will be authorized.” The white hair at his temples flashed as he suddenly rose from his seat to standing in a single swift motion. “The profit potential behind this prize is limitless. No price is too high. Do you understand?”

She stopped her pacing at once. Quickly as she could she turned to face him straight on, shoulders matched. Heedless of the brutal stinging agony it demanded from toes to neck she dropped to one knee on the carpet and bowed her head. “I am an instrument of my duke’s will. I shall give freely all I possess.”

Decima of Braid Kirukep lacked the worth to hold the secrets of Doctor Elima Kaier, her creator. No Rucel, no member of any of the hundreds of Nacla species those secrets gave form, could ever be. How could they lay hand to the power of their maker? The very thought entwined blasphemy and madness.

Arall Chavant was human, the same species as Kaier. His lineage was heir to the Nacla name as much as any other and strong in its own right. If anyone lived who was worthy, it must be he. She could believe that.

She would believe that.

It had to be enough.


Technical Notes
This chapter contains an important reference to the Pius Dea, an important but somewhat poorly known piece of Legends canon. Though this story is set one thousand years after the Pius Dea Era concluded, it's influence remains considerable over events.

 

Chapter Two
“Though conceived and designed in isolation, the various sub-projects were part of a greater scheme. While the economic promises of corporate speculators hold no interest for me beyond a source of funding, it should not be assumed that I was uninterested in the potential processes beyond initial crafting and stabilization. The potential for interaction, for community creation among all that was built, is a fascinating development demanding considerable attention. However, it equally demands restraint. Individual systems can be modeled and, in extremis, contained. Combination increases possible outcomes exponentially. Truly, the possibilities are endless, and endlessly fascinating.” - Doctor Elima Kaier, Memoirs.

In official government documents the station went by the name: Harlax System Fuel and Supply Depot, a boring, complex, corporate, but solidly informative appellation. Inevitably everyone who referred to it in actual conversation adopted a vernacular label. Throughout the sector it was known simply as The Depot. Simply, easy to remember, and totally devoid of useful information content. Such incompatibilities were considered by most space travelers utterly ordinary, the natural state of the galaxy.

Most of the pieces of the official label represented their implications intuitively in terms of purpose and services available. The only potentially confusing bit was the Harlax System. Named systems were, in and of themselves, unusual. The corporations and governments that cataloged stars usually utilized some complex combination of acronym-based categories and random numbers. Names were avoided, especially in the case of spectacularly ordinary red dwarf stars that had managed to discard any planets they once possessed billions of years ago. In a galaxy with a hundred billion stars, any lacking a habitable planet were unlikely to acquire an actual name.

Driven by curiosity, and with more than a little spare time to indulge in hobbyist research during the voyage, Yasen made a point of searching out an explanation behind this little irregularity. The answer was easily found in official encyclopedias. Harlax was the name of the human scout who’d been the first living person to physically reach this star.

Ancient Republic law gave such individuals the right to append a proper name to the astronomic designation if they wished. Most scouts did not bother unless they found a habitable planet at the same time, and some held out for worlds inhabitable by their own species. Commentary also suggested that, while the first-in-system arrival had essentially free reign to name a star whatever they wished, naming one after yourself was regarded as unbelievably gauche.

The ancient explorer Harlax, now some seven thousand years deceased, had therefore been doubly anomalous. Yasen wondered if he’d simply been arrogant and crude, or eerily prescient. It was humbling to think he might have guessed that this seemingly unremarkable little star would end up holding a post of great import.

Initially Yasen agreed with the consensus that Harlax had done something truly crude. It was hard to recognize naming a star, of all things, after yourself as anything other than crass and uncultured. However, as he thought on the matter further, and the slow passage through space to the Depot encouraged extensive introspection, he came to recognize a sort of cunning, even devious, efficacy behind the move.

From the perspective of keeping your name in the mouth of others for as long as possible, naming a celestial body after yourself ranked rather high on the list of options. Especially when the object in question was a low mass star with a projected lifespan of two trillion years. It was a solid bet that the star itself wouldn’t be the limiting factor that caused you to be forgotten.

For his part, Yasen found even contemplating such massive, eon-level lengths of time troubling. History was unmanageable enough as it was considering no more than the Republic's fifteen thousand years of existence. Trying to contemplate something that would last one hundred million times as long left his head spinning, imagination strained. He accepted that his reach extended to a much more localized scope. The Athallia sector's history was little more than eight millennia, and The Depot's just over half of that. Such numbers were much more manageable, especially considering the prolonged periods of dormancy that simplified the record.

Public information regarding the system and its sole non-stellar occupant of consequence remained limited. What there was tended to comprise mostly broadly useless trivia such as the identity of the aforementioned Harlax. Yasen had studied everything he could find prior to departure, and spent the journey engaged in an intensive course of repetition on the matter.

Few alternatives existed to find useful entertainments. The Depot might be an important regional trade hub, but passenger access, especially for someone not affiliated with a large freight firm, was in distinctly short supply. The number of captains willing to conduct transport was limited. Those whose vessels met Yasen's personal threshold for safe travel practically non-existent.

Captain Mrenks' Linelighter met both criteria, if only just. Mrenks, however, took the surprisingly common space captain's view that the ground-dwelling were some kind of bizarre exotic animal who needed to be kept under extremely tight control and must be isolated such that they were never even in proximity to any important systems while the ship was underway. All passengers were kept to confined to their quarters or to a very tightly spaced set of communal galley and recreation zones. The very act of asking to see the rest of the ship invited a sucker punch from the bosun, an event one of Yasen's less patient fellow travelers induced on the second day.

The limits grated on Yasen, but mostly in the form of low-key annoyance, not anything truly onerous. He tried to pretend he was spending the ten days cramming for exams. That comparison was nice and safe, far less dangerous than the other reflection on extensive confined waiting that kept cropping up in the dark hours when he tried to find sleep atop the horrid foldout cots allotted to the tiny closet-sized cabin he'd paid entirely too much to rent.

Anything to avoid the remembrance of the siege.

He read, he studied, he played games on his datapad, and during the joint mealtimes he joined in idle conversation in the passenger galley. No one spoke much, of course, or said anything about themselves. The Depot was not some sort of tourist stop or idle travel destination. Its principle normal visitors were colonists, merchant crew, and resupplying miners, all sets that utilized their own specialized vessels rather than hitching along aboard a tramp freighter. Anyone journeying as an independent passenger was either visiting family, in which case it was impolite to pry and Yasen had no desire for the details anyway, or on business that demanded discretion.

Of course, he did not fit either category properly. His family firmly desired to pretend he did not exist, and the allowance they deposited to his account each month was deliberately designed to keep him from engaging in business of any kind. The one time any of the others asked why he was headed for the Depot he claimed to be a market researcher for the Corellian Engineering Corporation and in lieu of elaboration proffered his best 'you need to move aside now, private' glare.

Civilian context robbed that expression of its full potency, but no additional inquiries were made.

On the penultimate day prior to scheduled arrival he holed up on the tiny, uncomfortable cot and performed a full refresh on his program. He reread both Casuil Brank's Travels in Nacla Space and Doctor Elima Kaier's Memoirs from cover to cover yet again. The former was a truly insipid travel journal, written in a bitterly arrogant style, but Brank was the only popular author to have physically visited the Depot and several worlds beyond in person in the post-war period. All other sources were decades out of date. No other recent publications existed at all, and shipboard gossip was both prejudiced and untrustworthy.

This done, he made plans for one final gesture prior to arrival. Passenger confinement to quarters was a matter of official rules, disseminated by the captain, but it fell to the bosun to enforce such dictates. The bosun, in the grand tradition of so many non-commissioned naval personnel in a chain that stretched back to the age of water-based ships, took bribes. He was not the least bit circumspect about the move, which meant the captain surely knew and was receiving a personal share of such kickbacks. Yasen knew that was generally a superior situation. Open and accepted corruption had a certain security absent from the clandestine kind.

Unlike the other passengers he did not seek to acquire female companionship or doses of illicit substances. Nor did he have any need to discretely hide goods in the cargo hold away from the eyes of customs officers, but he did have a request, one that could only be made real by dropping a sizeable pile of credit chits into the sailor's palm. “I want a full view of the Depot on final approach,” he broached the request quietly, but firmly. “Live, with my own eyes, not through a screen.”

“That's stupid,” the grizzled spacer replied instantly. “Perfectly good vids.”

“I did not ask your opinion,” the officer's voice jolted out of Yasen, surged with all the power connected to the needs of promises made and memories linked. “I directed you to make it happen.”

