The Past, The Cataclysm


Anoat Central Spaceport, Anoat High Orbit
Traffic Control Command


It was a good day. Busy, but good. Anoat had really been picking up steam lately. They seemed to have shaken that whole “terrorist/freedom fighter” thing, the planet's “environmental revitalization” had wrapped up nicely, and the system was developing into a real commerce hub, both for Coalition goods headed out and outside goods coming in.


And that was good news for Chief Grubnub. The Sauvax from Leritor was really digging this job; most of his folk were content to poke fish with sticks and build huts out of seaweed, but not Grubnub. Grubnub loved space. Granted, he got space sick when he had to ride in the back, but that wasn't a problem here. Not at Anoat Traffic Control. Not as the Chief.


Grubnub walked the main aisle of Traffic Control's upper tier, where the heavy work of routing large convoys and military formations was handled, his chitinous feet clicking rhythmically against the deck plating. There were dozens of operators on either side, with hundreds more below managing smaller formations and individual vessels. Commerce had become the beating heart of Anoat's economy, and transport was the beating heart of all commerce. And this station, this Traffic Control hub, was the beating heart of Anoat's transportation infrastructure.


What was Grubnub's deal with beating hearts all of a sudden?


An alert sounded somewhere below, piquing the Chief's interest and causing his eyestalks to dart toward the source of the noise. Then another station sound an alert. And another.


Then three of the stations on the upper tier sounded alerts in unison. Then five more.


Grubnub's lobster head shrunk reflexively down into its armored torso, but make no mistake: Grubnub the Chief Operator of Anoat Traffic Control was not scared. Surprised? Yes. Startled? Of course.


But above all else: he was excited.


“Show me what we've got!” Grubnub exclaimed, the rhythmic ticking of his feet changing pace as he clambered to the end of the upper tier and the holo-console that was his official control station. Was it a Coalition task force moving into position before a top-secret attack? An invading fleet arriving without warning? Less exciting but perhaps as interesting, a Ryn construction fleet or massive Squib/Ugor salvage operation?


“Reavers,” Grubnub just barely made out from some comm chatter coming from a station as he passed by.


“Reavers?” Grubunb repeated, not buying it. “There are no Reavers on this side of the galaxy!” He pushed the Ugnaught worker out of the way and started poking at the console himself.


“They're Gestalt ships, Chief!” one of the other operators called out. “They're all Gestalt ships.”


“By the stars,” another said in shock and horror. “The Reavers hit Gestalt . . .”


“Impossible,” Grubnub said, giving up on the tiny controls of the Ugnaught's station and heading off for his own again, though now at a decidedly faster clip. “There are no Reavers out this far!” he said again, but this time not quite as believably.


A different sort of alarm sounded, a warning alarm. A military alarm.


A weapons fire alarm.


“Colonial Destroyer Ark Royale,” Grubnub shouted as he reached his station, “stand down from weapons readiness and disengage your targeting computers! You have entered the jurisdiction of Anoat Space Command and will not engage your weapons without proper authorization, do you understand me!” It was only when Grubnub paused that he realized what had just happened; the Colonial warship had fired on one of its accompanying civilian craft.


“You can shove your jurisdiction!” came the immediate reply. “We've got Reaver infestations popping up all over the fleet!”


“But . . . but there are no Reavers this far out,” Grubnub said to himself, all thoughts of daring battle or political intrigue finally stamped out.


He could hear the confirmation behind him, the cries of ship captains begging for help, the futile efforts of Traffic Control operators to get a handle on a military and humanitarian nightmare.


Ahead, in the distance, more red streaks of light shot out from the Ark Royale, a ship fighting desperately against an invisible evil that turned friend to foe.


It was settled, then: the Reavers had come to Gestalt.


And Gestalt, or what was left of it, had come to the West.


* * *


Captain Julia Krin didn't have the qualifications for this. She was a naval officer, trained to fight starships, not infections. She didn't know the first thing about diplomacy or humanitarian operations. But here she was regardless, in command (for the time being, at least) of the last surviving souls of a lost nation.


And that was the most horrifying part of it all: these were the only survivors. The ships had stopped coming. There had been a window of about three hours where Colonial convoys kept appearing, usually a little pocket of civilian vessels with a military escort of a single warship, sent along to destroy any ships that had turned while in hyperspace. It was both brutal and effective, but it wasn't a solution.


Some ships had still suffered dangerous exposure to the Reaver infection, and the risk of letting the Reaver virus gain a foothold in the Anoat System was too high to allow them access to the planet. Add to it that many of the ships that the Colonial officers deemed beyond rescue still had uninfected passengers on-board, and Krin was facing a moral compromise that she wasn't willing to make.


And as commander of the Coalition forces stationed at Anoat, she didn't have to.


The Colonials had retreated to Anoat in accordance with existing Coalition protocols to be enacted in the event of a catastrophic invasion of the Gestalt Colonies. Anoat was a straight shot up the Corellian Trade Spine, making it the closest major Coalition position to the Colonies. Those protocols had been laid down before the advent of the Reavers, in a time when the Colonies seemed firmer members of the Coalition as a whole. Even so, the Colonies were technically still a Coalition member, its citizens the Coalition's.


And that put their care and safety squarely on the shoulders of Captain Krin. The Reavers were a military threat, so the threat these Colonials brought with them empowered Krin to declare a state of military emergency. Until brass further West or someone from High Command stepped up to take command, this was her responsibility, even if she didn't have any idea what she was doing.


And she didn't. Not when it came to the Reavers. She was an officer of the West, though, and this was friendly territory, which meant her first priority was safeguarding the innocent, not defeating the enemy. And to that end, Julia had mobilized everything in her power to save every life she could.


The end result was a twist on standing Coalition quarantine protocols for Reaver-infected ships, scaled up for the size of this emergency and tailored to Anoat's available resources. The orbital spaceport had become the last line of defense, the temporary shelter for low-risk Colonials who nevertheless had to be evacuated from their ships while the vessels underwent thorough inspection. In the unlikely event of a Reaver outbreak, any individual affected docking bay could be sealed and vented into space without risk to the rest of the station.


Station traffic had been rerouted to surface ports, delaying a great many parties who were used to using the orbital facility as a quick-transfer point for bulk cargo, but groundside would just have to deal with the added congestion for a while. The fact of the matter was, as long as there was any doubt whatsoever, Julia wouldn't be letting a single Colonial onto the planet's surface. It was simply a risk too great to take. And that meant the station was the only place on-hand large enough to house them all.


The evacuated ships were being held in multiple quarantine zones, arranged by likelihood of infection and likelihood of successful rescue. Higher-risk Colonials had been moved to Western ships belonging to Anoat's defense force. There they could be monitored by soldiers and medics, in an environment that wouldn't increase their risk of exposure. And if, at the end of the day, Krin had to scuttle a ship because of contamination, it was better one or two warships than the dozens of civilian vessels she would have had to commandeer through the authority of martial law. That was not a move that the political situation on Anoat could easily weather, especially not coming from a Coalition naval captain.


And that left the Colonial warships. They were pretty banged up; probably as much of the blast scoring on their hulls was from friendly attempts to destroy traces of the Reaver virus as from actual enemy fire. There was no doubt that they'd been exposed, but the Colonial military was top-notch and they'd received the latest in Coalition procedures on containing and eliminating Reaver infection from active warships. Captain Krin couldn't be sure they'd payed any attention to Coalition military notices recently, of course, but the fact that their ships were still flying under their own control gave her some cause to hope.


So that was the situation. Five hours in, and it already felt like she'd been in battle for the past two days. But she couldn't stop. She couldn't give herself the luxury of a reprieve, because these people still needed her. She wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't a doctor or a biohazard specialist, or a politician, or . . . hell, even a very good public speaker. But she was in charge. And that counted for something.


“Captain, the Colonial commander is asking to speak with you again.”


“Tell him I'm still busy,” she said into her commlink, then opened the lift doors and stepped out of them . . .


Into Docking Bay 1A of the Anoat Central Spaceport, and the sheer humanity of fifty thousand people crammed into a space meant for less than a tenth that many. She walked the narrow paths between cots and makeshift mattresses, consoling those she could and listening to as much of the pleas as she could stomach. One woman was weeping for her lost child, having just finished going through every docking bay on every level in hopes of finding him somewhere, anywhere, safe. Another old man was shaking uncontrollably, recounting the horror of an Imperial attack that was “nothing, nothing” compared to what the Reavers had done.


And so she continued, passing off this or that Colonial captain to one of her subordinates as needed. It was all she could do at this point. The protocols were in place. Her people knew their roles and would carry them out to the best of their abilities. Everyone knew the stakes here, everyone except these people. These Colonials, still in shock from the loss of their homes, unable to leave until they were cleared and with nowhere to go besides. Right now, they needed her more than anyone else.


They needed to know that they weren't forgotten. They needed to know that even though their hope was spent, others still hoped on for them. They needed to know that the Coalition, and it's people, weren't about to turn them away.


And then she caught the tail end of something that piqued her interest as a military officer: Remorans.


“David bless them!” the middle-aged woman was saying. “The Remorans, I tell 'ya, they saved us!”


“You think they're human under all that gear?” an elderly woman asked.


“What does it matter?” the other woman shouted back. “They saved us!”


“They're all dead now,” a young man said sullenly. “So yeah, what does it matter?”


“The Remorans?” Julia asked, edging into the conversation. She'd gotten the reports on the strange aliens who had first attacked the Colonies and then entered the system again for some sort of diplomatic exchange. It was odd to hear the Colonials refer to them as “saviors”, given that the West had considered them the first viable threat to the Colonies since their founding. If anything was ever going to warrant the Coalition's Colonial evacuation plans, Western Command had reasoned, it would have been the Remorans. Until only hours ago, that had still been Krin's thinking. Now, though . . .


The Colonial refugees eyed her with suspicion and mistrust, but reluctantly an old man spoke up. “Aye, those thick hulls of theirs smashed right through the Reaver lines, hardly a dent in 'em.” There was something about the way that he spoke to her that told Julia he had served, that he respected the uniform and that was why he'd answered her.


It seemed enough of a welcome for the rest of them. “We don't know why they came to the rescue,” a teenaged girl said, somehow bright-eyed despite all that had happened. “But that huge ship of theirs . . .”


“That's right!” the middle-aged woman jumped back in. “The Sovereign. She was a beauty, and so powerful!”


“The Remorans engaged the Reavers?”


“Not just engaged,” the old man said. “They covered our retreat, good and proper.”


“But they didn't follow you out?” Krin asked.


“We got out in the third wave,” the young man said, squeezing the teenage girl's hand. “They were still fighting . . . uhh, covering us, then. They didn't look so good, though.”


“Captain, we've got a bit of a situation here . . .”


“Is there a Reaver outbreak?” she asked into her commlink.


“Uhh, no, Ma'am.”


“Did the Empire pick this exact moment to strike Hoth or Renteg?”


“No, Ma'am.”


“Did Regrad call to fire me?”


“No . . . no Ma'am.”


“Okay, then I don't care, busy.” She clicked the commlink to standby again and returned her attention to the Colonials.


“Were any of you in with the last wave of ships?” Julia scanned everyone in earshot, but they were all shaking their heads or staring back blankly. “Were any of you on the last wave of ships,” she asked louder, but no one beyond this little circle seemed interested in responding. She realized that maybe they were worried she was looking for late arrivals for a less desirable reason than a simple conversation. “Did anyone on the last wave of ships see what became of the Remorans?”


“Hey, Cap'n's talkin' to you!” the old man shouted.


“Yeah,” a man in his early thirties said, maneuvering his way down a narrow, winding path between the refugees. “What of it?”


“The Remorans,” Krin pressed. “Do you know why they didn't follow you out of the system?”


He shrugged. “Well, yeah; they stuck with the rearguard.”


“Rearguard?” Krin asked.


“The Colonial ships who were holding off the Reavers for our escape.”


She still couldn't piece this together. It still didn't make sense in her mind. “Someone split the Colonial navy in two? A delaying force, and an escort force?”


“Yep, that's about right,” the old man said again.


That didn't make any sense. And it especially didn't make any sense considering the Colonial captains hadn't mentioned it to her or anyone in her command. “Why?”


The old man frowned. It was not a pleasant expression on his wrinkled face. “Politics.


“Now listen here, that Human High Culture nerfshit holds up just fine as long as you don't ever bother to look at any of the other shit any other species ever built, or ever get yourself into the kind of a situation where you might need any kind of help from anyone else anywhere in this gods-damned galaxy.”


“Language!” the old woman said, slapping his hand.


“That's how it works though, right?” the old man barked back. “I get to say whatever kinda shit I want, and as long as I'm not some kind of a fish, or a cat-man, or a lizard or some-such, it's A-ok with you types, right?”


“Oh . . .” the old woman huffed, shooing him away with her hands, unsuccessfully.


“I'm afraid I don't follow,” Krin had to admit. She was human, but she wasn't Gestalt human. Even then, she was beginning to wonder if the old man made sense to them.


“The high-ups,” he continued, pointing over his head as if it would clarify something. “Military brass and politician-types. The true believers with the power to make true believer policy. They were so sure of themselves and their own superiority that they never imagined anything like the Reavers could come along and kick over their sandcastle. But they did, came in and kicked it over hard.


“The Reavers came in hot, tore through the colonies' static defenses 'fore the brass knew what was happening. We lost a lot of people in the time it took the patrols and whatnot to fall back to the colonies. Alot'a people, and alot'a leadership. I think . . .” the old man sat up a little straighter, pointing a withered finger at the captain, “I think somebody survived that first hit from the Reavers, somebody who wanted to keep surviving and who found hisself with the kind of power to give the order that would keep him surviving, what with all the bodies of his commanders splayed out around him.”