The bosun over-topped Yasen by at least ten centimeters and out-massed him by easily twenty kilos. He stepped back all the same, weathered experience bound up into his very bones could recognize command presence, and deference penetrated equally deep alongside that instinct. “Fine, it's your money,” he shrugged, diffused tension out through the time-honored recipe of cynical glumness. “There's a spot, but it won't be comfy.”

“I'll manage,” restraints slammed back into place. Maenali was far behind, in time and space alike now. It needed to stay there.

Three hours prior to scheduled arrival the bosun led Yasen out of the passenger section and through deserted corridors down to the lower decks. “Down there,” he pointed to an access ladder embedded on the side of a floor shaft. “Stay put until I come get you.”

With a single nod of assent Yasen scrambled down.

He discovered that the vantage point offered to him was not any sort of viewing gallery, but rather the ship's aft ventral gun turret. From that clear ceramic bubble at the bottom of the ship he possessed a surprisingly good view of space. Though the ship's bulk blocked half the sky, the other hemisphere was entirely clear. He'd expected much less.

It helped immensely that the actual guns were gone.

Linelighter was a CEC-made HM-120 class, heavy mixed-use freighter. Along with her unoriginal class name she'd come out of the factory with fore and aft turrets on both the dorsal and ventral faces, and turret mounts on the port and starboard for those captains inclined towards additional firepower. Not long ago that was the majority. Freighters in this portion of the galaxy had long bristled with weapons.

The war changed that. A few rail turrets might dissuade raiders in converted merchantmen, but truly military craft laughed at such paltry defenses and the sector was awash in surplus patrol ships. At the same time, armaments were in short supply for those deadly little ships. Captain Mrenks had clearly chosen to walk the resulting path toward swift profits. Three years had not seen the guns replaced.

Their absence made Yasen nervous, a little. A ship was at its most vulnerable during a final approach, in the interval between the safety of hyperspace and the protection of a secure dock.

Thankfully the Harlax system offered succor against that risk by virtue of astronomy. He could even see it from his position.

A bright sphere of deep purplish red, small and cool, the little star projected only lightly into hyperspace. Incoming ships could emerge quite close to its comforting light. At the same time the sides were guarded.

To Yasen's right space glowed a bizarre melange of green and orange, the light of the distant galactic core refracted through the thick gas clouds of a thick nebula called Pirax. To his left there was only a vast darkness. Starlight limited and distant behind a veil of nothing. It could not be seen, but a terror waited there, the lightness crushing gravity of the black hole Theodrir, a lost love gone forever.

Together these vast interstellar presences formed a beautiful contrast surrounding the little star, but in hyperspace each projected a hideous shadowy labyrinth capable of seizing any ship that dared pass close and smearing it to fragments across inter-dimensional boundaries. Little Harlax floated a violet beacon at the center of a long twisting valley, the only path between those terrible cliffs.

With no planets orbiting the small star the space station could be placed without a need to dodge their paths, and it floated just within the hyperspace access interval.

Total approach time from emergence to docking measured just under two hours. Some star systems, according to Yasen's research, mandated two days, or even more. Inner system asteroids, a danger in some systems, were absent here, cannibalized to serve as the raw materials for the station. Inside five AU from the star the maw of heavy industry swallowed up everything larger than a cabinet. Any raider would be forced to approach completely in the clear, an impossible assault.

The absent guns would not be missed today.

Years of neglect had left the gunnery seat, still attached to a gyroscopic swivel-mount, worn down to base metal. It was cold, hard, and induced an ache in the rear almost immediately. After a few moments the pain started to crawl up his back too.

After a few minutes, he stopped noticing.

From the initial vantage the Depot was nothing more than a glowing dot in the endless void, distinguished from distant stars only by its variant silvery spectrum and from other starships by the lack of relative motion. The number of nearby ships was substantial, a snap estimate suggested three score. Traffic moved in constant flow to and from the Depot, but the patterns displayed across the array of running lights and engine flares told a curious story.

The great majority of ships in the system approached from the opposite direction. It took no mastery of orbital mechanics to recognize the meaning behind this. They were coming to Harlax from the other side, not from the Republic-held Athallia sector, but the wild region beyond known as Nacla Space. Swirling motions of numerous vessels revealed the Depot's role as a gatekeeper, the sole connecting point between those two divided realms. Thousands of stars hidden behind the gap, never touched the Republic anywhere but here.

They were at the very edge now. Not of the known, never that, but of control. The power of the Republic, so recently extended in bitter bloodshed out this far once more, reached no further. This was the last fingernail-edge grasp of what some, though few Yasen could say he respected, called civilization.

Nervous anticipation, cast cold as ice, filled his belly.

In time, as Linelighter raced down along its docking path, the full scope of the Depot resolved into view. It grew until it dominated the sky beneath the freighter. The sight induced constant motion upon the observer, he shifted back and forth, spinning about. He contorted his neck wretchedly in search of new angles, a vain attempt to take it all in at once.

A ring, that one simple word encapsulated the superstructure perfectly. A single cylindrical loop, broad and wide after the fashion of a plain metal band worn on a finger.

It hung parallel to the star, positioned so the broad outer circumference maximized exposure to the soft light of the primary. Solar panels coated the outer surface, drank in the light across their endless rotation, a tried-and-true method to power such an edifice. The vast photovoltaic carpet broke apart at one point alone; there a series of elongated spars, pale and barely visible in their narrowness, shot out from the outer surface. Six in total those struts, arrayed in the classic six-star pattern of a jeweler's setting, with only the gemstone missing.

These, Yasen knew, were their destination. Ships of all sizes and shapes clung to those slender poles; tiny beads locked in place. Kilometers long, the bars were hollow. Through their internal tubes passage could be had to the inside, the habitable interior surface of the great ring.

Docking fixtures made for a moving target, for the entire structure possessed a slow, regular rotation. He did not need to calculate the rate of rotation, he knew it was pegged to supply the interior with a perfectly standard one g. An old method, rotational gravity, far more cumbersome than the gravitic generators utilized even by aged and dilapidated ships such as Linelighter, but an effective one. Reliable too, and cheap; once spun up into position it took almost no energy to maintain the rotation. At the Depot's scale the difference was considerable, artificial gravity would require more power than all other functions combined.

Proper sense of that scale, of immensity, eluded Yasen. The star was far too large and even the greatest of bulk tanker ships too small to build a ratio comparison. Nothing he saw could convince un-augmented human senses that the statistics he'd memorized long before departure held true. The basal portions of his mind refused to accept that anything crafted by sophonts could approach such immensity.

Official records proclaimed the Depot's ring was two hundred kilometers in diameter and had a width of fifty. It was slender in the third dimension, only five kilometers thick, and most of that open air. It was not, so the encyclopedias declared, the largest space station in existence. It was not even in that class. In fact, the same basic design could be scaled up to almost ten times the current diameter before even the strongest materials failed. In the poorly developed Athallia sector, however, the Depot stood unchallenged.

And it was certainly the largest artificial object Yasen had ever seen.

His mind whirled, filled with a thousand questions. Twenty-five hundred years since it had been built to current specifications but preserved by the sterile environment of open space and the steady maintenance of thousands of droids the Depot appeared as if it had been built yesterday. Long abandoned, the changing fortunes of galactic history breathed life into it once again a century past, tied it to the endless ebb and flow of interstellar trade. Once empty, home only to machines, it now hosted nearly four million residents.

Beings he was eager to meet.

As Linelighter pulled in, engines cut and maneuvers slowed to a crawl alongside the collection of magnetic clamps and extensible docking tubes, Yasen reached a hand over and tapped his chest at the top of the sternum. Fingers briefly contracted around the profile of the crystalline disk that hung there beneath his shirt. The legacy of Doctor Kaier he wore for luck and resolve, the same words that called him to this distant station. The only place where her many creations gathered as one; formed what might generously be called a community.

It had never been a choice, not from the moment he found that little chip. The instant the war ended it swallowed up his mind, drove him onward, further, and positioned this as the only possible destination. As the ship shuddered and creaked to a stop he finally felt at peace. He'd arrived at last.


Technical Notes
The distance Yasen is travelling – Maenali-Athallia-Harlax – is quite small in galactic terms, only a few hundred light years. However, it takes a full ten days because of both limited hyperlanes in the sector and the much weaker hyperdrives of 9,900 BBY.

Harlax is an M7V red dwarf star, with a mass of roughly 1/10th that of the sun. Given the way mass shadows project into hyperspace, it follows that you could drop out of hyperspace much closer to such a small star than could safely be done with a typical G-type.

The Depot is a Bishop Ring. This is a very real proposed space habitat type.

 

Chapter Three

Yasen had once read that no more than one percent of all sophonts in the galaxy engaged in space travel. As such, his limited experience put him well ahead of the curve. Nevertheless, he knew a handful of roundtrips from Maenali to Athallia, a mere twenty-three light years apart, did not a veteran spacer make. The present excursion, at roughly one hundred and sixty, nearly doubled his total distance traveled in space. Hardly anything at all considering a galaxy one hundred and twenty thousand light years in diameter. He’d never even left the limited confines of his home sector.

Privately, he found this perfectly acceptable. Space travel was a dangerous business. Long voyages across the galaxy or season-spanning work details on freighters were the province of trained merchantmen, not dilettantes. Even those usually gave the practice up after a decade or two.

Beyond the risks, shipboard journeys were cramped and grungy, and he was in no hurry to repeat this one. Eagerness to end the interregnum of passage made the last challenge both more irritating and less thrilling than he’d expected after gazing upon the grand vista of the Depot.

Docking on a giant spinning ring represented a truly virgin experience.

After the bosun took him back to quarters Yasen and the other passengers were instructed to gather their possessions and clear the tiny cabins. Linelighter did not bother with any sort of luggage service, not even droids. Passengers were expected to handle their own loads, with the unspoken implication that anything left behind now belonged to the crew and would shortly be pawned to pay for grog. Excepting a single couple, who seemed to have squeezed the contents of an entire apartment into a succession of strap-sealed trunks, the travelers packed light. With only a single heavy rucksack and a hard-sided case a meter-and-a-half in length of his own, Yasen fit among them easily.

Once ready, the bosun gathered the ragged assembly in the lounge. With the assistance of the purser, he settled both outstanding bills and bribes alike before allowing anyone to depart. The problematic family with the trunks received a glare, and an order to not move until the surely furious XO could sort them out. The others were led on ahead up to the airlock.

No ceremony, or even-gladhanding, followed. The doors opened and they were swiftly shoved out down the personnel access tube toward the attached docking spar’s waiting platform. Without so much as a word, the bosun slammed the doors immediately once all were clear.

The docking spars extended from the ring like long spines, but they were angled to allow maximally safe traffic by starships, not the comfort of occupants. Deflected slightly off from the axis of rotation, the false gravitational impact of the centrifugal force upon the passengers made for instant misery. It pulled them down with greater strength than standard and at the same time bent everyone to the side. Every step felt as if walking up an angled ramp, only the angle changed if you turned.

Several of the passengers vomited, staining the floors and walls until cleaning droids cleared the slick metal surfaces. Yasen managed to keep his breakfast down, but his footsteps stumbled, and he struggled to keep his balance. After a few steps he dropped his rucksack from his back and resorted to dragging it instead. The heavy mass of the bag served to anchor him.

Unbalanced, off-directional gravity was no place for an organic worker, and the docking spars accordingly did not possess any. Autonomous droids and remote-operated drones skipped about the spar on various duties, leaving the small group of passengers the only living presence. A small four-legged unit, in the spider-style Yasen would come to recognize as ubiquitous on the Depot, guided them using arrow signals on a broadside display panel the short distance to a large passenger elevator. Customs, it appeared, was willing to wait until its targets were within a proper rotational gravitational frame.

The elevator itself was nothing but a metal box and a control panel, utterly without amenities. Moving people was clearly a secondary priority compared to the mighty freight corridors that occupied the nearly ninety percent of the docking spar’s two-hundred-meter diameter. Upon entry the little spider-form machine jumped up to cling to the ceiling, a frightful maneuver considering its speed and ability to defy the heavy weight pressing down on everyone. A single light flashed green atop its sign panel. No other warning came before they lurched into motion.

According to the station’s specifications, the docking spars each stretched for fifteen kilometers from the ring’s base. Though Linelighter had not docked on the end, the elevators nevertheless kicked with powerful acceleration and moved at great speed. The experience was strange and brutal upon the inner ear. Even as acceleration pressed them down, their ascent reduced the impact of rotational gravity back down toward standard one kilometer at a time. At the height of their final deceleration, Yasen felt as if his ankles were trying to fly free of his boots.

He’d ridden in ballistic atmospheric rockets as part of his military training. This was no less pummeling upon the ligaments.

It took him the space of several deep breaths to gather himself and start walking after they finally came to a stop. He took some comfort in the equalization of pressure and gravity. Here at the bottom of the ring everything returned to standard, and the slow rotation no longer remained noticeable. His body was quick to pretend he stood on the solidity of a planet once again.

As the passengers recovered, they filed out. Another droid with a flashing signal panel waited there to guide them. This one was a roller model, typical of stable, sterilized industrial spaces. Its multi-directional top panel displayed a message in four common languages that all passengers were required to follow it to customs. The visuals were matched by a digital broadcast, on repeat. Yasen’s wrist display picked this up at once and relentless beeped until he silenced it manually. A quick check revealed that all other access to the Depot’s networks was blocked. He assumed customs would unlock that function upon clearance.

That much was within expectations. It also suggested that the very worst rumors about the Depot were not true. Enough authority existed to at least maintain control of the internal datanets.

The walk to meet up with customs proved unexpectedly lengthy. He’d not thought traversing several kilometers of winding passages looped around massive freight elevators and industrial conduits a normal part of the arrival experience. Even with various moving floor panels to speed them along and rest their backs, his bags grew heavy over time.

Yasen discovered that, despite his efforts, he was completely incapable of detecting the ring’s slow and steady turn. Nor did simple experiments, like tossing a rolled-up sock down the corridor ahead, reveal centripetal influences either. It seemed the scale of structure was sufficient to hide such impacts at the scale of human observation.

It did wonders for his composure.

After a time, he realized that their elongated and twisting course served to channel all arrivals to a single point. Considering this from the perspective of the customs operation he saw this made logical sense. From the opposite side, the one he was currently trudging along, it represented truly abysmal customer service. He suspected the local authorities simply did not feel obligated to care.

The privileges of sitting on a hyperspace bottleneck.

Aside from incipient back pain, the overlong journey bothered him little. He was in no special hurry after all. Several others grumbled as the trek wore on, however, even those he was certain had made the trip many times before. Catching bits and pieces of gossip as it echoed up and down the empty metal halls, he discerned that apparently the distance from the two docking spars reserved for dedicated passenger vessels was considerably shorter.

They stopped at the aperture of a second elevator. Not square as all those passed previously, this one was circular in structure. It also represented the end of unrestricted access. A pair of wedge-shaped turbofan-driven hovering drones waited on either side of the door. Hard-edged double-barreled gun mounts sprouted from their dorsal surfaces.

Hands clenched against the straps of his rucksack as Yasen saw the things. He knew those forms, intimately. A spark kindled in his chest upon recognition. Cold flames summoned from the depths of memory; fueled by loss.

Military surplus, he knew they must be. These little industrial death dealers spread further and further along the hyperlanes each year. Soon, he suspected grimly, they would be everywhere.

The guard droids did not react to the mixture of fear and hatred they provoked on the faces of Yasen and several others in the group. Their processor matrix did not possess emotional emulation. They killed without feeling, and exercised restraint in the same measure. Glares from the travelers suggested they were not much admired, but they were incapable of caring about the opinions of others.

Their current deployment perfectly suited simple automatons. They could hold position for days on end and would never complain, never relax their vigilance, and never grow bored; all at a fraction of the cost of a living guard detail. Yasen suspected that if organic sentries had once held this post, they never would again.

Such thoughts left him muddled. Perhaps it was progress, but it felt dangerous. One level up, he relaxed immediately upon discovering that the Port Authority’s Customs Service continued to resist such militarized mechanization. He’d no desire to try and explain his motives to droids.

The Linelighter’s passenger group stepped off the elevator into a massive area. It was truly vast, as large as any enclosed space Yasen had ever been within. At the same time, it was almost completely empty. Based on assembly counting techniques he’d learned in officer training, he suspected as many as twenty-five thousand humanoids could stand waiting in this space. That was probably an overestimate, civilian families sprawled out in queues and carried large amounts of luggage rather than standing in ranks as soldiers did, but regardless of the precise number the setup was clearly intended for huge numbers.

Grand pillars, lengthy marked walkways, regularly spaced refresher stations, and empty stalls suited for concession hookups all confirmed a design capable of processing thousands in continual stream.