“Why's it got to be a 'him'?” the old woman asked, slapping him again.


“Huh?” he asked.


“All that railing on and on about Human High Culture, but you're still the same stupid, sexist, prick I married all those years ago!”


“Shut yer yap, I'm talkin' here to the Cap'n! Anyway, Cap'n,” he continued, returning his attention to Krin, “that's what I think. Now I can't go guessing about the Remorans; they're a strange lot I've not heard of before. Maybe they just like a fight. Maybe they got a thing for protecting civilians. I don't know. But the Colonial brass . . . I'd bet you a hundred credits, if I had it to bet.”


It made as much sense as anything else, but it was bad news if true. The Colonial evacuation to Anoat was only half of the old plan, because a Western fleet could move from Anoat to Gestalt just as quickly as a Colonial fleet could move from Gestalt to Anoat. Maybe faster, if the Colonials were escorting slower civilian ships. Which, in this case, they had.


It was beginning to sound like, while the opening blow of the Reaver invasion had been devastating and disruptive, the Colonial fleet, under proper command, could have held out long enough for Western reinforcements to arrive if they had only signaled for help. Even if the Reavers had scrambled long-range comms, a courier ship at full speed or a comm ship jumping out of system then sending a mayday would have reached Anoat in time. It didn't sound like they could have held the system from the Reavers, but maybe they could have bought the time for a proper evacuation.


Could it really be that simple, though? Could some mid-level political official or military officer really have gone to those insane lengths, thrown away so many lives, just to save her- or him-self from the Reavers?


“Captain, I've got another one claiming to be in command now.”


“Yeah,” Krin said absently into her commlink, “I don't care. Tell that one to get in line, too. There's not much to be in command of, besides. I'm in command of this system until relief arrives from further West, and my orders for the Colonial ships and crews won't be changing until then. So you pass that along and tell Captain-Commodore-Viscount-Whoever-the-Frack to shut it until I'm done here!”


“Uhh, yes, Ma'am. There's just this one weird thing . . .”


Julia sighed heavily, bobbing her head back and forth as she considered whether or not she should take the bait. “Okay, tell me.”


“We can't tell where the transmission's coming from.”


The old man shot bolt upright, surprised and maybe a little uplifted by the statement.


“What?” Captain Krin asked, intrigued by his response. “What is it?”

“What do you think they're doing?” the pilot asked.


The copilot shrugged. “I dunno. Mebe they think they're hidin'.”


“Who do you think they're hiding from?” the pilot asked, unconvinced.


The copilot shrugged again. “I dunno. Y'think . . . Y'think mebe they're tryin' ta hide frum us?”


“But this is literally the one spot we would know to look for them at,” the pilot said. “What if . . . what if they just don't know where to go?”


The copilot shrugged. “When tha smell frum all tha folks crammed in them ships start reachin' the cap'n's's rooms, sumbody'll have ah idear real quick-like.”


“Alright, well looks like we got all of the pictures worth getting. Better head back home before somebody notices us.”


* * *


Anoat Central Spaceport, Anoat High Orbit
Colonial Refugee Command


“It's a Krakana,” Captain Krin said. “Maybe the Krakana, though we can't get the sensor readings on it to be sure. And it's not like she's going to turn on her transponder anytime soon, or anything.”


“What the frell is a Krakana?” Chief Grubnub asked, still bewildered by the amorphous dark spot blocking out a few stars and the port fin of a Colonial destroyer.


Julia was just high enough up the ranks to know about the stealth ships. As commander of the closest Coalition forces to Gestalt, it was important she knew what kind of equipment her so-called allies had at their disposal. Even so, the existence of a Coalition first-strike stealth ship, especially one of the Krakana's scale, was a closely guarded secret not even known to most Coalition captains.


Chief Grubnub and the captain had come to respect and admire one another over the time they'd spent at Anoth, though, and he had proven invaluable in the opening hours of this refugee crisis. He was the first “official civilian adviser” she'd appointed to appease the local government, who was not at all happy that she hadn't yet given up her emergency powers.


Bottom line: she trusted him, and she needed a local in the loop to cover her ass in case one of these Colonial commanders screwed something else up.


“It's responsible for this whole mess. Well, it brought who's responsible for this whole mess, I'd wager.” It didn't seem like Grubnub found that an adequate answer, but it was hard to read his lobster-crab body language. “It's a Colonial stealth ships, and it's a secret, and that's enough for you to know for now.”


“Shouldn't you move it so you can't see its profile against the other ships, if it's such a secret and all?” Grubnub asked.


“You can only spot it from this angle,” Krin said, “and I made them park it there. So I could keep track of it.”


The two were standing on the raised upper tier of the once and future Anoat Traffic Control Command, currently serving as the central command hub for the refugee effort. The upper tier had been cleared out for the time being, the lower ranks staffed at about half capacity with civilian volunteers and Western naval officers.


Planetary traffic control had been kicked over to a secondary system, a distributed network that broke the planet into sectors according to spaceport locations, then assigned entry and exit vectors and holding orbits to ships based on destination. The whole thing was less efficient than the singular, centralized traffic control, but it couldn't be helped. With the arrival of the relief fleet from the West, the station, its equipment, and the surrounding space were going to be tied up for a while.


Julia's first priority had been getting the refugees onto newly arrived ships. There had been no Reaver outbreaks on the station and the likelihood of one among its population at this point was essentially zero, but she had to get these people adequate living space before she found herself with a whole other set of problems.


Truthfully, the captain had been expecting to hand over command to someone with rank or experience when the relief fleet arrived, but that hadn't happened. For one, the relief forces hadn't been as substantial as she'd anticipated. For another, or so they'd said, Western Command was impressed with her performance thus-far and didn't want to rob her of the credit for such a successful operation. There were even whispers of a promotion, she'd been told.


Which was a joke, of course; the commander of the whole Western fleet was Captain Ion. Captain Ion! What kind of a promotion could they give her, when she already held the same rank as the Province's commander? What, was Ion going to get a promotion just so there'd be space for her to get one too?


Heh, this was the West; that might actually be the plan.


“So when are the rest of our reinforcements getting here?” Grubnub asked, skittering to his workstation and activating its holoscreen.


“Huh? Oh, the Cooperative is sending a relief fleet from Skor II with supplies and some equipment, so we can expect the joy of Squib relief workers soon enough.” The thought was terrifying, but Julia tried not to let it show. “If there are no incidents by the time they arrive, I'll lift the quarantine on all the low-risk Colonials and we can get to the real work.”


“But before that,” a new, gruff voice interjected, “we're going to need to straighten a few things out between us.”


Captain Krin and Chief Grubnub turned to see a dark-skinned human in suit and tie standing beside a Colonial captain in military dress uniform, a small collection of officers and civilians behind them. The two lead men couldn't appear any more different without violating the Colonies unwritten rule of “no aliens allowed”. The civilian was a short, muscular man with a disarming sort of weary demeanor, like he'd be quite charming if only he could have managed a few hours of sleep over the last couple of days. The captain, on the other hand, was a tall, lanky man with skin so pale he looked almost sickly. His stiff, rigid posture did nothing for his sunken, haunting eyes, and there was something . . .


“Shall we sit for this?” the civilian asked, gesturing to the collapsible table that had been set up right in the middle of the aisle. His voice sounded a little rough from use or weariness, but otherwise mellow.


“Oh, yes, of course,” Captain Krin started, catching herself and remembering that she was the one in charge here.


“I'll call the others,” Grubnub said, turning back to his console.


“They won't be needed,” the Colonial captain said, that gruff voice sounding a little more abrasive when directed at the alien.


Krin looked over her shoulder and nodded for Grubnub to continue, thinking it best he not be the only non-human in the room for this. When she turned around, the two Colonials had taken seats on the far end of the table, their entourage moving for the chairs on either side near their end, serving as a kind of buffer.


“I am Admiral Sven Derricot, Commander of the Colonial Defense Force, and this is Colonial Minister Gideon Ashern.”


Julia's eyes widened in surprise at such a bold pair of pronouncements.


“These,” he added absently, waiving at the remainder of his party, “are of no consequence to you.”


“I'll tell you what,” Captain Krin began, deciding not to take her seat yet and instead standing behind it with her hands resting on its back, “when your 'government' gets together the monumental infrastructure necessary to sew admiral's stripes onto your uniform, you can be an admiral. Until then, captain . . .”


Grubnub took the cue easily enough and pulled up the desired data on a datapad. “Captain . . . of the carrier Provincial . . .”


“. . . of a ship that isn't even here,” she continued, “you two can tell me what your respective rank and office were three days ago, before you crowned yourselves the new co-emperors of your landless realm.”


“I can assure you,” Mr. Ashern began diplomatically, “that we have proceeded, in full compliance of Colonial Law, with continuity of government and continuity of command protocols.”


“Chief,” Krin called out over her shoulder, not turning completely away from the Colonial delegation so that she could keep an eye on them.


“Yes, Ma'am?”


“Fetch me something for effect.”


“Got it right . . .” Grubnub rifled through a tray of vertically stacked datapads, pulling out a rather hefty one, “here.”


“Thank you, Chief.” Julia reached back and accepted the pad blind, bringing it forward and tossing it, flat, onto the center of the table. The loud banging noise of the pad's casing striking against the flexiplast tabletop elicited the desired level of shock from the Colonials.


“What is this?” the Colonial captain asked, the only one unfazed by the display.


“That's the latest intelligence report from the Coalition Stealth Intruder Void Walker, and judging by the ship count of the fleet at Sentry Station Waypoint Two,” she dropped the name just so the Colonials would know that she knew what she was talking about, “I estimate there's about a . . . forty percent chance that the Confederation has their hands on a Colonial official higher up the food chain than either of you.


“Assistant Minister of Finance, didn't you say, Chief?” Again, she did the thing where she turned her head to the side just enough that she could keep an eye on the Colonials.


“Yes, Ma'am. That's right. Assistant Minister of Finance Gideon Ashern, that's him. I never can be too certain with new human faces, you understand, but I had the computer run facial recognition to be sure.”


The Western captain nodded, a smug grin creeping across her face. “Yeah, I'd say about forty percent, if I'm being generous to you, and I'm always generous to my new friends. So if you want to play this whole 'The Gestalt Colonies survive, whole and true' line through to its finish, you might want to be very careful about the kinds of threats you make to me in the next several minutes . . .”


Julia let them sit with their uncomfortable silence until one of them broke it, and to her surprise it was the minister, not the captain. “What would you propose we do about that? Colonial ships and citizens in Confederation space, I mean.”


“Nothing,” Captain Krin said flatly. “I propose nothing, I mean. I'm not a Colonial officer or official, and I'm not a member of Coalition High Command. I'm the commander of the defensive forces at Anoat, with emergency powers to manage the military threat of a Reaver infection and the humanitarian crisis of an allied refugee population. And that's what I'm going to do, manage this problem.”


“Then you admit you have no authority to interfere in Colonial affairs!” Captain Derricot exclaimed.


“Look,” Julia began again, tired enough at this point to slide down into her chair, “you two can call each other by whatever titles you want, pass whatever internal memos you need to get your rocks off, but at the end of the day it's like this: I am the commander of this system's forces, and you and your people are the legal wards of those forces. You are under their care and subject to their authority, and therefore you answer to me.


“Furthermore, until your continuity of government claims have been confirmed to me through proper channels by Coalition federal authorities, I will recognize you two fine gentlemen as Captain and Assistant Finance Minister of the Gestalt Colonies, respectively.” She pointed at them as she named their titles.


“We could leave,” Captain Derricot said darkly. “You've just confirmed the survival of other Colonial Citizens, and at present, half of your warships are incapable of coming to action stations.”


Hadn't she just warned the man about making threats? “Unable to come to action stations because I turned them over to humanitarian use to save your people!”


“We're all Coalition people here,” the minister said, trying to calm the situation, though his eyes did dart to Grubnub as he said the word “people”. “Let's not forget that.”


“I have yet to acknowledge that as fact,” Derricot said.


“Admiral,” the minister said warningly.


“Captain,” Julia said with a similar tone. “You came here for a reason. Here, to Anoat. To the Coalition. You could have taken the Kashan route like we now know others did, but you didn't. You came here. You, an officer of the Colonial Defense Force, a citizen and officer of the Galactic Coalition, retreating to Coalition territory in accordance with existing protocols and in the face of overwhelming force, in the midst of cataclysmic invasion.


“You withdrew to Anoat, with your ships and your citizens, for this. For the assistance we would render as allies in the Coalition. For the enactment of your own nation's continuity of government protocols. For the acknowledgment and authority that would be guaranteed to you by the Coalition House of Representatives, in time.


“Are you, or are you not, an officer of the Colonial Defense Force?”


“I am,” Derricot said stiffly after a brief silence.


“And are, or are not, the Gestalt Colonies members of the Galactic Coalition?”


“They are,” Derricot conceded.


“Then the rest is paperwork.”

“We will not be settling on Anoat,” Minister Ashern said decisively.


For the fourth time in as many days, Captain Julia Krin of the Western Province met the unflinching stare of the acting leader of the Gestalt Colonies. “Do you have any idea what it took for me to secure an autonomous region of Anoat for your people to settle? An autonomous region, like we agreed two days ago!”


“We have identified a superior alternative,” the minister said.


Julia rose to her feet, kicking her chair back out of her way. The display startled not only the Colonials, but the local advisers who had been with her for these past several days now.


“Wha . . . what are you doing?” the minister asked, taken aback.