Almost all of this remained completely abandoned.

Standing signposts, placed on stations not anchored to the floor but marked now by the dust of decades and the subsidence of centuries, directed passengers to the one portion of the extensive array of customs stations still in use. A bored looking guard waited by a junction of several elevators. He gave them a single glance before waving them onward in the right direction. His eyes returned to the datapad in his lap without hesitation, barely acknowledged their existence.

Yasen hung back among the gaggle of assorted travelers and studied this sentry for a moment. The man wore a uniform, a combination of deep blue and soft red with badges on each shoulder. Features rattled off inside his skull, assessing measuring, determining. He caught himself in the middle of the process, triggered by the cut and pattern of the garment. In response a scowl stretched across his face and he forced his feet to push ahead.

Human. Male. Late twenties to early thirties age. Fit but not imposing; not mandated, personal habit. Uniformed in durable workwear, bland coloration, not new, not cut for flash, bureaucratic rather than martial. Low-grade body armor vest, no helmet, no arm or leg plates. Minimal vigilance.

The pieces flowed together into a coherent picture as he stepped forward. This man conformed almost exactly to expectations, an utterly mediocre security official. He represented no threat so long as his authority was not questioned, was probably moderately corrupt at most, and knew how to use his weapon but would be shocked if he had to do so.

None of this would have been out of place on Athallia or Maenali, which surprised Yasen. Dark rumors and wild warnings surrounded the Depot, claimed it sat at a level of violence barely above that of an active war zone. Many claimed the Halrax Port Authority, the station’s nominal governing body, was nothing but a bloodthirsty militia. Either customs duties were heavily isolated from other operations, or the scuttlebutt presented a distinctly incomplete picture.

He recognized that he needed to figure out the truth quickly, though neither possibility was precisely comforting. Hands tightened about the handle of the hard case he carried as he walked toward the operational counters. It was too early in the day for surprises.

Active customs operations utilized perhaps one percent of the available space. The Depot’s creators planned big, but the current landlords were content with much smaller means. They’d marked out a line upon the floor in front of a quartet of security booths. Two officers occupied each one, one to talk and the other to run baggage scanning gear. Further back several more stood behind large metal examination tables and glowered in the general direction of all who approached. Though all wore pistols, Yasen spotted no heavy weapons, long guns, or defensive droids here.

Perhaps one hundred individuals stood in line before the business travelers off Linelighter. All appeared to be mining station crew, recognizable by their standard mass-produced utility coveralls, ore and oil stains, cutting tools, and builds shaped by heavy labor in cramped spaces. Roughly nine in ten were male. They were split into two rough groups. The larger one, about two thirds of the total, was human. The smaller were a near-human species with rust-red skin and violet scales instead of hair. The image tantalized in familiarity, but the name slipped away as Yasen tried to extract it from the web of memory. A Nacla species for certain, but he could not recall which one.

There were just so many of them. Dr. Kaier had not dreamed small. Nor had she given up swiftly.

The mine crew line advanced quickly. Aside from one or two chosen for a few brief questions, the balance of the group simply flashed identity cards in front of the scanners and were waved past. They were clearly regular visitors of a type well-expected. Little scrutiny applied to them. The HPA’s customs officers paid considerably more attention to Linelighter’s eclectic mix of business and pleasure seekers.

Bags were scanned, harsh questions were asked, and a portly man who’d claimed in the galley to sell specialty cosmetics received a pat down for contraband in full view of everyone. Despite this increase in attention the atmosphere mostly remained relaxed. Several of the group’s members were clearly repeat visitors and exchanged gossip and tasteless jokes with the officers. The possibility of smuggling arose more as a sort of friendly game than a serious law enforcement priority.

Not until his turn finally came up did Yasen realize that, in his eagerness to observe the process, he’d ended up last in line. In the distance behind another group of coverall-clad ship’s crew was making their way over from the elevators, but the massive nature of the concourse left him alone before the numerous eyes of the port authority during a considerable gap.

Even the completely innocent would not welcome such a position, and he would hesitate to apply such a label to himself. The case handle felt suddenly hot in his hand.

A middle-aged officer, human and graying at the temples, called him up. This man scanned Yasen up and down and braced in the posture of one to whom anything unexpected was immediately categorized as unwelcome. His glare made no mistake as to the qualifications of the person standing in front of his desk.

“Identification?” he demanded behind a tight scowl.

Yasen handed over a Republic-issued identity card. A complex combination of advanced printing technology and authentication circuitry, it was shiny and unmarked; newly issued immediately prior to the voyage.

“Yasen Rost,” the guard read the name off his screen as he passed the card beneath an optical scanner many times older than the item it was presently examining. “Republic citizen, resident of Maenali. Looks like it’s your first time here.” The scowl deepened; edges of the mouth twitched slightly. “What’s the purpose of your visit to the Depot?”

“Research,” Yasen long knew this question was coming, and he’d decided on an answer before he boarded Linelighter. It had the virtue of being true, in a generalized way, and was vague enough to avoid triggering any immediate red flags.

The custom’s officer didn’t blink. “What kind of research?” He bit off the words with a distinctive combination of disinterest and disdain.

“Ethnography and linguistics.” Spoken aloud this statement carried a notable elitist gloss and dredged up all the naivety Yasen though the war had beaten out of him. “I’m attempting to chart language-based cultural convergence among Nacla species.”

The guard’s poster drew up slightly at this, and his stare deepened. “An academic? You got a research letter?”

“Ah, no,” Embarrassment, warm, soft, and squishy, sloshed across his chest. He felt the lack of credentials deeply, a piece of gear missing from his kit. Fabricating a link would not serve, however, such things were too easy to check. He could only take solace that this encounter would likely fade swiftly from his interrogator’s memory. “I’m not affiliated with any university, institution, or firm, just a hobbyist.”

No words came in response to that. Instead, the officer turned back to his screen. He tapped a series of rapid commands across the keys, squinted hard at the results. “Hobbyist?” so submerged in skepticism was this word that it transformed into raw disdain. “And how long do you intend to stay?”

“Probably six months, at a minimum,” another pre-prepared answer. “Maybe longer if I find a promising line of research.” Following the publication of the Memoirs, Yasen knew without the slightest doubt that he needed to, must, come here. Not that he’d ever managed to effectively articulate his reasons. But whether the Depot was the goal, or merely the first step on a journey remained beyond his understanding.

“And you don’t need to work? You can support yourself through a half-year vacation?” The officer’s face communicated disbelief easily, his lined countenance cascaded through a remarkable series of skeptical expressions. “Depot life’s expensive. There are no freebies here. You go broke, you get the boot, and that means mining.”

Yasen had come prepared with research on space habitat life. In a closed system, with only a certain amount of air, water, and calories available, indigence could not be allowed. Debt slavery to asteroid miners was a light fate compared to some places. He had an answer to this all-important question at the ready. A quick turn of his wrist presented the image preset to the display to the officer. “This is my current liquid funds, held through an account with Athallia First Financial, a financial institution I know for certain operates an office here. Based on my estimates, it should suffice for, well, a considerable span.”

At last, this revelation broke through the deep-seated bureaucratic cynicism of the man. “Stang,” he cursed sharply. “Where in the nebula does that money come from?”

“It is not widely advertised, but the Rost family controls roughly half of the property on the continent of Suestira, on Maenali,” Yasen bit back a sigh before saying those words. He did not add that this applied only to the human settlements on the small amount of drainable land. The swamps were left to the Maenalis, considered valueless. “I’m not main line, but I still get an allowance.”

“Must be nice,” those few words contained unspoken multitudes. The officer leaned back, suddenly relaxed. Apparently, the rich were not considered a security risk.

Yasen bit back another sigh at this.

“What about cash?” A mild follow up. “Are you carrying large amounts? A thousand credits or more?”

“No, just a few hundred,” He might not be a seasoned traveler, but Yasen liked to think he knew to avoid a few obvious pitfalls.

“Okay then,” the officer bent back forward, eyes bright with curiosity. “One more thing before we scan your bags. What’s in the case?”

“A Corellian Arms Combined Field Infantry Combat System, Specification: Rifleman,” Yasen rattled it off as he’d practiced, sounding like a sales tech. He swiped over to a second document on his wrist display, pre-loaded for inspection. “I have a license for civilian possession issued by the Athallian Defense Ministry, though according to my understanding of Harlax Port Authority ordinances there’s no need for such qualifications here.” Like most frontier outposts, the Depot had a decidedly pervasive approach to weapons laws.

Slowly, with a careful visible deliverance that forced Yasen to watch patiently, the man took a visible deep breath and gripped the sides of his chair. “Technically, you’re right, law says any resident or visitor can carry any personal armament of their choice, but you’d better know how to use that rig, otherwise it’s not going anywhere but on a cause of death report.”

“I do,” a simple, short expulsion of words, done as soon as they’d begun, but they hung frozen in the air a long while.

Casual boredom faded from the official’s expression. Practiced observational skills came to the fore. “You saw action then?” He asked quietly. “On Maenali?”

“Maenali, yes, the Dova Front.” The words came out by rote, all feelings bottled up, contained in a place where they might be kept safe a little while.

“That must have been tough,” a basic, bland solidarity crossed the desk beside these words. “Just remember, the war’s over alright,” he tapped a command on his terminal. “And it never came here.”

Though the conversation ended, it still took several minutes for Yasen to clear through baggage. Not out of any concern, but instead due to the desire of the officers to ogle his weapons. They gathered round the examination table and opened the case to marvel at the black metal and pale ceramic pieces within. An understandable impulse, the contents of that case were assuredly the most expensive thing he’d bought in his life.

Despite making a point of rejecting extravagance for years, he’d happily put forward every credit for a system worth more than the whole shift worth of officers made in a year. He considered each and every credit well spent. There were some things whose value could not be measured in credits, but in lives, and he’d learned the hard way to count the implements of death among them.

 

Chapter Four
“The possibility of custom designed space habitats with unique biospheres of their own has long been considered as an option for galactic settlement. Though viable, it remains a distinctly inferior method. Life did not evolve on rotating disks, spheres, or rings, nor does it usually emerge on asteroids or any other object incapable of achieving hydrostatic equilibrium. Planets, for all their complexity, have gravitational and resource advantages that simply cannot be discarded. There is a place for habitats built in space in our design, but the staging ground is never the heart of the work.” Dr. Elima Kaier, Memoirs.

After clearing customs there was another walk to the exit. This one was shorter, only around one hundred meters. A series of numerous glass doors, lined up in parellel to let hundreds pass through at once should the need ever arise, marked the egress. Bright light flooded through them, illuminated the otherwise empty clearance lobby. The businessmen and miners were all well clear by now. Yasen passed through observed only by maintenance droids.

On balance, this was a good thing. Given how suddenly he stopped on the other side, anyone behind would have walked into him.

The transition was stark. Before the doors was a space station, vast and cavernous, but still a sealed and managed artificial zone. Beyond them was the open environment of the Depot. It left him absolutely stunned. He’d never seen anything of the kind.

Yasen knew he was indoors, technically, but his senses categorically refused to believe this statement. They countered with the evidence of everything in front of his face. He stood in the middle not of a starship, but a city. He waited in thrall on the edge of a broad sidewalk. Past its edge groundcars rolled along in considerable low-speed bustle. On all sides tall buildings rose up, hundreds of meters high in several cases.

Beyond the neck-straining towers of glass and concrete there was, and at this the mind truly boggled, a sky full of clouds. The contrails of several aircraft cut sharp channels through their pale billows. Bright and blue beyond, just a little after midday according to local settings fixed to Republic standard.

A false sky, he knew that intellectually, some complex artifice of overhead lighting, optically active painted membranes, and advanced polarizers. His eyes ignored this and found it uncannily real. It was only when he turned and squinted into the maximum distance that he caught a glimpse of the pale gray blot of the massive retaining walls at the edge that he managed to convince his body that they remained inside a crafted structure. He suspected that, from the top of one of those mighty high-rises, the curve of the ring would be visible, but for now the shadow of the crowded skyline obscured any such vistas.

Gaze deflected back down, he marveled at a different aspect of the backdrop.

The station’s structure might wield a bizarre wonder against his senses, but the achievements of mechanical engineers, no matter how advanced, could never compare in Yasen’s sight to those of their compatriots who labored with cell and DNA. It took only one glance at the pedestrian stream populating the thoroughfare to set his head spinning. Eyes wide, he stuck fixed in place; drank in the diversity on display.

He was eventually spurned to move by the noise of many doors opening behind. Customs might not have seemed busy, but it quickly became clear that was at least partly due to their extreme willingness to wave through miners and ship crew. A large group burst through shortly, and flow in the other direction, or through a variety of alternative pathways that he presumed led to non-customs in-system traffic, offered considerable volume of its own.

The forms on view were nearly endless.

Yasen amended this assessment swiftly. Though the diversity of the populace was vast, it was also constrained. Though he suspected members of somewhere between thirty-five and fifty species passed through the doors in just the few minutes he spent observing, it felt far greater due to their universally near-human forms. The contrast hammered at him, left him unmoored.

No more than half the people could be human. Probably less, considering that some variant species had indistinguishable external morphology. None of the others appeared in any great numbers. Most were present in isolated groups of family size at most, with many lone individuals going about their business as well.

It was nothing like Maenali, where unless there were notably special circumstances the total number of sapient species was a constant two. Even Athallia, which hosted a handful of well-recognized alien minorities, was demographically dominated by humans. This place was that rarest of habitats, a land of without a demographic majority.

He was not so blind to think that was purely a matter of wonder. The distinct blue and red uniforms of the Harlax Port Authority were common here next to Customs. Noticing them was a properly of background vigilance he could not restrain. That count revealed only humans in the chosen garb of government.

Recognizing that specific arrangement dredged up unwelcome familiarity.

His reverie, a semi-futile attempt to recognize the various examples of Nacla species as they strode past and match them up against ancient catalogue references he’d laboriously memorized, did not reach a point of completion. The endlessly shifting humanoid collage trapped his senses; its profusion overwhelmed comprehension, drowned in its profundity. Only outside intervention allowed him to break free of the unending mental filing.

“You look new. Need a guide?” A voice, one sharply defined but at the same time strangely sweet-sounding, intruded upon introspection from his left.

Instincts, bound to muscle and bone by harsh experience, took control without conscious awareness. Yasen snapped into motion. His body twisted. The left arm shot forward, brought the heavy case held there forward and across to interpose its armored bulk before his chest. The opposite limb dropped to his belt, fingers closed and grasped hard.

They wrapped futilely about empty air. The pistol expected by those fingers was not there. It remained inside the case, forbidden by the decree of Linelighter’s captain from being worn aboard ship.

“Bright,” the same voice, its owner blocked from sight by a container full of deadly military equipment, gasped. “Calm. We’re standing in front of Customs. Relax a little, there’s not a safer place in the whole Depot.”

Chagrined, Yasen lowered the case, but a part of him recalled that despite the sanguine assurance, his threat reaction had not gone unrecognized. Perhaps this region was calm and controlled, but it seemed the rumors that parts of the Depot were decidedly unsafe were true. He had to fight down the urge to open the case up right there in the street and armor up on the spot.

Eyes fixated on the speaker served to quell that desire.

She, and the animal instincts in his mind managed to take note of sexual characteristics before almost anything else, was a compact humanoid presence who came up roughly to Yasen’s chin. In profile she appeared human, with a wide fan of black hair sweeping out at neck length behind a pretty, wide face with a sharp chin and high cheekbones. That association collapsed, however, when the brain recognized that her skin was a deep violet shade with undertones of gray and the dark emerald eyes in her face had a vertical-slit pupil structure that offered a feline countenance.

“Sorry,” Yasen apologized. He tried to avoid scanning her from head to toe, but after half a heartbeat gave up. Decorum stood no chance against a joint assault of curiosity and vigilance.

She was a small woman, one who would have been called petite if human, but he believed she was fully grown. Her figure could not be easily grasped, for it lay cloaked beneath a dual-layer blue and white kaftan that wrapped from neck to toe. Long white sleeves extended down to the tips of her fingers. What little could be seen revealed pale blue lines, painted or perhaps somehow tattooed, traced down along the back of her hands from the base of the nails to the knuckles.

“You’re definitely new here,” she quipped lightly. She did not smile, but at the same time she sounded amused, not offended. “You need a guide. Not just a professional rep, but friendly advice generally, starting right now. I’m available, reasonable rates.” She did smile then, though the motion showed no teeth. Her lips were a truly dark purple shade, one that like an aged wine seemed to drink in light.

She took a half-step back as her lips bent level once again. “But one question first. Do you know what this means?”

Her eyes then did something Yasen had not expected at all. Suddenly, fast enough that he lost the change in an intermittent blink, they turned metallic powder blue, as if a butterfly wing had sprouted from her irises. Then, swiftly as it occurred, the change swept away. He stared into narrow feline slits once again.