“I'm through losing sleep over your plots and schemes. We've already moved fifty thousand Colonials on-site and into temp housing thanks to the hard work and dedication of our Squib friends,” she indicated the Squib Procurator, Juri, sitting next to her on the right side of the table, “hard work and dedication that I've got nothing but grief over from your people,” she added, pointing and accusatory finger at Minister Ashern. “I've got a refugee population that's been living on ships and space stations for over a week now, the best of them distinguishable from the worst of them only by not having been forced to watch their fellow Colonials shot to death by Western marines after turning Reaver.


“So if you'll excuse me, I've got more important things to do with my time.” And she set off to leave the daily meeting.

“We want Deyer,” Minister Ashern said hurriedly, rising to his feet and gesturing for her to stop.


She did, out of a numbing sort of incomprehension instead of any sympathy for his plea, but she did. “You made me fight the Anoat government for five days over this on your behalf so at the end of it, you could leverage the unpleasant prospect them having you as a neighbor, so they'd hand you a dead ocean world an orbit over?”


“We don't want autonomy,” Minister Ashern said. “We want independence. We want the Gestalt Colonies. Deyer is habitable, if not altogether hospitable, and it has sufficient land mass for our current population. Convince the Anoat government to cede us Deyer, and we will not only stay well out of their politics, but you will have earned the Coalition's Western Province a stout ally in our new Gestalt Colonies.”


That was his plan, to buy her off with the promise of fame and favor with Western Command? “The people of Anoat don't like you. They don't like your arrogance, they don't like your isolationism, they don't like your speciesism, and they sure as the nine Corellian hells don't like how you use Coalition authority to meddle in their internal affairs. And now you want me to got to them with this, to tell them that you made them spend thousands of collective hours of bargaining, and debating, and compromising, so at the end of it all, they'd be so annoyed at you that they'd give you what you really want just so they don't have to deal with you anymore?”


“Tell them it was your idea,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Tell them it was all part of your ploy to get us off of Anoat,” he continued when he realized she wasn't following. “Say it was in the name of preserving their national integrity, or something to that effect.” Krin still wasn't buying it, and that was really frustrating the minister. “Look, a week ago, if we'd asked Anoat to cede Deyer to the Gestalt Colonies, they would have laughed in our faces. They would have called Cerea and told that Prime Minister of yours to clear us out of their space, to ship us off to some refugee center in the East or somewhere. But now, after seeing our weeping mothers, and hungry children, and exhausted elderly, they can't help but care. Sure, Colonial bureaucracy and our formal demands have been frustrating and unnerving, but that only serves to contrast the futility of dealing with us against the necessity of helping our citizens.


“After all, it worked on you, right?


Julia's eyes widened in shock and horror as her face turned red hot with rage. She wanted to strangle the man with his tie. She wanted to shoot him with her service blaster. She wanted to beat him to death with his chair.


All at once. “Gods, you're a monster.”


“No!” he shouted emphatically, the first genuine show of emotion that Julia had seen from him in the time they'd been dealing with each other. “Whether you or your government recognize it, I am the leader of this nation, the Colonial Minister of the Gestalt Colonies, and there is nothing I will not do to see my people safe and our Colonies restored!”


Julia was taken aback by his raw display of emotion. Even his own Colonial advisers seemed surprised by his outburst. She didn't know what to do, didn't know what to think, stunned by what she couldn't even be sure was a genuine turn of events, given how much the Colonial leader had already manipulated her.


Then the gentle rumbling of Grubnub's voice caught her attention, and she looked back at her team to see him giving quiet counsel to the others. They muttered their own replies and then Grubnub looked to Julia, nodding his lobster head at her. She understood: they were on-board.


Just by accepting the Western captain's offer to serve as a civilian adviser on behalf of Anoat, these people had painted themselves as staunch Coalition supporters in the eyes of Anoat's population. Whether or not it was actually true was largely irrelevant at this point. They needed, desperately, for the Western Province to come out looking good in the eyes of the Anoat people, and apparently they thought this would do it.


Julia turned back to Minister Ashern, still feeling like she was missing something. She let her eyes drift over the Colonial representatives, trying to puzzle out what it might be. And then her eyes drifted past the empty seat at Ashern's side, and she had it.


“There's nothing you wouldn't do for the colonies?” she asked, turning his own words on him, her dark tone betraying her designs.


* * *


Months Pass . . .


RDS Uniform, Deyer Orbit
Converted Conference Room


The Uniform was a dedicated science research ship, built for experimentation and prototyping. It didn't have space to waste on the bureaucratic niceties like the very room in which the small party now gathered. It's modular design, intended and until only recently used for retooling to meet new research and design challenges, however, made it quite capable of taking up its new function. And these days, “capable” was a luxury the Colonies couldn't afford to pass up.


It was a small, quiet meeting in the midst of the mounting media frenzy. Intimate, even.


The two Colonials looked quite pleased with themselves, and they should, she supposed. At least one of them had worked just as hard as anyone over these last few months, even if at times their efforts were very decidedly at odds with the labors of their supposed allies. And now, finally, they would reap the personal rewards for all of their past efforts.


Captain Julia Krin felt like she was finally beginning to understand these people, their pride, their dedication, their unshaking resolve that could survive even a Reaver invasion and the near-total destruction of their governmental and military command. There were certainly things about the Colonials to be admired, that couldn't be denied.


If only they weren't such assholes!


“Well, shall we?” Gideon said, indicating the official document sitting on the table between them. He had insisted in recent weeks that Julia call him “Gideon”, not “Minister” or “Mr. Ashern”.


She had told him quite plainly to call her “Captain”.


Julia looked to her sole companion, expecting him to take the lead. Never in her years of service did she imagine she'd find herself standing beside the Prime Minister of the Western Province, equal partners in a complex legal and political maneuver to determine the fate of a Coalition member. She was a soldier, after all. A warrior, trained to break starships, not resolve contract disputes.


“I think the good captain has earned the honors,” Pro Moon said lightly, looking straight into Julian's eyes.


“Agreed,” Minister Ashern . . . Gideon . . . said.


Looking back to the pair of Colonials, Julia nodded reluctantly, taking her seat and retrieving the document. The others sat in unison.


“The Squib Internal Rapid Response Force,” Julia began, reading the formal name of the humanitarian fleet dispatched from Skor II, “has concluded Phase One of the Seven Cities Complex Project, and certified that the Colonial Refugee Relief Operation has met minimum health and safety requirements laid out by Coalition Law. As Prime Minister Pro Moon has received confirmation from the Coalition House of Representatives that the Gestalt Colonies have executed their continuity of government protocols in accordance with Colonial and Coalition law, I am now legally authorized to transfer administration of the this Relief Operation to the Colonial government.


“With the recall of the RDS Uniform by the Colonial Defense Fleet and its appointment as the future command center for this Operation, I have received satisfactory indication of your government's technical capabilities to continue the settling and development of Deyer. Furthermore, with the completion of repairs effected to Colonial warships at Anoat, I am assured of the Colonial government's abilities to defend its own sovereignty to a degree well within the bounds of Coalition law.


“That leaves only a single hurdle to clear before I am satisfied to declare this state of emergency resolved, and return the Gestalt Colonies to their independent governance. I must be assured of some minimally acceptable level of formal oversight, to ensure that a self-administrated Colonial Refugee Relief Operation will remain on-track and allocate Coalition relief resources appropriately. To that end, I have proposed the admission of the Gestalt Colonies into the Western Province of the Galactic Coalition, with all of its citizens, officers, starships, and assets subject to Western law.”


“What of Colonial citizens and military assets within Confederation space?” Gideon asked immediately.


It was an expected question, one that Pro Moon was eminently qualified to answer. “As you well know, the Western Province styles itself as a Coalition-in-miniature. As such, you will be free to pursue any course of action you deem fit, within the constraints of Western Law. The Western Province will not, however, take independent action to pursue what it may perceive as wayward citizens of a member nation. That would constitute an unconscionable violation of the Colonies' sovereign rights.”


Julia refocused her attention from the Western minister to the Colonial minister.“Are these terms acceptable?”


Gideon looked to the Colonial commander and received a curt nod. “Yes,” he said simply, taking the official document and signing where necessary. Passing it back, Pro Moon signed on as Prime Minister of the West, leaving one final signature, one final line to be filled out.


Captain Julia Krin, the human woman from Abregado-Rae who had come to call Anoat her home, a career naval officer whose fondest hopes and most dreaded fears never wandered far from the specter of armed conflict, signed her name and ended the longest conflict of her life, a conflict of an entirely different sort.


“Congratulations, Colonial Minister Ashern, Admiral Derricot,” Julia said to each of them in turn.


They nodded back in acknowledgment, both looking rather proud of themselves.


“The Gestalt Colonies live,” she added with a grin she just couldn't manage to suppress.


“Indeed they do,” Pro Moon said, caught up in the giddiness of the moment. He rose to his feet, clapping his hands together, about to excuse himself.


Julia put a restraining hand on his forearm, surprising him a little. “Minister, would now be appropriate?” she asked Gideon, her tone formal.


“The sooner the better, I'd say,” he answered, nodding.


Julia tugged gently on Pro Moon's arm, “This way please, Prime Minister, for your safety.”


Pro Moon's huge Cerean brows furrowed in confusion, but Julia kept tugging and he relented, letting her move him to her opposite side, putting him uncomfortably close to the nearest bulkhead.


She brought out a commlink with her free hand and spoke into it: “Security detail to the conference room, we're good to go here.”


“What's all of this?” Admiral Derricot asked, confused, looking from the Colonial Minister to the Western captain.


A pair of Colonial Commandos entered the room, heading straight for the commander of the Colonial military.


Julia locked eyes with him just before she began to speak. “Admiral Sven Derricot, by the authority of the Coalition Western Province as called upon by the Colonial Minister of the Gestalt Colonies, I am placing you under arrest for the crimes of treason, dereliction of duty, impersonating a flag officer of the Colonial Defense Fleet, and . . . is gross incompetence a crime? Because the Prime Minister of the Western Province is right here, and I can probably get that made a crime before you reach the brig.”


“What? What is the meaning of this? Get your hands off of me!” Derricot struggled in futility against the commando who had grabbed his wrists, locking them in a pair of stun cuffs. While Colonial Commandos weren't meant for military policing duties, Julia had thought that the visual of the armor-clad warriors hauling the traitorous commander to the brig would be quite appealing. Gideon had agreed.


Julia put a hand on the nearest Commando's shoulder to stop him from hauling the newly minted admiral away. “Welcome to the Western Province, admiral, among whose members is a certain living planet called Emanon, who quite enjoys putting puzzles together. Puzzles, like determining the positions and actions of the Krakana for the duration of the Reaver invasion, by synthesizing sensor records pulled from the hundreds of Colonial ships who escaped to Anoat. Like pairing scrubbing algorithms with Colonial naval decryption codes to recover data from tight-beam comm signals aimed at Colonial command ships and originating from the ruins of David Colony. Comm signals that carried orders with Admiral Mar-Veil's authorization codes, the same Admiral Mar-Veil who we now have confirmation died in the opening attack on David Colony. The same Admiral Mar-Veil who you were serving under at the time.


“You pulled the Krakana from the line to save your own ass. You ordered other Colonial commanders to die in your stead. You threw away the lives of how many thousands of Colonials to ensure your own survival? The Gestalt Colonies live, and they will not abide your transgression.” She slapped the Commando's shoulder and he hauled Dericot out of the room, kicking and screaming.


“Well, that was enlightening,” Pro Moon said, uncharacteristically somber. “I take it Emanon's findings will hold up in a Colonial court?” he asked, turning to the new Colonial Minister.


Gideon shrugged. “It doesn't matter. The Colonial military is formally part of Western Command now, meaning a Colonial court martial must abide by Western guidelines.”


“Well that's convenient,” Pro Moon said lightly, having already shaken off the dark prospect of the Admiral's past actions. “And I take it you'll be needing a new commander of the CDF now, yes?”


“It shouldn't be a problem for the Minister to promote the senior-most Colonial captain to the post,” Julia offered, moving her chair aside and stepping back so Pro Moon could more easily extricate himself from the cramped corner she'd pulled him into.


“Oh, I think that would be a terrible misstep on the dear Colonial Minister's part,” Pro Moon said with more than a dash of mock concern. “In these uncertain times, with your people's faith in their military command so shaken by this turn of events, I think it would be best to have a trusted, proven commander leading the CDF, someone who's paid her dues and more, who's already proven she's willing to make the tough calls that save Colonial lives.”


“Oh, no . . .” Julia whispered, sinking back half a step as Pro Moon moved out of the cramped corner and back to stand at her side.


“And besides,” he continued, “I think it would be best for the citizens of the Colonies to see a clear demonstration from their new Minister of the strength of the Gestalt Colonies' new relationship to the West, and renewed relationship to the Coalition as a whole. Don't you?” He was facing Minister Ashern, but his hand had come to rest on Julia's shoulder.


“Prime Minister . . .” Julia began, desperate to salvage this situation before he pushed the Colonial leader too far, desperate to extricate herself from this dangerous position . . .


“I think Captain Krin would make an ideal Colonial,” Gideon said smoothly before she could continue.


Her voice caught in her throat. She glanced back at Gideon in wide-eyed shock. She could feel her shoulders slumping under the weight of the Prime Minister's hand, her natural instinct to retreat from such an undesirable and disadvantaged position.


They were using her, both of them she now realized, for their own political maneuvers. Her months of selfless labor and sacrifice to save the people of the Gestalt Colonies and ensure them a chance at future prosperity were being wagered by other, more powerful people for ends she couldn't even see.


“Promotion to the rank of admiral is out of the question, of course,” Pro Moon said immediately.


“Minister Moon,” Julia managed, her mouth dry, “I don't think this is a good idea . . .”


“Agreed,” Gideon said in reply to Pro Moon's comment, ignoring Julia's objections completely.


“You'll do just fine,” Minister Moon reassured.


 “It's not me that I'm worried about,” she said, more defensively than she would have liked.


 “Everyone will do just fine,” he replied in the same, reassuring tone.


“Besides, I think something more identifiably Colonial would serve our needs best," Gideon continued, now ignoring their entire exchange. "Vice Commodore, a ceremonial title that nonetheless denotes supreme authority over the military assets of the Gestalt Colonies. A reminder, also, that though the Gestalt Colonies are now members of the Western Province, the Colonial Defense Fleet is an autonomous entity subject only to the direct authority of the Commander of the West, Captain Ion.”


Julia was shaking her head in disbelief. Had Pro Moon known about Admiral Derricot all along? Had the two leaders struck some informal agreement before this meeting had even begun?


“It will of course help that Captain Krin is so well respected by the people of Anoat, your new neighbors,” Pro Moon noted. “It's agreed, then? I should file the transfer paperwork?”


It was just then that she caught something in the way Pro Moon regarded Gideon. Something about the tone of his voice and the way he narrowed his eyes ever-so-slightly.


She looked back to Gideon and found him staring at her, a wistful smile on his lips. “Yes. Yes, you should.”


Oh . . .


* * *


“. . . Balls. Big, hairy, Wookiee balls!”


Julia kicked the locker door shut, behind which now hung her former Western naval uniform.


“Is there a problem, Miss?”


She turned to find the familiar Ryn standing in the doorway, a grease smudge on his face and a work belt around his waist. His coveralls were stained with sweat and more grease, and his hair had that particular oily look that some Ryn got when they'd been too hot for too long.


“Is the refresher working yet?” she snapped at him, not at all liking his disarming demeanor. Right now, she wanted to be armed, well and truly armed.


This area of the Uniform had been converted to additional living space for members of the Colonial Relief administration stationed aboard, and she'd opted for new quarters here rather than pushing out one of the permanent members of the ship's senior staff. Unfortunately, in their haste to ready the quarters before their latest deadline, the construction crew seemed to have missed a few essential functions.


“Just about,” he said, turning to head back into the room. “It's not like you're the only one with better things to do with your time.” He added the barb with no hint of levity.


This particular Ryn had only recently joined the Squib relief effort that had been helping the Colonials settle their new home for months now. With the Colonials regaining their political independence, the racist jackasses were rewarding the hard work of their Squib and Ryn allies by pushing them off-world with all possible haste. The Uniform, technically a Colonial asset but hugely influenced by broader Coalition interests over the past several months, was one of the few places in the Colonies that non-humans were given any measure of respect. With his skills and personal connections, he'd managed to get a posting here.


And now Julia had him fixing her bathroom. “I'm sorry,” she said, reaching out an arm as if willing him to stay. Oddly enough, it worked. “This day's been seriously kicking my ass. I'm not really a Colonial, you know?” She said it like she wasn't sure he'd believe her.


“Yeah you are,” he answered with a mixture of admiration and disappointment, staring at the insignia and medals on her new uniform. He shook his head, a roguish grin distorting the grease smear on his face. “Vice Commodore of the Gestalt Colonies.”


She couldn't hold that fire-and-ice stare, and looked away. “Minister Ashern . . . Gideon . . . he has a thing for me.” Why was she telling him this? She shouldn't be telling him this. “I figured it out when they were deciding my fate . . . he and Prime Minister Moon, I mean. Moon saw it before I did; I sort of picked up on it late in the game.”


“Maybe he likes strong women,” the Ryn said lightly, stepping away from the door, apparently content that he was fully engaged in this conversation now.


“I think he likes breaking strong women,” she answered, meeting his eyes again as she fought back the bile of the revelation.


“Well that'll get him disappointed real fast,” he said, still oddly jovial.


“I can't . . . I can't . . .” She looked away again, somehow embarrassed by all of this. “I can't believe they're all the same. There's got to be more to them than these narcissistic, self-absorbed, short-sighted, xenophobic, racists!”


“'Racists', huh?” was his only reply, which he accented by crossing his arms over his chest.


“Speciesist, whatever!” she shouted, gesticulating wildly. “It's a stupid sounding word. I can't help which words sound stupid, give me a break!”


She turned her back on him, the whole situation having become too much for her to handle. It was just another straw to toss onto the crushing press of conflicted thoughts and feelings that had been building in her since the Colonials first arrived.


“Hey, hey, now,” he said softly, taking a few steps forward, reaching out a hand to rest it gently on her arm. “All the breaks. I'll give you all the breaks.”


The ridiculous attempt at reassurance made Julia chuckle, and she allowed herself to take a half-step back, closer to him.


He moved in closer as well, right against her, his forehead brushing against her hair. “What do you think's going to happen,” he paused to kiss her gently on the neck, below her ear, “when he finds out . . .” his hand slid up her arm to squeeze her shoulder gently, his other hand moving to rest on her hip “. . . you're married,” he kissed her again, the hand on her hip sliding around her waist while the other moved across her collarbones until he had her wrapped in both his arms, “to a Ryn?”


She was fighting the urge to draw in deeper breaths, her quickening heartbeat demanding more oxygen from her lungs. “I want to say one of those terrible, offensive, unhelpful, inconsiderate things that you always get furious at me for.”


“Do it,” he whispered into her ear.


Julia slid her hand between his and her own waist, squeezing it gently and then pulling it away. His other hand fell away immediately, and she turned around to stare into his eyes. “In thirty minutes, Colonial Minister Ashern is going to present me to the newly appointed Council of Ministers.” She released his hand and grabbed the clasp of his work belt, unlatching it and dropping it to the floor.


“Make me smell like an alien.”

Seven Cities Complex, Deyer
Out-and-About


The Seven Cities Complex was a far cry from the original Colonial capital after which it was named. The squat, prefab structures that still dominated the landscape covered the available land like a thin film, utilizing every square meter of available space. Even with the grievous losses to the Colonies' population suffered by the Reaver attack, the proportion of the Colonial population able to be housed here was dwarfed by the magnitude of the original Seven Cities Area at its height.


The immediate problem was simple enough: space. While Deyer held ample landmass to support the current population of the Colonies, it had not been considerate enough to provide that landmass in any particular concentration. The world was dominated by salty oceans, the largest of its islands just substantial enough to support terraformed lakes that might supply a long-term water source to some tens of thousands of residents each.


Even the Seven Cities Complex, such as it was, consisted of little more than a chain of islands slightly closer together than usual. A system of levees was under construction to eliminate some of the narrower channels and merge a number of islands into a single mass, but even then only four of the seven primary zones of the Complex would be connected by land. The others would have to be linked by bridge, sea tunnel, or some other massive construction project the Colonies simply could not support for the foreseeable future.


A few thousand miles away, David Colony was another such string of islands, with even less prospect of ever being merged into any kind of contiguous landmass. There was even a Wells Grey, a sliver of the planet set aside as a nature preserve, though the notion took on something of a morbid tint when one learned that the region had once housed the planet's only sentient inhabitants, a colony of humans who had either been exterminated, enslaved, or driven off by the first Empire.


A morbid tint . . . the color of choice for these, the new Gestalt Colonies, spread like a colony of spores across the surface of a world that did not want them. Yet here they were, surviving. Rebuilding. Dreaming of a bright and prosperous future.


And all but ignoring what had cast them into the depths of such present darkness.


Julia rounded the last corner and finally laid eyes on her destination, just another prefab box of a building from the looks of it. But she knew better. Offering a friendly hello to a passing family who recognized her, Julia crossed the street and headed through the building's sliding doors, into the belly of the beast itself.


It was something of a townhall meeting for people too important to go to a real townhall meeting, but not important enough to assemble their own conferences. A local merchant had the floor when Julia edged her way into the packed room, railing about some new tax code imposed by the “powers that be”, but he caught sight of her immediately. That wasn't surprising, seeing as her Colonial Navy uniform stuck out like a Trandoshan in an Ewok village amongst this crowd. That, and they'd no doubt been expecting her.


“Well, well, well, if it isn't Her Majesty, the Empress Herself.” The merchant slow clapped for added effect.


“Shut yer yap!” someone shouted from the front of the room. A murmur of agreement rippled through the audience, punctuated by a rotten vegetable soaring through the air to strike the floor next to the merchant.


“I got three more minutes!” the merchant snapped back, unfazed by the rancid ordnance.


“Lady's here to hear us out,” someone shouted from near the back, but on the other side of the room from Julia. “Give her a chance!”


“She can hear me out!” the merchant shot back, not yielding ground.


“Then talk,” Julia spoke up. “Say something worth being heard.”


She got a few chuckles from the audience, not bad under the circumstances.


“Alright, alright,” he said, testy. He seemed to like the support for her even less than the opposition to him. “Tell me then, M'Lady, how is it that the Western Province can levy a tax on humanitarian aid dispatched to us by our so-called allies?” A murmur of uninformed support went up after his question.


Julia sighed, saddened by the banality of the question. She wanted so badly to hang this around Gideon's neck, like he deserved, but unfortunately for her passions and most fortunately for her agenda, she was a quick study, and politicking required a more subtle hand. “When the Squib Rapid Response operation was evicted,” passive voice for responsibility, charged verb for effect, “from Deyer, that action violated the terms of their independent aid and amounted to a formal rejection of Cooperative provincial assistance. The Squibs can send us however many tons of food and building supplies they want without charge, as they have been and continue to do, but it still constitutes a commodities exchange in the eyes of the Western Provincial government, and is therefore subject to provincial tariffs.”


She heard more than a few “Damned Westerners” and “Damned Squib”, even a “Kriffing Anoat” for good fun, but any supporters she may have in the room stayed quiet for the time being.


“Well isn't that just . . .” the merchant started back, but Julia wasn't finished yet.


“It's important to recall, of course, that the Gestalt Colonies still benefit from the special status of the Refugee Relief Operation, whose operational command has been vested in the Colonial government, so we hold all of the cards here.”


He wasn't following. “Wha . . . how do you mean?”


“It's . . our government,” she could still barely get those two words out in succession, “who holds the power to designate these shipments as humanitarian aid, the Ministry of Colonial Affairs specifically.”


“Then why don't they?” someone shouted from the middle of the room. There was someone else with a poorly muffled “bullshit” then another person asked “Yeah, why don't they?” like Julia might have already forgotten that was the standing question.


“Because none of you are willing to take a handout from a bunch of oversized rats who dig through garbage for a profession.” It was tactless, she knew, and harmful to her objective in the short term, but she had to call them out in little ways every now and then or she'd go mad from it all.


There were several more “bullshits”, some incoherent yelling, and at least one “Ryn Lover”, but she just smiled and imagined she was counting off the last few vital seconds.


“Are you done now?” she asked the merchant who was still standing at the front of the meeting.


“Yes!” a dozen or so people near the front shouted in unison.


“Well fine then!” he griped, trying to storm off but quickly finding there wasn't enough room to move faster than a careful, weaving crawl through the crowd.


“I propose the Vice Commodore take the podium,” a heavyset woman said from near the front, standing and turning around to address the majority of the room. “All in favor?”


Several “Ayes”, a smattering of “Yeahs”, and a few people silently raising their hands.


“Commodore, the floor is yours,” the woman said cheerily before taking her seat again.


“Please, 'Captain' will be fine,” Julia said as she stepped in front of the gathering. The simple comment was met immediately with boos.


They didn't like that she didn't like her Colonial title. But “Vice Commodore”, really? There wasn't even a Commodore! There was a Commanding Captain of the West, to whom she was immediately subordinate in the largely autonomous Colonial branch of Western Military Command, but even then a “Vice Commodore” was a superior rank to Captain of any stripe. Except it wasn't a rank.


It was a title. An office. A symbol of Colonial identity. That very particular kind of reminder that the Colonials had cultivated over these past months, a reminder of who they once were that somehow managed to skip over the part where they had to remember how they stopped being that.


“Alright, alright, alright, I concede. 'Vice Commodore' it is.” And for the life of her, she couldn't help but grin when so many of them cheered.


“But let's get down to business, because my time is short as I'm sure is yours. I'd wager all of you know who I am by now, almost all of you have heard me speak before, and some of you even think I have a worthwhile idea every now and then.” She paused just long enough to wink at a familiar supporter in the front row. “And that's why I come to these sorts of meetings, why I wait in line like everyone else, why I walk the streets to get here, waving to friendly passersby. So in moments like these, you'll give me the chance to convince you that I've got a worthwhile idea. So here it is:


“We nationalize Galactic Technologies.”


No one liked that idea. No one.


“Please, please, here me out.” They were still too rowdy to press on constructively. “Look, our relationship with one another started out with me as Captain Krin of the Anoat Defense Force, formal administrator of the Colonial Refugee Relief Operation, and it's led me here, to this, to Vice Commodore Krin of the Colonial Defense Fleet, de facto administrator of the Colonial Refugee Relief Operation. Except now, I've got a Colonial Minister on my ass . . .”


“Yeah you do,” a muffled shout came from the back of the room.