Memory triggered at this motion. Crumpled and fragmentary bits of academic cramming shifted upward from deep in the recesses of his skull to compete for attention. A confused whirl of ideas, entries, and labels all sought dominance in the moment, fought for control of his tongue.

One bit of biological trivia locked down pole position before his mind fully caught up. “Nictitating membrane,” the unfamiliar word served as a catalyst, shocked the cascade of relevant associations into place. The whole of the profile, burned into memory, rushed to the forefront. “It protects the eye.” He snapped out the rest of a context as it came. “From debris and brightness. The iridescent blue shade is distinct to your species. It means you’re a, a…” He paused. The image held clear in his mind, but the full word would not assemble. Too many names competed on the long list. “I’m sorry,” he apologized instead. “It seems I can’t recall exactly. It begins with K, but regrettably that’s the best I can manage.”

The elusive toothless smile twinged again. “You got the first letter right. It’s Korzol.” It vanished as she shook her head slightly. A little wave passed across the thick field of her hair in response. “Not why I asked, anyway. Important part is you didn’t flinch. Hall rule, no working for flinchers.”

Korzol. This one word, this name, served as the key to unlock a complete picture from a storm of scattered factoids. A species from a xeric world, possessed a communal culture centered around units called ‘halls,’ resistant to ultraviolet radiation, altered color perception; these and other bits banged together, forged an incomplete but broad image. Enough for intuition to assess and accept that such a person was likely to work as a local guide. Acknowledgment remained a risk, but the same instincts that pulled together the assessment suggested trust.

He extended a hand. “Yasen Rost,” he announced formally. “New arrival.”

“Tan Perlen Elomenie,” she took the offered limb not on the fingers but the wrist and squeezed tightly. Her hand was uncommonly warm to the touch. She did not shake, shift, or tap, but simply held the contact for several long breaths. Long enough that Yasen grew nervous.

“Comprehensive guide service to the Depot available,” she met his gaze without bending her back, neck tilted upwards close in. “I know all the good spots, all the bad spots, and all the tricks. Full time advice and support, just ten credits per day, plus meals and lodging.”

Yasen had never wanted for money, whatever his arguments with the second half of his name, they’d not sufficed to strip away wealth completely. Perhaps ironically, he’d learned by necessity to bear up acute awareness against frauds, gouging, and scams. He did not haggle, made no counteroffer. One eyebrow simply inclined significantly. “Ten credits per day?”

Bright blue membranes, shining beneath the artificial sky, rose and descended again. This time, knowing what to look for, he caught the motion of the iridescent third eyelid as it slid up and then back down. “Fine, seven,” Tan countered brightly. “And yes, that’s still above market, but Perlen Hall skill and dedication is worth a premium.

The precise nature of the Perlen Hall was completely outside Yasen’s understanding, but he recognized that daring to run a search on his wrist display would trap him in the depths of a well-rehearsed marketing spiel. He chose the few questions he might sneak through with considerable caution. “How well do you know the Depot’s Nacla Species?”

“As well as any,” no hesitation colored the reply, but neither was she bragging. At least, assuming Korzol conversational cues remotely resembled human ones. The textbooks suggested they did, but such references remained unconfirmed. “I was born and raised here, not on Korzol. I’ve eight years as a guide. I’ve seen them all and have plenty of alien friends,” she flashed her toothless smile again. “Even some humans like you. You’ll not find better.” She tossed her head again, though the emphasis supplied by this motion did not convey.

Whatever the meaning, it was a brutally cute movement. It had to be deliberate. The words, at least, felt honest. “Good,” Yasen decided. “Two further questions. Do you have any objection to shared lodging? Or a long-term contract?”

“In this business, steady work is always better,” Tan put her hands together in front of her chest. Her posture stiffened, took on a detectable formal bearing. “Korzol and Human environmental requirements make a good match. Atmosphere mix same, ideal humidity comparable; your kind like things a measure on the cold end, but it’s nothing a few extra blankets can’t handle. We can even share meals, so long as you don’t insist on vertebrate flesh.” She donned a smile for a bare instant before her lips tightened once more. “Since you’re a male though, I need to make it clear that I don’t mate with clients. If you really wish to mate with a Korzol, I have a referral arrangement with Fedores Hall.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Yasen struggled with a vague, difficult to place disappointment that she’d felt obligated to warn him against such a maddeningly unprofessional course. He guessed that he’d stared too long. Chastening cold cut through his gut. “That would be incredibly improper.”

“Just wanted to be clear,” the smile returned to Tan’s face. She did not sound offended, amused perhaps, but it was impossible to read those cat’s eyes.

“Well then,” Yasen decided with unusual spontaneity. “Consider yourself hired, on a trial basis, for today and tomorrow. Payment to be rendered as soon as you find me appropriate lodgings.” He recognized this course as reckless, in many ways, and due diligence ought to involve canvassing many potential guides, but despite these warnings he felt comfortable with the choice all the same. He had not flinched from her eyes and she had not blanched when he tried to draw on her, enough for a basis of trust.

“Great,” Tan clapped her hands together, lightly, twice. “I’m at your service. As for lodgings,” she wasted no time at all in transition. “We should head to the next station. Everything here at Zero is massively overpriced. On the way you can tell me what you want. It’s not far.”

Without waiting she pushed ahead into the thick pedestrian traffic along the thoroughfare.

Forced to hurry behind her, for the Korzol had quick steps despite her compact frame, Yasen struggled to keep up. It was not the crowds, themselves, that bothered him. Thick human masses in tight proximity were a natural feature of Maenali’s land-starved cities, but this mixture of dozens of species each slightly different from human norms served as a constant distraction. The need to retain vigilance in the face of so many unknowns strained his pace. To keep up he had to periodically scramble into a half-jog.

This did not go unnoticed. Without looking back, Tan slowed her pace and shifted rightward to hug the facades of the towering buildings there. She also anchored herself to Yasen’s side and launched a continual stream of narration.

“The Depot, as you probably saw on your way in,” she began, ratcheting off clipped phrases with the distinct cadence of a speech given many times. “Is a Ring. But, unlike a planet, we live on the inside, not the outside. Compass points and other navigation tricks are useless. Instead, we use the Ribbon Grid System. Three hundred and sixty degrees around, twenty-five klicks up and twenty-five klicks down from the equator. Right now, outside Customs, we’re at Zero-Plus-One. You follow?”

“I understand,” In his mind Yasen could imagine it, the whole station unrolled as a single strip with a line down the middle and divided into rectangular patches. It reminded him of a parking lot. “So, the docking spars are near the center then. That makes sense.”

This earned him a brief turn of the head and a smile of acknowledgment.

“Right, all the docking spars terminate between Three-Fifty and Nine, and the interior space above them is what you see here,” she swept her hands about to take in the high-rises nearby. “Downtown.”

The math behind that statement was simple enough for Yasen to perform in his head. Five and a half percent, that much made up Downtown. Compact, but his pre-arrival studies made it clear the Depot had designed for occupancy several times greater than current levels. “Who owns all these buildings then?” He questioned with a glance across the nearby high rises.

Tan’s hand extended to point and shift back and forth with startling speed. “That’s HPA Headquarters,” she noted an extremely tall back and gray tower behind them before swiftly moving along. “Mining company, food company, fuel company, joint office building full of lawyers, fuel company, casino that’s also the most expensive brothel on station, food company, high-priced corporate hotel, mining company. See the pattern?”

“Yes,” Yasen appreciated that, aside from the Port Authority, Tan hadn’t bothered to rattle of a list of names he would never recall. Simple descriptors served far greater use.

“And in front of us,” paired violet hands merged. “Is the tram station.”

It was not an office tower. Instead, it hung suspended above the road atop hulking support pillars as an elongate structure of several levels. Broad and massive, built to the necessary specifications of ultra-heavy machinery, it loomed with brutally boring solidity. Huge windows revealed multiple trackways at variable heights setup within. Blurred forms rushed past inside.

Tan angled towards a wide pedestrian stairwell leading up to the highest level. “This is the Central tram line. It runs through the exact equator of the Depot. Branch lines extend up and down at every degree marker. Everything’s automated, controlled by droids embedded in the superstructure.”

The system’s autonomous and automatic nature became clear the moment they stepped off the stairs and entered the station proper.

In any ordinary city a central transit hub of this kind would surely be a baroque architectural monstrosity filled internally with complex ornamentation, extensive art displays, historical monuments, and as many secondary business stalls as could be crammed in without compromising traffic flow. This place was utterly devoid of such demonstrative accoutrements. Instead, it bowed to a brutally austere efficiency regimen.

Unadorned metal walls, bare tile floors, stark safety rails in cross-hatched black and yellow comprised the totality on offer. No concession stalls, information kiosks, or other apertures could be found beyond obligatory emergency mustering points painted on the floor. Yasen discovered, to his shock, that even security outposts failed to penetrate this minimalist mastery.

“No ticketing?” The absence of booths or stations to extract money from the public served up the greatest disconnect of all. Internal traffic was intense, with passerby constantly buffeting past. It absolutely dwarfed that of the vehicles passing through on the road beneath.

“Free service,” Tan chuckled with an oddly accented motion. “Officially anyway. The trams are powered by exterior solar panels and their maintenance systems draw from universal station feedstocks with priority above any discretionary systems. Unless there’s an emergency there’s no organics involved at all. HPA keeps things free Downtown. That’s all we need today.”

This answer hid some unspoken truth. Yasen caught that much. He did not press, no doubt his guide would reveal the rest in time. She seemed very aware of priorities.

The upper level offered passenger travel down the ring. It held only a single set of tracks, but squat two-car trams passed through at a nearly constant clip. Bodies entered and exited along swiftly shifting pathways in continual stream. To avoid being swept up in the press of bodies Tan grabbed him by the arm and pulled them over toward one of the wide windows.

Yasen noted a spider-shaped maintenance droid clearing the glass several meters above his head. A quick scan revealed other units throughout the complex, engaged in the kind of constant cleaning necessary to keep a place such as this from conversion into an unofficial signboard and graffiti canvas. A chill ran through him as he wondered who saw all that those machines observed.

“What are you looking for in lodgings?” Cat eyes did not turn to him with this question. They remained focused on the motion of the stubby trams.

“Security, reasonable comfort, and a willingness to accept long-term residency without breaking the bank,” he listed requirements while staring at the shorter woman in an effort to try and grasp her thought process.

Nothing revealed by it, all that happened beneath black hair and violet skin remained opaque. “You don’t mind a mixed species establishment?”

“No at all.” That was the whole point.

“Then I know a good place at Five-Minus-Five,” Tan put words into action immediately; pulled him through the crowd with a jerk.

Literally pulled. She grasped him about the wrist with both arms and tugged with weight behind the move to keep him to the path. As she navigated amid the stream of bodies she maintained constant contact. She did not ask, did not hesitate; simply held on firmly and did not let go.

This action shocked Yasen deep enough he completely failed to register an objection. As they moved, he gathered that this was nothing to do with him at all. Tan did not avoid bodies in the crowd as a human might. She readily brushed, bounced, and bent against the bodies of others. She did not bother to shirk contact at all and turned aside only in cases of significant impact. All errant touches made no impression upon her, even as many others, especially humans, jerked back in surprise.

Contemplating this consumed his thoughts. He did not even notice as they passed through the doors and into a tram until the portal snapped shut behind them.

“Grab hold,” Tan gestured at the forest of standing metal poles and hanging loops that offered travelers a place to grip and brace. No chairs or benches existed; apparently the design cared nothing for those who struggled to stand. “The jump’s got a kick to it,” she warned.

Bracing his case between his armpit and the floor, Yasen wrapped gloved hands around the nearest pole.

A single warning chime sounded. Then the train accelerated hard. Standard maglev design, it floated gently in the air with precision balance, but there was nothing soft about the acceleration. The tram blasted down the track, accelerating to the razor edge of active discomfort. It recalled the industrial strength elevators, only sideways.

The tram hit maximum speed in less than five seconds, maintained that blistering velocity for twenty, then decelerated hard for five again. It crossed the distance to the next degree, roughly one-point-seven kilometers, in thirty seconds. Yasen checked his wrist display and discovered that the loading and unloading period equaled the travel time.

They made rapid, if brutal, progress. All too typical of a design crafted by a completely unrestrained corporation from thousands of years in the past, though such forceful accelerations were almost certainly banned in the present. The extreme nature of their movement left no time for conversation or views of the landscape beyond the windows. Yasen found himself forced to focus his mind against the intervals and preemptively brace his knees accordingly. Everyone around him seemed to be doing much the same.

Five degrees and five minutes later Tan hauled him out of the tram, across another perfectly sterile station, down a stairwell and into another tram identical to the first save for that it ran along a perpendicular track. Then they endured another five minutes of start-and-stop blasts. Whiplash inducing, it dredged up unwelcome memories of previous desperately timed dashes.

Thankfully it concluded quickly, and when they scrambled out of their destination station the new environment offered up plentiful stimuli. The eager senses shortly overwhelmed recollections.

The station on the longitudinal tram line of degree Five was much smaller than the equatorial one, only two levels in all. When they exited, legs slightly wobbly, he found the nature of their surroundings distinctly changed.

It was still very much a city, but the towers were gone., left behind back along the equator. Turning back to look upon them, Yasen discovered that he’d mentally decided that the ‘Plus’ direction qualified as north, and the ‘Minus’ as south. This was illogical, but he couldn’t banish the instinct. The Depot’s deception continued to convince his mind that he stood upon a planet’s crust.

In similar fashion his brain initially classified the vast dark gray blob that rose to the ‘south’ as the foothills of a mountain range whose peaks were the ring’s five-kilometer-high retaining wall. He shook his head vigorously to banish this false reference frame. A close examination revealed it was clearly not natural. Though the elevation was not constant, it changed at start, regular intervals, like a series of monstrously massive boxes. Such recognition provided no insight into what the feature might be, however.

He asked instead. “What that’s to the south?” A gloved hand gestured vaguely in the direction. “It looks like some kind of huge building complex.”

Tan did not blink, nor did she offer any other impression that this was a monumentally ignorant question. “That’s the boundary of the industrial zone. The Depot’s fifty klicks wide, but we only use the middle fifteen. Trams go from Plus-Seven to Minus-Seven. The rest is enclosed. Hydroponics, waste processing, droid operations, all it takes to keep the ring running.”

“Oh, of course,” Yasen blushed slightly, feeling foolish. “I did read about that.” Apparently, it was one thing to read that the residential space allotted to the living occupied less than a third of the station and entirely another to stare out at the looming dominion of the mechanical that controlled the rest. He found it left a sour taste in his mouth. It was bad enough to know in the back of the mind that all life here depended on the plans and activities of machines designed by a company driven bankrupt over two millennia in the past. Stark visual reminders could only discomfort.

That legacy was not the one he’d come here to unearth.

“Come on,” Tan, perhaps sensing hesitation, grabbed his arm once again. This time she wrapped both arms about the limb, as if escorting him to some old-timey ball out of a Core Worlds romance. That this pressed his entire forearm against her chest did not seem to bother her at all. “It’s just around the block, I figured you’d want quick tram access.”

These words proved true as they rounded the bend. It was no more than a few hundred meters waling distance. Even so, that offered sufficient time to get a good look at this part of the city. It might still be part of the Depot’s nominal downtown, but the feel here was very different.

No towers, instead buildings topped out at six stories, and most ran to three or four. The species mix was likewise highly truncated. None of the vast diversity of the main thoroughfare here. Instead, a solid human majority, broken up by members of a handful of repeating Nacla profiles, walked the streets.

The buildings remained tightly packed, but narrow strips of green space squeezed between them. Planters lined the walkways, packed in tight buffering formations. The plants that sprouted from those concrete pots were unfamiliar to Yasen, dark green low-growing things with broad shiny leaves. He suspected they were artificial breeds, crafted thousands of years ago to match the overhead lighting, atmosphere mix, and lack of precipitation that characterized the station environment. Compared to other achievements, such engineering ought to have been trivial.

Strange as the vegetation was, it only reinforced the illusion that this was a planet.

The ordinary nature of the urban environment, with its variety of mixed-use offices, shops, and residences, added to the deception. Admittedly the architecture offered a point of differentiation. The clean lines and sharp corners drew on some origin outside his experience, and by Maenali standards everything was both far too clean and lacked a layer of epiphytic algae clinging to every surface. Otherwise it registered a complete absence of distinction. The block could have been any mixed-use urban zone on a thousand worlds.

Beyond the bones of the buildings all the little things degenerated into a universal blandness. Vehicle shapes, sidewalk patterns, garbage receptacles, even street lighting all matched up with ancient design standards developed by humans millennia in the past before they’d even left the Core. The Depot might be thousands of years old, but it’s streets belonged to every yesterday.