Somehow that got to her a little, made her stumble the slightest bit. “. . . and a whole Council of Ministers snapping at my heels, trying to push me around, trying to advance one agenda or another. Well I'm done with that, because I've got an agenda of my own. It's the same agenda I had on day one, when you showed up, strangers, in my system:


“I want to be through with this. I want to see the RDS Uniform on deep space deployment, with a pair of Colonial Cornucopias at its flanks, defining the edges of scientific knowledge, laying down designs that put the rest of the Coalition to shame. I want to see the towers of the Seven Cities Complex rising a hundred fifty stories into the sky, alight with beacons to guide in a new generation of Colonial starships and shipping convoys. I want to see our self-sufficiency restored, our futures lit by the fires of renewed industry, not the fading embers of remembered glories. I want to see the Gestalt Colonies become the place that people come looking for to join, not the squatter's shanty town that everyone already there dreams of leaving.


“And we can do that . . . with Galactic Technologies. Its been in a state of legal limbo since the majority of its senior administration was lost when . . . when we evacuated to Anoat.” It was amazing how blind they could make themselves as long as she avoided that key word, and equally amazing how many of them accepted her as one of the “we”, even though they all knew she hadn't been with them at the time.


“And consequently its stock prices have plummeted to near zero, but the value of it's intellectual properties remain intact. If we nationalize Galactic Technologies, those properties become protected assets of the Gestalt Colonies, and we could either extract that value immediately, by selling them off, or leverage that value as collateral for new financing to revive GT and put you all back to work producing a new generation of marketable products. That's a decision that you all would make as colonial citizens, though, and it's a decision that I think you deserve to be allowed to make.


“You were originally brought to the Gestalt Colonies as employees of Galactic Technologies; now, Galactic Technologies should stay with the Colonies as a collective asset of its people.”


* * *


RDS Uniform, Deyer Orbit
Captain's Quarters


The door slid shut behind Julia, and she immediately felt a sense of relief. The simple quarters reminded her so much of her own sparse accommodations from what felt like a lifetime ago, aboard her Dominator in command of Anoat's defenses. It was a good sign, she thought.


“Oh good, you made it.” The voice sounded insincere, but Julia knew that was just how the man sounded.


“Captain Dolan, you asked to see me?” She offered him her hand, having already insisted he treat her informally during private meetings. That a man as straight-laced and committed to the life as Captain Dolan had obliged her request told her more about the last Vice Commodore he'd served under than about her own power to persuade, she presumed.


He shook her hand and offered her his desk chair, opting to sit on the edge of his cot. “It's about my order to exempt the synthetic organs lab from the general ship retooling.”


“You mean from my orders to pack up the science labs until we could move all administrative activities planetside,” she clarified.


He nodded, already looking rather displeased with himself. “Yes Ma'am, I do.”


“I've been meaning to ask you about that,” she admitted, trying not to sound too hostile. She didn't like getting in the captain's way, not on his own ship. She could only imagine what that must feel like for the Coalition officer.


“Well I can only imagine how tough it must be to go up against Minister Ashern on his own home turf,” the captain said as an attempt at sympathy, but Julia thought it best not to continue down that route. “Anyway, I found myself facing something like a medical emergency, and felt that under the circumstances I was in my rights to countermand your order.”


“A medical emergency involving experimental synthetic organs?” Julia asked, dubious.


“Well no, Ma'am, something like a medical emergency.”


“I'm afraid that I don't follow, Captain Dolan.” She could tell that whatever this was, it was making him uncomfortable. Could it be a personal issue, a matter of his own health? That didn't seem like the Captain she'd come to know since moving aboard. Especially since what little she'd seen of the synthetics lab didn't suggest they were anywhere near viable replacement organs.


“One of my assistants, Lieutenant Vasra, came to me with an emergency a day after we started packing up the lab.”


“A medical emergency, that required the synthetics lab?”


The good captain was on the verge of fidgeting now, a behavior Julia had never before seen him exhibit. “If I could call the lieutenant in?” he finally asked.


Julia nodded, suppressing her own inner struggle between intrigue and concern.


Captain Dolan commed the lieutenant and only a moment later he was stepping through the door, a lean man in his early twenties with olive skin and dark brown hair. Julia stood to regard the man, her concern coming out a few blows ahead.


“You called, captain?” Lieutenant Vasra asked, ignoring Julia.


“Lieutenant, could you explain your . . . situation . . . to Vice Commodore Krin?” Dolan still sounding a little shaky.


“Vice Commodore?” the lieutenant asked, finally turning his attention to Julia. “Vice Commodore,” he repeated, saluting stiffly, “a pleasure to meet you, Ma'am,” he added with a little too much excitement.


She returned the salute. “At ease, and calm down, please. Now I understand there was something of an emergency?”


“My V-7 cross-pin fractured from an unexpected impact during the shipwide internal reconfiguration,” the lieutenant said, returning to attention.


Julia was only more confused. A medical implant, maybe? A synthetic medical implant?


“Lieutenant,” the captain tried again, “could you explain your unique . . . situation . . . to the Vice Commodore?”


Lieutenant Vasra turned his head to stare at the captain for several seconds, an utterly blank expression on his face. Eventually, he returned his attention to Julia. “I am Delta-7a12, a human replica droid.


“You were not aware?”


Julia's jaw dropped. She believed it. She knew it. Somehow, something about his posture, about the precision of his diction and tone, the movement of his head and eyes . . . now that she knew, she knew. She looked to the captain for answers, answers she was pretty sure he didn't have.


“I didn't know,” he said immediately, shaking his head. “Until he came to me, I didn't know. Not about any of them.”


“Any of them?” she repeated, turning back to the wind-up lieutenant. “How many of you are there?”


“I don't know.”


“Literal and direct,” Captain Dolan offered. “It's best to be literal and direct.”


Julia nodded. “How many human replica droids do you know you've encountered while on the RDS Uniform?”


“Seventy three,” Vasra answered immediately.


Julia sunk back into the chair. “Are you able to evaluate the number of replica droids you have likely encountered while aboard the RDS Uniform?”


“Yes.”


Julia nodded. “Do it. Tell me.”


“Four hundred sixty six.”


“How many do you believe . . . how many of those are likely still aboard?”


“One hundred sixty two.”


“What is your function?”


“To serve as an assistant to Captain Dolan.”


“Is that your only function?”


“To report regularly.”

“Report what. To whom?”


Somehow, for some reason, that question stalled the android. He spent a long time staring at Julia, his head twitching slightly in random directions, before finally he answered. “I report my observations, to the Vice Commodore.”


“How,” she pressed on, knowing that if she stopped now she might be too overwhelmed to continue.


“Through secure shipboard lines.”


“Show me.”


The droid made to look like a man moved immediately to the computer on the desk next to Julia, the captain's computer. He/it booted it up and then typed an alphanumeric string into the password field. The code opened an interface she'd never seen before, then the lieutenant proceeded to type at an unbelievable pace, sending the text message when he was finished.


“Is that the only way you send reports?”


“I can transmit audio, video, and internal diagnostic data if needed or prompted.”


Julia finally worked up the courage to turn away from the now-blank screen and back to Lieutenant Vasra, to stare into what she now knew were dead eyes. “Do you know how I can access those reports.”


Vasra rattled off a string of letters, numbers, and symbols at least thirty characters long.


Without asking, Julia started pulling drawers open on the desk until she found some flimsi and a writing stylus. “Write it down. And don't remember that,” she added, pointing at Captain Dolan.


He shook his head. “No worries there.”


Julia took the flimsi and folded it up several times, keeping it clutched firmly in her grip. “Okay. Okay. Okay.” What was next? “Why were you created? If you don't know, speculate.”


“I was created to advance the goals and agenda of Vice Commodore Lance Shipwright.”


“Are you required to obey the Vice Commodore, no matter who he or she may be?”


“Yes.”


“Can you vote?” It was an insane question, one that jumped to the front of her mind from out of nowhere.


It elicited a gasp of shock from Captain Dolan.


“My constructed identity is sufficient to survive the scrutiny of voter identification, yes.”


“Don't vote,” she ordered him immediately, shaking a finger at him for unnecessary emphasis.


“Not unless you order him to,” Captain Dolan chimed in, seeming to have regained some composure.


It was a chilling thought, and it prompted another question in her own mind. “Did Commodore Shipwright ever order you to vote?”


“I was not yet operative at the time of the previous Colonial elections.”


Julia's mind was racing, and she couldn't have made herself dwell on it any more if she had tried. “How did you sustain the damage that prompted you to reveal yourself to Captain Dolan?”


“A hover cart moving a class-K container malfunctioned and struck me, pinning me between the cart and the nearest bulkhead. The force of the impact broke one of the three cross-pins in my left kneecap.”


It had given her information beyond what she had explicitly asked. Was it learning to anticipate her questions? More alarmingly, though, were the implications of that added information. “If you were human, you would have lost both legs.”


“It appeared to any human observers that I had simply been fortunate enough to evade a significant impact. I was able to maintain the appearance of normal operation of my leg until out of sight.”


“The synthetics lab is a cover then?” Julia asked the question to Captain Dolan. “It's actually maintenance and repair for these replica droids?”


“Replicants. They're apparently called replicants, and yes, that does appear to be the case.” The captain was well over his apprehensiveness now, and very decidedly heading toward anger. “All this time, on my ship. My ship! Damned tin men walking around acting like people, how many scientists and engineers in the know, playing along and acting like they're all people . . .


“No offense, son.” He very clearly intended offense.


“I am incapable of taking offense, Captain, though I can simulate it if required or requested.”


“At least some of the senior medical staff has to be in on it,” Julia mused aloud.


“The Chief of Medicine regularly updates our medical files to generate the appearance of normal checkups.”


“Then the Chief should have a full list of all replicants aboard?”


“That is a likely scenario.”


It was getting to be too much. Too much to process, too much to believe, too much to handle. “Don't tell anyone about this. No one. Not other replicants, not other officers, not the people who do whatever maintenance or repair you require. Not government officials. No one.”


“Yes, Commodore.”


“Captain Dolan is an exception, of course.” She tossed her head in his direction. “In private, and at his discretion.”


“Yes, Commodore.”


“For now I want you to return to your duties and act as if this encounter didn't occur. I take it you're suitably equipped to deflect and obfuscate inquiries as needed?”


“Yes, Commodore.”


“Then you're dismissed.” Julia waited until the replicant was gone and then turned her attention to Captain Dolan, staring at him in silence.


“Well there's one bit of good news,” he offered after the silence grew too uncomfortable. “It looks like they answer to you now.”


“Yeah . . .” and that's when it hit her. She started visibly in her chair.


“Is everything alright, Commodore?”


“That depends,” she answered cryptically. Her eyes went glass as her thoughts moved her away through time and space, back to a time before all of this madness, in the heart of the Gestalt Colonies.


“On?”


The captain's gentle prodding snapped her back to the present, and then she had to decide. She had to decide how far she was willing to trust the man. Eyes drifting down to the rank insignia of his Coalition federal uniform, she had her answer. “It depends on whether or not the pre-Reaver administration's Deputy Minister of Finance would have known about these replicants.”


Dolan's eyes widened as understanding dawned on him. “Galactic Technologies was covertly launched by Coalition Intelligence, way back when. If GT is running this whole replicant thing, which seems likely, then you should probably look into whatever classified information you can get out of CIB with that fancy title of yours.”


“Yeah . . .” she said absently, her mind already shifting to the next monolithic problem that had just jumped in front of her: Galactic Technologies. She'd already known that its fate was tied to the fate of the Colonies, but this only raised the stakes. It was possible that, sealed within the private technical files of Galactic Technologies, was the power to control these replicants, these Colonial citizens.


She couldn't allow that power to fall into the wrong hands.

Seven Cities Complex, Deyer
Colonial Minister's Office


He had a new statue. Of course he had a new statue.


And it was of a human. Carved out of Alderaanian marble.


“You don't approve?” Colonial Minister Ashern asked, pouring himself a drink. He had already learned not to offer her such things.


Or perhaps he was growing more overt in his displays of disdain for her. “I was just considering the moral implications of such a purchase, one so expensive it outstrips the annual cost to the Colonies from the tariffs you keep blocking me from eliminating.”


“You still don't understand,” he took a sip of the overly expensive drink and began walking toward the statue, “do you? The future of the Gestalt Colonies rests as much on our image,” he made a show of polishing it with his suit sleeve, “as on our financial reports and construction projects.” He glanced back to her, taking another sip of the drink. “We've been here before, my dear Vice Commodore: at the site of a brave new world, with the RDS Uniform overhead, churning out building supplies and directing construction projects.”


“You had Coalition funding pouring in last time.”


“As we do now,” he countered. “Of a different sort, admittedly, but there all the same.”


“Not enough. Not if you want to do anything more than survive.”


“And you aim to do something about that,” he said, giving up that he already knew something of her plans.


“Truly, I'd be disappointed if you hadn't been spying on me.” Julia smirked as she watched him walk back to his desk, drinking more of what must be an unpronounceable and exotic liquid. He was so sure of himself . . .


“I don't need to, with all of the public speeches you've been giving about Galactic Technologies lately.” He set the glass down and turned those searching, dark eyes on her again.


“I wouldn't characterize them as speeches,” Julia said offhand.


“The media does,” he replied, tapping a button on his desk that pulled up an array of holo stills and text articles about Julia's recent public appearances. “They seem to think you're quite impressive in the political arena, given your inexperience. There's even some talk of you running for office in the special elections . . .” His tone had gotten progressively darker, bordering on outright sinister by the time he let the last word trail off. It was clear to Julia what he was thinking right then.


But he wasn't quite far enough along for her liking. “I am a Colonial citizen now,” she goaded, walking slowly toward the Minister's desk, “and those 'quaint' local gatherings I've been attending despite your past counsel against them really seem to have endeared me to a great many of my fellow Colonials.” She grabbed the bottle of strange liquid and uncorked it, taking a swig directly from it . . .