Yasen wondered what the Nacla residents thought of this backdrop. His efforts to research even such simple questions had come up empty, driven him to this place in person.

As he stood there, maglev trams pulsing in the background, simplicity faded into the infinite distance.

Tan’s chosen hotel was a four-story box of a building painted in a combination of earth tones and pastels that probably intended to be non-threatening but ultimately came across, at least to human eyes, as perfectly tasteless. The sign above the door proclaimed it the equally bland Aster Lodge. Yasen ignored these; his senses tracked security measures instead, out of reflex. Reinforced fencing to block an explosion, slightly recessed windows with bullet-blocking emergency shutters, security cameras arrayed in a full coverage field, and sharp-eyed guards at the chokepoints.

Though the street outside offered no signs of active hostility nothing was taken for granted.

Inside the lobby the backdrop returned to the mundane. The decor followed a simple economy business model, a perfect match for the thousand-meter view of the place. Yasen considered it a testament to Tan’s discernment. “Who normally stays here?” he questioned softly before approaching the liveried official behind the front desk.

“Independent businessmen, freighter captains, specialty engineers, lawyers,” she shrugged, a motion so completely human it disarmed utterly. “It’s a mix, but I’ve brought clients here before. No complaints.”

The air, Yasen noticed after a minute or so standing inside the lobby, differed from that of the ambient Depot atmosphere. Internal circulation, he realized, though not fully contained since the doorways had no pressure seals. He found his breathing easier somehow, probably a slight increase in oxygen concentration. A sharp acrid scent accompanied it, tingled in the nostrils. Industrial cleanser of some kind used to purge the excreted organic compounds of multiple species in close proximity. Such measures were inevitable, the ship had been the same.

The desk clerk responded to his request for a first-floor room, two beds, one week simply by quoting a price. The human, with milk-pale skin suggesting a birth on the Depot, scanned him carefully but asked no awkward questions. His stance was deliberately casual and indicated a weapon in easy reach somewhere under the desk.

One look to Tan, with a tiny head shake in unspoken reply, sufficed to clarify that this was not a moment for haggling. Yasen proffered a credit chip, and the clerk completed the transaction without further words by handing the chip back with a pair of electronic keycards. Unexpectedly, the price came in below expectations. Unlike shipboard berths, it appeared space was not a premium here.

A century and a half of resettlement clearly failed to fill the station. Whether that was natural or an aspect of HPA’s limited ambitions of navigational profiteering remained unclear. He could not help but reflect upon that unusual puzzle. The ravages of war, legacy of a near-millennium of madness against which the most recent conflicts were naught but a brief skirmish – though he was not sure he truly believed that – had made it so. Records were clear on that, but whether it had been good or ill did not pop free of the tale. What might have been had the Nacla Corporation survived and crafted the empire of commerce they’d planned? Would it have been better?

Would Elima Kaier have even cared?

He could only hope to find some answers here. They would not exist elsewhere.

He flipped one of the chip keys to Tan. She caught it cleanly, but the cat's eyes in her face spread startlingly wide in that moment. It seemed she'd not expected him to offer up such trust.

A cold spike dove into Yasen's stomach at that thought, suggested he was far from certain of the choice himself. He'd just met this woman, and truly knew nothing about her. She could be a swindler, a plant, or a scout for a criminal crew. He knew he represented a target along those lines. Whatever his father's personal feelings, the old man would likely pay out a ransom should he be kidnapped if only to avoid the embarrassment. Bringing Tan inside the walls surely represented a major risk, perhaps even a careless one.

Despite this, the ice in his gut melted rapidly, replaced by a balmy contentment. He needed a guide, he was not so foolish as to challenge the Depot all alone, and it seemed he'd chosen the Korzol. Vigilance would serve now, and no time need be wasted in frivolous searches for alternatives.

He took solace in the Korzol identity of his ally. The finer points of betrayal struggled to cross inter-species boundaries, relied on social courses and cues too easily missed, especially in new acquaintance. Inability to fully understand each other was in itself a form of safety.

At the very least he could say no young, attractive, human woman would cling continually to his arm the way Tan did. Clearly the two species calibrated their views on physical contact on different scales.

The hotel room was just down the hall and resembled every other piece of commercial multi-species temporary lodging Yasen had ever seen. The furnishings were formed of adjustable, flexible prefabricated materials, the kind that offered minimal comfort to all, satisfaction to none. Even the airflow options, controlled by a wall console, allowed for a wide range of localized atmospheres, within certain common limits. The pair of desks against the wall hosted mass-produced civilian terminals and possessed the sterility common to little-used electronics. Yasen knew quite well that his personal datapad, a high-end model imported from Denon, rendered them utterly superfluous.

At least the room safe met his specifications. A stout, reinforced metal box half-embedded in the foundation secured by a programmable password lock it presented sufficient space to secure his full kit. He promptly set about depositing most of it.

Tan gasped when he opened the box on the floor. “Are you some kind of bounty hunter?” Narrow eyes dashed across black metal surfaces and dark gray ballistic plating. She took a half-step back. “Because I don't work that kind of job. I don't want any trouble. You can have your credits back, even.” She did not sound scared, merely careful, worried.

“No, it's-,” Yasen cursed silently beneath his breath. He'd been a fool not to warn her. It must have been obvious the case contained a weapon, a large rifle at the least, but perhaps the whole integrated system: assault rifle, pistol, attachments, armor vest, and helmet, was enough to overwhelm the expectations of even a frontier-tested guide. He took a deep breath, deliberately moved his hands away from cool glistening surfaces. “This is a combined arms system,” he kept his explanation couched in technical language. “The armor and weapons are linked together, with integrated data feeds. The design serves to provide all information, targeting, and combat needs to a combat rifleman. Officially this is a security model, not a military unit, which means there's no high explosives or mines, but it's otherwise identical to recent conflict deployment kit. I purchased the whole unit as one, for exactly that reason.” He took a long, prolonged inhalation, felt the incoming air fight against the black tide crawling up his throat. “This is the newest model, but aside from some minor system's upgrades it's basically the same design the Corellians sold us during the war.”

The look Tan gave him was hard, imperious. Cat's eyes stalked their way up and down his face. “You were a soldier?” she spoke the words slowly, disbelief evident upon her violet skin. “But you dress like a rich executive and talk like a nobleman.”

“Hah,” Yasen chuckled sadly, swallowed the bitterness filling his mouth. He'd chosen his outfit in an attempt to blend in with the typical breed of independent business traveler, but apparently Tan knew the signs of fashion that hid beneath the surface. Whether cut, fabric, or seams, some little piece of tailoring no doubt betrayed the high-quality custom fit origins of his garments. He'd not expected his vocabulary to betray him, at least not to a non-human who did not speak native Basic, but it seemed Tan could judge accents easily.

“And rich noblemen can't be soldiers?” he counted, perhaps harsher than he'd intended. Old wounds suppurated below the skin.

This drew only a shrug. “Maybe,” Tan committed to nothing. “Humans are strange. We do not have soldiers as you do. The fighting Halls fight, as is sensible. I've met many soldiers, no nobles, very few rich boys.” Slit eyes narrowed and her expression darkened. “Plenty came here after the war. Most drink, or worse. Every credit they pull from mining or maintenance goes to their poisons. You, whatever you are, you're not one of those.”

“I wonder,” Yasen mused, moved by the dark insight. “Maybe my particular poison is simply a bit special.” It was not a new thought. “I'll tell the whole story if you want,” he surprised himself here. Something about those eyes drew him to openness. “But it's a long one, so I believe we should secure a meal first. I'm rather famished actually.” It had been a long time since breakfast about Linelighter, and his stomach had finally fixed itself in the inertial reference frame long enough to remember that. “You mentioned something about food issues earlier, but surely there are nearby restaurants where we can share a meal?” He certainly hoped there were, otherwise meal times were sure to be awkward.

“That depends,” Tan's face brightened into a toothless smile. “How do you feel about shrimp?”


Notes
Regarding the Depot's internal architecture it's useful to imagine a really long row of parking spaces, like at an airport. The central tram line runs down the 'middle' and each 'space' represents one of 360 degrees around. The longitudinal tram lines run through the middle of each space.

Tan is a Korzol, which makes her the first true member of a Nacla species to appear, since Decima and the Maenali soldiers are part of the 'final test stage.' Tan's a very important character and I'm working really hard to get her right. I'm quite interested in any commentary on her physiology or psychology.