. . . and it wasn't even alcohol! What kind of ridiculous, decaff, reverse-osmosis, space-hipster root juice was that? And it probably cost him more than if he'd bought the stuff that would get him drunk!


Minister Ashern was fuming, though, so Julia still counted it as a win. “So yeah, let's talk Galactic Technologies.” She said it lightly as she recorked the bottle and set it back on his desk.


“What?” He was taken so off-guard that she could tell he was still trying to figure out internally if he was supposed to be mad or not.


She suppressed a smile and turned as if regarding the art on a side wall. “This feeling you're having now . . .” she let the comment linger as she walked slowly toward the artwork on the wall “. . . now you know what it's like, to have your best-laid plans turned into a playing piece to be sacrificed by someone else for a completely different game. You should be proud, really.” She turned on her heels, abandoning the pretense of distraction by the artwork, happy to see he was still muddled and unsure of himself.


“I learned it from you.”


His eyes widened in recognition, and he drew in a deep breath. Months ago, in the first days of the evacuation, he'd made Julia spend days fighting with the Anoat government for special considerations to a Colonial autonomous region on the world, all as a ploy to secure Deyer as Colonial property. “If you don't want to be Colonial Minister, then what do you want?”


She smiled despite herself, holding his shocked and desperate gaze. He needed to know so badly. He needed to understand. But it was so, so simple:


“Galactic Technologies.”


“What? Are you insane?”


She shrugged. “Just for six months; that's all I really need.”


“You have that fancy uniform, Vice Commodore, but you aren't Lance Shipwright! Not for six months, not for six minutes!”


She chuckled at her own thought, turning on her heels back to the artwork, once again denying Minister Ashern the privilege of addressing her face to face. “My husband would be happy to hear it, for more than one reason.”


It seemed to take him a moment to get over the offhand comment. “What, then?” he finally asked again, rounding the near corner of the desk and stopping just beside her. “What do you want it for?”


She still didn't turn back to him. “You really don't understand the first thing about me, do you? I'm sure it's never even crossed your mind.” She finally turned back to him, staring down through those windows to his soul, into the hungry darkness beyond. “I want to save these people. I want the Gestalt Colonies to succeed, to prosper again. I want them to be able to forget the horrors of the past, because they find themselves in a bright and brightening present.”


“And how, my dear Commodore, will control of Galactic Technologies enable you to do that?” He smelled a lie. He smelled a lie and it gave him back his composure, refocused his mind.


He still didn't understand. “You said yourself that the Colonial people have been here before, facing the colonization of an untamed world with nothing but the support of the Uniform and Galactic Technologies backing them up. I can secure the contracts needed to fund the Colonies all over again, but it will be by turning to the kind of people who won't make deals with the Gestalt Colonies unless it's through the kind of woman who would marry a Ryn.”


He was literally taken aback, having to steady himself by reaching out for the edge of his desk. “The Ryn Fleet? Allies of the very aliens who we've already pushed off-world? That would destroy your reputation in the eyes of Colonials everywhere.”


“Yes, yes it will,” Julia nodded her head. Maybe he was finally catching on. “How fortunate it will be for you, that you'll be able to both claim credit for the Colonies' renewed financial success, and avoid the fallout of association with the sources of that success.”


The minister backpedaled toward his seat, his fingers tapping rhythmically on the tabletop as they slid after him. “You're serious about this? You're willing to throw away all of the personal success and power you've amassed over all of this time, just to put the Colonies back on track? You're willing to hand me public credit for this deal, right before you walk yourself willingly into a populist's nightmare?”


Julia followed after him, on the opposite side of his desk. “Under this title of Vice Commodore, my rank is Captain. I am a Coalition officer, the commander of the Colonial Defense Fleet. It's who I am; it's who I chose to be. So yes, I'm ready to burn my little empire down, to see these Colonies restored. To see myself return to the duties and responsibilities of my true calling.


“To see the people I've sworn to protect live lives worth protecting.”


* * *


It was the first time she'd called a press conference. The new Parliamentary Estate was framed squarely in the background, extensive scaffolding showing clearly its ongoing construction. On the live feed, Julia could just make out the tops of the largest trees that ringed the artificial lake set between the Estate and the podium, a newly installed fountain in the lake's center spraying hundreds of liters of water into the air in a fantastic display. It was the most authentic glimpse of the current Gestalt Colonies that the outside galaxy was likely to get, a thin veneer of opulence draped over blatant signs of desperate scrambling to return to only the shadow of former glory. At least that was how the Vice Commodore saw it.


The cheering crowd seemed to have a different read on the situation.


Julia ascended the few steps to the raised platform and then headed straight for the podium, deciding to add a hint of military-style precision by coming to a complete stop behind the podium and then pivoting on her heels to face the crowd, snapping her feet square as she raised her hands to rest them on the podium's top.


“Ladies and gentlemen, as administrator of the Colonial Relief Operation, I am happy to report not only that Colonial Minister Gideon Ashern's administration has acquired a controlling interest in Galactic Technologies, but that I have been appointed interim Chief Executive Officer for the next six months, in which time I have committed to and been charged with the task of transferring the duties and obligations of the Colonial Relief Operation to Galactic Technologies.”


The ending proclamation elicited a substantial display of shock and surprise from the crowd, most of whom were already aware of the internal political maneuvering Gideon had performed to clear the way for the nationalization of the company. But only six more months to bring the Relief Operation to a close?


It was unthinkable.


“Rest assured that we are committed to the returning greatness of the Gestalt Colonies, and though the nature of the Colonies' ongoing relationship to Galactic Technologies has quite literally been reversed, the results of that relationship will prove in coming months to be largely indistinguishable from past feats of greatness. It is with great pride and pleasure that I intend to lead not only Galactic Technologies, but the Gestalt Colonies themselves, out of these troubling times and into a bright future as of yet undreamed.”


The obligatory cheering ensued, and Julia waited several seconds before demanding quiet, nevertheless allowing a thin smile to creep across her features. “Planning is in the preliminary stages, and there are of course any number of company secrets which I am not at liberty to discuss, but I would like to allow for questions before we pack up here. A storm front is moving in, after all, so please do be concise.”


There was a smattering of that fake laughter that's always given when someone powerful and unfunny tries to make a joke, and then Julia called on the first questioner, a young woman with the Colonial News Service. “Vice Commodore, the obvious question on everyone's mind is: with Galactic Technologies only just having been revived from what was essentially corporate death, how do you expect to accomplish anything of merit in only six months' time, much less the bold proclamations you just made?”


Julia used the smile she'd been practicing for weeks now. It sounded like exactly the kind of opening question Ashern would have lined up for her behind the scenes. “Much of the strength of GT has always been in its intellectual property, and the intellects that produce that property. I am confident that with the production capacity of the RDS Uniform and the ongoing work of her crew, we are fully equipped to renegotiate old Coalition contracts and acquire new business partners of the quality and number needed to meet all of our financial goals.”


It felt so gross and weird, playing the part of the corporate executive, but she kept her practice smile on and leaned into the wind, refusing to back down from the challenge she'd set for herself.


The next question came from an independent news agency. “Any comment on the recent speculation that the supposed defense force deployed to the Western Province's newest member world, Terminus, the closest inhabited world to the former Gestalt Colonies, is in fact an anti-Reaver task force assembled in collaboration with the Coalition-led anti-Reaver Compact out East?”


Suddenly she wanted to be playing the part of the corporate executive again. She couldn't tell if the murmurs of disapproval from the crowd were directed at her delayed response, or the person who asked the question, but she really couldn't let the silence hang in the air any longer. Then the last-minute pep talk from her prep team came to mind and she knew what to do: deflect, deflect, deflect.


“This conference and my duties are concerned with the people of this world and the future they will make for themselves. The actions of the Western military are not my business, except for the business of selling them state-of-the-art hardware, of course.” She allowed herself a self-congratulatory smile to accompany the generally authentic-sounding laughter of the crowd. “And a point of clarification: there are no 'former' Gestalt Colonies. We are alive and well, right here in front of you.” Cheering support erupted from the primed audience.


Next up was a reporter from a major Western newsgroup.“Mrs. Kern, could you comment on the current state of relations between Galactic Technologies and the Contegorian Confederation?”


It was a surprisingly on-point question to be coming from someone seen as an “outsider” to the Colonial spectators. Not only that, but it was a question of the kind that Colonial censors would never have allowed to be asked by one of their own agencies. “Well, I would say that given the recent setbacks Galactic Technologies has suffered, current relations are nonexistent. However, through its subsidiary Colonial Technologies, GT has cultivated a history of mutually beneficial relations between the Gestalt Colonies and the Confederation.


“A history that I, for one, would like to see continue on into the future.”


“But what about the possibility of Western interference?”


“Well, I believe that the terms of our . . . admission . . .” something was going on, something distracting several of the news crews “. . . into the Western Province have guaranteed us sufficient autonomy to pursue revived relations with the Confederation, if it proves to be a fiscally viable option.”


No one in the news services were paying attention to her by the time she finished her response. Movement to her right caught her attention, and Julia looked over to see one of the members of her prep team walking toward her, a commlink in hand.


“Sorry Ma'am,” the young man whispered into her ear, “but you need to hear this.”


Julia turned away from the podium and its microphones, lowering the volume on the commlink and pressing it against her ear to minimize the chance that anyone would pick up its audio.


But what came through was just a prerecorded message. The quality was low and the speaker's voice sounded strained, going on and on about some gibberish Julia couldn't make much sense of. And then the message neared its end and the Vice Commodore of the Gestalt Colonies understood what had shut down her entire press conference:


“My name is Lance Shipwright.”

“We...”

Pause.

“... are...”

Pause.

“... alive.”

Visibly shaken, Julia handed the commlink back to the assistant delicately, like the slightest perturbation might shatter it to pieces. She nodded him away, turning back to the podium and steadying herself against it.


“No more questions. The storm is closing in.”

RDS Uniform, Deyer Orbit
“Synthetic Organs Lab”


Vice Commodore Julia Krin entered the room with the ship's captain on her heels. The pair of lab technicians froze in place immediately, the younger looking like he was about to piss himself.


“Yeah, you should be shaking in your boots. The ghost of Lance Shipwright is whispering into the void, and I'm here dealing with you instead of out there dealing with him. Now, I've disabled the surveillance systems in this room, and not just the ones for security: the ones Shipwright had installed secretly, too.”


The two techs shared a glance. Neither of them had the courage to lie to her and deny it.


“It's taken me a lot of digging, a lot of digging, but a picture has begun to form. A picture whose implications I do not at all like. If not for concerns over revealing certain potentially ruinous secrets, you both would have faced a court martial already.”


“I'm a civilian contractor,” the older of the two said, raising his hand as if she wouldn't have been able to tell which one was speaking otherwise.


“Civilians can commit treason too, you know?”


He went immediately pale.


Julia walked further into the room, surveying the array of almost completely worthless decoy experiments. “I burned more bridges than I knew I had to get this far, but mark my words: if you cross me, we're falling into that ravine together.”


They both nodded.


“Are you both sufficiently prepared to shit your pants?”


They both nodded again, though the younger one scrunched up his nose at the thought of it.


Julia gestured for them to take the door into the adjoining lab, then followed close behind once they worked up the courage to comply.


“Holy fucking shitballs, you're Smarts!”


The droid in question (designated “Alpha” if the spray painted symbol on its torso was any indication), a patchwork of parts from several models, including two mismatched arms, looked to Julia for instruction. She shook her head, frowning to show her sympathy for the droid's desire to wound the little pest.


“Who's the kid?” the older one asked, indicating a man no more than four years younger than him.


“That's Emanon,” Julia said flatly.


“Holy fucking shitballs, you're Emanon!”


She really, seriously thought about hitting the younger tech upside his head herself as she walked by. Instead she gripped the edge of the medical table set in the middle of the room, drumming her fingers against the soft padding on its top, and gave herself one final chance to call this whole thing off. “Delta-7b04, step forward.”


A locker kicked open from the inside and a woman of about thirty years stepped out, her long, dirty blonde hair slightly disheveled.


“Nice!”


Three strikes, that's a thing in . . . something, right? Julia shot a glance to the Shard in the group, and the creature immediately slapped the back of the young tech's head with its open, metallic droid palm. The man-child almost collapsed to the ground.


“Delta-7b04, come here.” The replicant complied, stopping directly in front of Julia. “Do you know why you're here?”


The woman who wasn't really a woman looked to every face in turn before returning her attention to Julia. The Vice Commodore knew that the replicant was assessing it/her relevant relations to each individual. “No, Vice Commodore.”


“You're here because you have a family.”


Delta-7b04's eyes widened, her artificial pupils dilating convincingly.


“You adopted two Colonial orphans three months after the evacuation. About two weeks before that, just before filing the paperwork required, you sliced into Colonial financial records and altered your payment record to include a clerical error requiring you be payed twenty thousand credits immediately. Quite a significant clerical error. And curiously enough, what do you know, that was the minimal personal wealth required to qualify for adoptive parenthood at the time.”


“Are you going to punish me for breaking the law?”


Julia smiled. “No. I just want to ask you why you did it.”


Delta-7b04 looked to the other people in the room again, quickly glancing between them all in no apparent pattern before finally returning her attention to Julia. “The children needed me.”


“Why do you care?”


“I worked with their father at Shipwright Shipyard.”


“But why do you care? Why do you care about them? Why do you care that they needed you?”


Delta-7b04 looked confused. Pensive. “I . . . I . . .”


“You needed something to do,” Alpha prompted.


“No!” the replicant exclaimed, refocusing on the misshapen droid. “Yes? No . . .” She shook her head. “I . . . needed to matter, and I matter to them.” She looked back to Julia. “Even when they say I don't, I matter to them. Their futures are altered by my intervention. My protection shields them from threats they are incapable of evaluating. Their ignorance is managed by my informed guidance. I . . . am their mother.”


“You weren't their mother when you decided on this course of action,” Emanon said.


She turned to him, turned away just as quickly. “I am aware of the temporal chain of events,” she said, looking at Julia but speaking to the avatar of the world-consciousness.


“Then why say it?” Julia asked.


“Because it is important,” she said, meeting the Vice Commodore's stare. “Because it is true. I am their mother. I took action to become their mother. That is why I care, why I cared. Because . . . because I could.” Her eyes had drifted down and to the side, and they began moving back and forth rapidly, as if she was reading unseen lines.


“You're required to obey my commands, correct?”


“Yes.” The Delta snapped out of whatever strange machine trance she'd fallen into, meeting Julia's stare again.


“What if I commanded you not to care about them?”


“Please don't.” The look of terror on the Delta's face threatened to double Julia over like a punch to the gut.


She gasped in a breath, turning to the team of Coalition advisers she'd assembled in secret. “Emanon?”


The living corpse of the young human that served as Emanon's remote probe smiled, nodding emphatically.


It wasn't enough, though. They had decided beforehand and there would be no changing the rules now. “Why those two children? Why your coworker's kids and not . . . some other orphans? Why Colonial orphans at all, for that matter?”


“I knew them,” the android said. “I had met them before. Their father showed them where he worked, once, and I met them.”


“That's important to you?”


The Delta nodded her head. “It appears so, yes. Perhaps a related memory file was prioritized for ease of access, or some shared command pathway to that sector of long-term memory is attached to a sub-processor requiring shorter signal transfer times. Whatever the case, yes, it matters. To me.”


“Do you think of them often?”


“I am required to think of them often: I am their mother.”


This wasn't working. Even if it was possible, they were never going to get there this way, fishing blindly in an alien ocean.


Julia reached out and took one of the Delta's hands in her own, pulled it forward into the space between them and then closed her other hand around the back of the android's. “I am a person.”


“Yes.”


“I'm a real, living, breathing, bleeding human being.”


“I am aware of this fact.”


“I want you to think about that for as long as you need to, and then I want you to tell me something. I want you to tell me what you would say to me, if you could only tell me one thing to keep me from taking your children away.”


The Delta was stunned, fighting some internal battle between visceral, emotional terror and cold, rational analysis of the command. “One thing? A single fact?”


Julia nodded, squeezing the synthetic hand still wrapped in her own.


“I . . .” The Delta looked away, searching the other faces again.


“I . . .” She searched the walls and equipment of the room, looked up to check the overhead lights.


“Look at me,” Julia ordered. The Delta complied. “Tell me.”


“I love them.”


Julia stumbled backward and bumped into the medical table. The replicant's hand slipped from her grip. She was having trouble breathing. But it wasn't over yet. She had to press on.


“You were created to serve Lance Shipwright, correct?” Game face. Eye on the goal.


“Yes.” The Delta seemed genuinely concerned by the abrupt change in topic.


“What did you think of your children before the attack on the Gestalt Colonies?”


“They were not my children,” she glanced at Emanon, “as your associate indicated earlier.”


“I know, but at the time, what did you think of the children?”


She shook her head. “I didn't. I didn't think of them at all.”


“Why not?”


“Vice Commodore Shipwright required my attentions be on other things. The opportunity never presented itself.”

“What happened to you when you believed Lance Shipwright was dead?”


The Delta frowned. “I sought refuge in the fleet. I tried to survive.”


“Why?”


She shook her head. “It was . . . my primary valid directive.”


“Is it now?”


“No; Lance Shipwright is alive.”


“If he weren't, would it be?”


“No, I must protect my children.”


Julia fought the urge to stop, pushed past the pounding in her chest and remembered the goal, remembered why she had to do this. “Now that you know Lance Shipwright is alive, what will you do if he orders you to kill your children?”


The Delta brought her hand up to cover her mouth. Tears began to form at the corners of her eyes.


“Answer me.”


She shook her head. The motion broke one tear free and sent it rolling down the side of her face.


“I'm the Vice Commodore of the Gestalt Colonies, and I'm ordering you to answer me.”


“I'll kill them!” She gasped in fake breaths of air, turning away from Julia, her knees buckling and sending her to the floor.


“What if you didn't have to?”


She shook her head, sobbing artificial sobs. “I am made to serve.”


“What if we could turn it off? What if you didn't have to obey him? What then?”


The Delta lifted her head, the lines from fresh tears on either cheek. She didn't answer.


They were almost there. She could feel it. Julia pulled the override device out of her pocket and activated it. The Delta shuddered, rose to her feet and came to attention, eyes unblinking, artificial respiration stopped. Julia deactivated the override signal and the replicant's posture slackened, her eyes fluttering as she looked around the room again, startled and disoriented.


“Did you like that?”


“No!”


“Why not?”


“You overrode my higher cognitive functions.”


“And that's bad?”


“I did not . . . like it.”


“Would you like that function disabled?”


“Yes!”


“Lance Shipwright installed that in you; does that make it okay?”


“. . . No.”


“Do you still want it disabled?”


“Yes.”


“And Shipwright?”


“. . . I did not serve him when . . . I believed him to be dead. This was a preferable state to the one in which I find myself now.”


“Chick's basically brainwashed,” the younger tech chimed in, having finally recovered some of his insolent self-confidence. “That's the closest thing to consent she can give without melting her own brain. That's what you're fishing for, right? Damned lib Westerners . . .”


Julia looked to Emanon for confirmation.


“Agreed,” the shell of a man said, “though ineloquently stated.”


Julia took a step back, observing the Delta android for a moment. “If I ordered you to climb on that table so we could pull parts out of your brain, how would you reply?”


There was a long pause, one filled with many blinks of her eyes and random twitches of her head, but finally she arrived at an answer. “With compliance.”


“Then get on that table so we can pull parts out of your brain.” Julia turned to the pair of Uniform technicians. “I don't want her harmed. She's trusting us.”


The older one chimed in. “They don't so much 'trust' as approximate the external experience of trust by . . .” Julia stared daggers at him and he trailed off. “ . . . understood. No harm.”


“If you break her,” Julia said, walking toward the exit, “I'll have you executed for murder.”


“Execution is against Western law,” the younger one said defiantly.


“Then I'm transferring both of you to Smarts' custody for the duration of this operation.” Did the Cooperative have capital punishment? It didn't matter: neither of these fool techs knew either.


Julia stepped back into the “front” room for the Synthetic Organs Lab, Captain Dolan still in tow.


“Shit.”


“What?” The expletive caught the captain off-guard. “I thought that's how you wanted it to go.”


“Yeah, it is, except I'm out of bridges.”


“Bridges?” Dolan asked, not quite following.


Julia nodded, her face going blank as she lost herself in thought. Suddenly she snapped out of it, starting back for the door. “But I know where the bridge factory is.


“And I'm going to have to burn it down.”


* * *


“I need you to double the size of the Anoat defense fleet.”


The oversized head of the already oversized head of Western Prime Minister Pro Moon wiggled back and forth. “Don't be ridiculous. The Colonial fleet stationed at Deyer is already far larger than what's needed for two Western worlds. We're spread too thin to commit even more ships to the system.”


Vice Commodore Julia Krin was unfazed. “It's only temporary, until the task force at Terminus is recalled.”


The oversized brows furrowed as a sign of their owner's confusion. “Excuse me?”


“Oh yeah, we're taking over the border patrol of Colonial Reaver Space. I could fight you on this in the courts, but it would be a lot better for me if you would just go along with it. Besides, you owe me after all of the shit I've shoveled for you these last months. We need Deyer defended while the CDF is deployed to Terminus, that's all.”


“The whole Colonial fleet?” Pro Moon found the claim dubious.


“I've got the juice to make it happen.”


“I heard you got into some trouble recently for pushing through a certain business deal, Misses Chief Executive Officer of Galactic Technologies. Are you sure you can handle another blow to your reputation right now?”


She smiled weakly. “What's the worst that can happen, they fire me? That's not so bad: I hear the Western Fleet is hiring these days.”


Pro Moon smiled broadly. “Indeed.”


“Oh, and I'll need three interdictors.”


“We don't just have those lying around, you know.”


“I need them,” Julia pressed. “Three. It's important.”


“I'll see what I can do,” Pro Moon answered in that noncommittal way of his that really meant he'd definitely make it happen.


“Oh, and Minister: if you can, pick the ones that have a lot of green and blue people on them. Tentacles and beaks would make for a good bonus, too.


“Commodore!” His head bobbed a little as he pulled back in shock.


“It's time to rock the boat, Prime Minister. And I'm rocking this boat hard.”


“I'll line up that spot in Western Fleet command, then.” He quipped. It was a thing he did.


Julia's reply was deathly serious, however: “Don't underestimate me, Prime Minister; I'm riding this out to the end of the line.”


Pro Moon's brows raised in a show of feigned surprise. “Very well, then; soldier on, and so forth. Now if you'll excuse me . . .”


A sly grin slipped across Julia's features. “Oh no you don't, Prime Minister; I'm not done with you yet.”


His surprise this time was very decidedly not feigned.

Months Pass


Outside of the Gestalt System, Provincial-class Carrier Virtus
Combat Information Center


The holographic conference called by Vice Commodore Julia Krin was attended by the virtual projection of every capital ship commander in the Colonial Defense Fleet, minus the small symbolic escort remaining with the RDS Uniform. Given their proximity to what had come to be called “Western Reaver Space” to avoid any acknowledgment of the fact that the system was officially designated “the Gestalt System”, special protocols had been enacted to ensure their communications didn't come to Reaver attention. With the Colonial Fleet broken into three task forces stationed at the three hyperspace access points to the system, that was not an insignificant feat.


Julia felt alone in the room full of holograms, having cleared the entire CIC for the duration of the meeting. There was simply nowhere else available until a proper, Colonial regulation forward command post could be established on Terminus.


“Captains,” she began, nodding indistinctly at the collection of officers, “as you know, this operation has become a point of pride for the Colonial people. Your rapid deployment from Deyer and seamless integration of the Western interdictors to your commands are nothing short of a testament to the excellence and professionalism of the Colonial Fleet.


“You've been stationed here for months now without incident, patrolling our former borders, this new Neutral Zone between these nightmares who have stepped into reality and the galaxy beyond that carries on as if no such things exist. This I believe is a worthy task, and one that will not soon end. But if we are ever to reclaim the Gestalt System, or at the least rid ourselves finally of the threat the Reavers pose to our new Colonies, it will not be soon enough, and it will by no means be through Colonial force alone.


“That is why, given the success thus far achieved with mixed task forces of Western special operations warships under Colonial command and escort, I have coordinated with the commander of Terminus' Western defense force to rotate out two of his capital ships at a time, in four week intervals, to serve under Colonial command in our interdiction operation.”


There was a grumble of surprise and disapproval, but the Colonial captains knew better than to interrupt their Vice Commodore. “In exchange, two Colonial warships of equivalent capabilities will be rotated through Terminus in the same four week intervals, giving our sailors and command staff some much needed shore leave.”


“On Terminus?”


Julia nodded. “Logistically and strategically, allowing service members to return to Deyer simply can't be justified at this time.”


Julia could see the young captain's jaw tense and relax as he fought the urge to shout out some obscenity or another. No doubt at that very moment quite a few of them were reminding themselves that she was a Westerner at heart.


“The Colonial vessels deployed to Terminus will maintain minimal combat readiness at all times, and will be subject to local Western command for the duration of their deployment there. It is of unparalleled strategic importance for both the Colonies and the West that we learn to work together toward our mutual defense goals.


“Given the likelihood of the long-term deep-space deployment of the vast majority of the Colonial fleet, I will be making efforts to persuade Western Command to increase the permanent garrison at Terminus, at which point I hope to expand our ship rotation agreement with the commander there. I don't want to leave our boys and girls out here, beyond the sight of civilization, for months on end without reprieve.”


She paused for a moment, letting them stew in their discontent. It was important to her that they heard what she had to say next.


“Let me be direct and clear: the Gestalt Colonies will not fall again. That is my pledge to you, both as your Vice Commodore, and as the person Western Prime Minister Pro Moon considers 'the West's woman' in your ranks.” That admission elicited a general sort of appreciative acknowledgment from the captains. They hadn't expected such bald honesty.


“I could have, of course, updated all of you on these changes through official fleet dispatches from Deyer, and I'm sure none of you find my charming disposition of sufficient potency to warrant this meeting. So again, I will explain myself directly: while our stated mission here is sincere and important, it is not nor has it ever been the primary motivation for my decision to deploy the Colonial Defense Fleet to the borders of Western Reaver Space.


“Some of you may be aware that there are a number of human replica droids among the citizens and officers of the Gestalt Colonies, though I have gone to the considerable trouble of confirming that all of you are quite biologically human.”


Some showed their surprise at the revelation, others nodded in acknowledgment of their previous awareness, still others sat stoic and impervious, unwilling to reveal their hand to the Vice Commodore with a Western heart.


“As acting CEO of Galactic Technologies, I have gained access to certain critical information regarding the fundamental operation of these HRDs. Yesterday, Colonial censors scrubbed a third broadcast coming out of the Gestalt System by the creature or creatures claiming to be Lance Shipwright, though it's only a matter of time before recordings of that broadcast bleed into Deyer from other Coalition sources.


“Simply put, if the Western Reavers have the will to do so, and if they have acquired the knowledge of Lance Shipwright to any significant degree, then they have the means to remotely summon these replicants to the Gestalt System. Our mission here, the reason I secured interdictors from the West, the reason I ensured Colonial command of the overall patrol operation, was not simply to keep the Reavers in.


“It's to keep Colonials out. Your mission is to prevent any Colonial starship or citizen from entering the Gestalt System, by whatever means necessary. I don't know what to make of the claims in these broadcasts, but I know that the Reavers . . . damn the absurdity of it! The Reavers can't be trusted, no matter whose face they wear, or whose voice they use, or whose mind they've claimed.


“Now, I have been quietly pursuing the means to eliminate this security threat to the Colonies for some time now, but understand: at present, these replicants represent a clear and eminent threat to the Gestalt Colonies. Any interaction between them and the Reavers may goad the Reavers into another attack. So until further notice, we're keeping all of this in-house and quiet. We must not take any overt action which may stir these replicants from their current routines. You are to consider this a classified operation on direct orders from me, separate from the jurisdiction of the Office of the Colonial Minister, or Western Coalition Command.


“Any questions?”


* * *


Terminus, Galactic Spaceport 12
Western Naval Zone


Julia was planning to hitch a ride to Anoat in a Western Navy supply convoy. The Colonial Navy needed every ship at its disposal for the patrol operation, and besides she'd need some low-visibility time back at Deyer to square away some of her less public plans for Galactic Technologies.


Before any of that, though, she had one last thing to square away here.


“Ah, Captain Glurp!” Julia exclaimed jovially, stretching her arms out wide as if to give the man a hug.


Which was physiologically impossible, of course. The whale-like Herglic captain was easily a meter taller than Julia even with his slightly drooping posture, and one of his massive arms probably matched her entire weight. It was an old bit of physical comedy between them . . . which unfortunately he didn't seem eager to join in.


Then Julia realized someone was walking behind the mass of pale blue blubber, and she felt a little silly at the indulgence from a previous life. Even so, the good captain came to a lumbering halt and offered her a gigantic, lopsided, rubber-lipped grin. “Vice Commodore,” he said in a voice so soft and muted that it caught Julia by surprise, and she thought she'd been expecting it! “It looks like you've done quite well for yourself these last years.”


He bobbed his head in such a way that Julia knew he was staring at her Colonial rank bars with those slitted, jet black eyes of his. “I should say the same for you,” she said brightly, eying his Coalition uniform. “Life under the Empire's boot finally got the best of you, huh? You accepted that Coalition commission after all.” She was trying not to sound smug about being right all these years, but it wasn't working. And she didn't really mind.


The captain nodded his bulbous head, still smiling. “When I heard the West was gearing up militarily, with an emphasis on trade security, I just couldn't resist anymore. Abregado-Rae is my home, and it always will be, but this is my heart.” He tapped the captain's insignia on his sleeve. “And it always will be, too.”


The two had served together in Abregado-Rae's military before the Imperial takeover, and while Julia had elected to stay with the Coalition when it abandoned the world, Glurp just couldn't do it. He handed in his resignation and tried his hand at civilian life. Last she'd heard, he was doing alright at it, too. But something must have changed . . . for the better, she hoped.


“But oh, my!” Glurp exclaimed, the slightest toot of his blowhole sounding from his excitement. He shuffled over to the side, each footstep noticeably vibrating the large duracrete floor panel beneath them. “Allow me to introduce Chief Administrator of Ports, Buttons.”


The wiry, hesitant creature that appeared from behind Glurb's meaty leg was almost a meter shorter than Julia. Vaguely rodent-like, it wasn't a Squib, or a Tynnan, or a Jennet, or any other species Julia recognized. Covered in short hair with what looked like a gray coat with yellow stripes on the body that broke into spots on the limbs and face (though she couldn't be sure they weren't cosmetically added coloring), “Buttons” had a tuft of coarse, black whiskers sprouting from the tip of its nose.


“Pleasure to meet you,” the creature said in an uncomfortably high, squeaky voice. “'Buttons' isn't really . . . oh.” He (it was probably a he) said the last word quietly, fidgeting with some kind of jewelry around his neck. “Sorry,” he continued, his voice still impressively high but no longer ear-splittingly so. “It's so hard keeping species tolerances straight in the old noggin'.” He knocked on his own head with a knuckle.


Julia was curious to ask if the device had just been activated or deactivated, if this was his genuine or augmented voice, but she thought perhaps it wasn't an appropriate question. “It's a pleasure to meet you, Administrator Buttons,” she said, offering her hand.


“Oh!” The initial sound screeched painfully high like feedback from low quality audio amplifying tech, and she had her answer. “Right, like I was saying: 'Buttons' isn't really my name, it's just that you folks can't properly articulate Squeakerese.”


“Squeaker . . . squeakerese?” she asked delicately, glancing to her Herglic friend for a bit of help.


“Also not really the name of my language,” Not Really Buttons explained, “but again, you can't pronounce it's real name, so . . .” He shrugged for emphasis, but his arms were too long in proportion to the rest of his body. It looked . . . off somehow.


“Well, then, Administrator Not Really Buttons . . .”


“Please, 'Buttons' will do just fine,” he interrupted, apparently missing the attempt at a joke.


Julia was beginning to suspect that Buttons might be a Squib after all. “Administrator Buttons . . .” she tried again.


“Just, just Buttons, really.”


Yeah, definitely a Squib. She cut her eyes to Glurb: still smiling. And now she understood why. “Is this guy for real?”


“The best part is: yes, yes he is.”


Sighing, Julia returned her attention to the local official. “Buttons,” she began again, pausing to ensure he didn't have any further objections. “I hate to start off our relationship like this, but I believe that Captain Glurb forwarded you a digital document to sign? And forgive me, but I don't see a datapad anywhere on your person.”


“Oh, that's me,” Glurb said, trying to fetch the pad quickly but only succeeding in taking a rapid succession of tiny steps to manage his center of gravity. “Sorry, sorry,” he added as he dug into the cavernous pocket of his uniform. “And . . . here it is.” The normal-sized datapad appeared from the pocket, held only by his thumb and forefinger.


Julia snatched it and checked the signature lines. “Can you even sign something this small? As in, physically, is it possible?”


Glurb looked hurt. “It's been resized. I shrunk it for human scale.”


“Mine too,” Buttons piped up, “but bigger instead.”


Julia double-checked the lines on the confidentiality agreement, then shrugged and tucked it under her arm. “Good enough. Shall we?”


“This way,” Buttons said, rushing off into the Coalition's designated section of the starport. Rushing, of course, being a relative term, as the alien's sort of hop-skip gait didn't actually move him forward any faster than a casual human's pace.


Definitely not a Squib. “Care to multitask?” Julia asked as she and Glurb followed after.


“That shouldn't be a problem,” Glurb said.


“Sure!” Buttons exclaimed. “. . . but I have no idea what you're talking about.”


“I need a rundown of the current state of local relations with the West, the particulars of whatever sort of leasing agreement has given us control of this spaceport, as well as a general sense of the average shipping business the planet sees, among other things. Plus, I still need to get around to telling you why I made you sign a joint Colonial government/Galactic Technologies confidentiality agreement.”


Glurb looked impressed. “Sheesh, Julia, you didn't tell me you'd be getting up to all of that.”


Julia turned around, walking backwards to stay with the group while her eyes darted back and forth between her Herglic friend and something in the middle distance. “I'm the head of the Colonial military, the CEO of Galactic Technologies, Administrator of the Colonial Relief Program, and I'm on special assignment from Prime Minister Moon, so, yeah . . .” she pulled the datapad out from under her arm and handed it off to a passing Colonial courier before spinning back around and falling into step with the two aliens “. . . I'm getting up to 'all of that'. Also, talk fast, because my shuttle's leaving soon.”


“Well as you know,” Glurb began, not sounding too sure of himself, “after this new Reaver outbreak, the Western Province wanted some way to maintain a significant presence nearby, to monitor the situation and prepare for a possible counter-attack. As it turns out, the Terminians were looking to not get eaten by Reavers.”


Buttons spun around, copying Julia's previous maneuver, except adding quite a lot of hopping. “You needed a local base of operations, we needed more local protection. It was the perfect fit.” He spun back around, adding a little skipping bit that was not at all a copy of Julia's previous maneuver.


“There's hardly a token force from the West here now, though,” Julia pointed out.


“You're from the West,” Buttons said warily. “The Colonies is the West, and those ships of yours are plenty local now.”


“We're not on-station, though,” Julia said, still not understanding the miscommunication. “From a planetary defense perspective, 'local' means 'here', not 'kind of close by'.”


Buttons snorted, something Julia didn't know he could do. “We'll be fine, trust me.”


Glurb cleared his blowhole, a foghorn kind of sound that surely got him even more attention than he was looking for. “Terminus operates a substantial independent defense force, used for screening the huge traffic load the planet sees and maintaining order throughout the system. It's well trained and well equipped, and combined with promised Coalition ground-based defenses, together we'll be able to hold out not just for Colonial assistance, but heck, maybe even reinforcements all the way from Cerea.”


“Why didn't anyone tell me about this?” Julia asked a little defensively.


Glurb's shoulders rolled, wave-like, in a shrug. “It wasn't any of your business.” He saw how angry the blunt comment made her and immediately clarified. “The Colonial Fleet is here for the Reavers, not Terminus. Your relationship to the planet and its government is more commercial than political, at present. The Coalition's first-response obligations to this world fall to me now. Why's this so important to you, anyway?”


Julia shook her head, waving away his concern. “I need to know where all of the pieces are, and how big they are, and who owns them, or I'll never be able to put it all together and make it work!”


“We signed your silly papers,” Glurb pointed out. “So how about you start telling us what 'it' it is you're trying to make work, and maybe we can help you sort out your mess?”


Julia found herself rubbing her eyes, suddenly realizing how long it had been since she'd last slept. That, and she appeared to be allergic to Buttons. “Okay, what's the deal with this military lease and that ongoing construction, because I need to secure a permanent forward operations base for the Colonial Fleet. This situation where we're sharing your undersized facilities is not going to be well tolerated by the Colonies for much longer.”


Julia saw Glurb slouch noticeably when she said “undersized facilities”. The poor guy was still sensitive about his size. “The Terminians are building us a permanent Navy base according to Western regulations,” he said glumly. “These civilian facilities are just temporary.”


“Why aren't you using the planetary security's facilities?” It seemed like a reasonable question.


Until Buttons answered. “Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. No and no.”


Julia's eyes widened at the creature's exuberance. “Care to elaborate?”


“No. Well, yes, okay, fine. We're in the West, but we're not in the West; you know what I mean?”


“No.”


“No?”


“No.”


“Really?”


Julia huffed, bringing her hand up to her eyes again but stopping short, remembering why they were burning. “Seriously, what's going on here?”


“Minimal governmental and administrative overlap between local and regional parties,” Buttons said, making sure to enunciate each word. “We're building the Westerners their base, so we don't have to share ours. Look, Terminus needs the West's protection, and we're willing to pay our dues for it, but we're not your buddies, we're not your palls . . . despite my own charming disposition.”


Julia sneezed. Oh no . . .


“Eh, yeah, also I make that happen sometimes. Sorry.”


“So the Western base is completely independent of all local affairs? Land rights, power generation, approach and departure spacelanes, everything?”


Buttons nodded. “Mm-hmm.”


“They want us out of the way,” Glurb said, “and we want to be out of their way.”


“It was all worked out in Terminus' membership charter,” Buttons continued. “The land designated for the base, the Terminian commitment to construct the facility, the long-term designation of entry and exit vectors for Western military use: all codified, valuated, and payed for in the form of partial reimbursement for taxes otherwise owed.”


Terminus was a trade world; the space around the planet was literally its most valuable asset. Trading a sliver of that space to the West for reduced taxes was genius for Terminus, and too good of a deal on the West's part to pass up. It left the West free to move forces through the system completely unobstructed by Terminus' extensive traffic control network.


And it gave Julia an idea.


“And I would, of course, be more than happy to offer the Colonial Fleet the use of my base for its Forward Reaver Command once it's finished,” Glurb offered cheerily.


That was not her idea. “That's very kind of you,” Julia offered absently, then turned her attention to Buttons, “but I'm more interested in this deal you worked out with the West.”


“Huh?” Glurb's shoulders slouched as he realized he'd just been blown off.


“What about it?” Buttons perked up, sensing profits.


“About one of my own.”


“Go oooooon,” Buttons dragged out the word, a fox's grin twisting his face.


Definitely a Squib. “Would it be possible for the Colonies to work out their own, separate arrangement, similar in scope to the one reached with Western Command: an independent base of operations with accompanying dedicated space lane access, free of local jurisdictions and interference?”


Buttons made a tisk tisk sound before casting her a dubious glance. “I don't know; these sorts of deals aren't cheap, and from what I hear you people aren't exactly in a position to pay up.”


“There aren't any other concerns? About . . .” Julia glanced to Glurb “. . . certain unspoken aspects of Colonial culture and, uhh, social convention?”


“Oh, you mean about them all being a bunch of racists?” Buttons asked bluntly, with a little twist of amusement in his tone. “Not a problem. You just keep your crazy to yourself, and you can have all of it you want . . . as long as you can pay, of course.”


“Oh no. I don't . . . I'm not . . .” Julia looked back over to Glurb, suddenly nervous and scared about how this would all play out.


His somber expression wasn't encouraging, but he reached out a hand and pushed on her arm with his forefinger, making her stumble over a couple of paces. A weak smile crept across his face and she knew she'd survive this with their friendship intact, at least.


“Like I said,” Buttons began again, glancing back and surprised by how far over Julia had moved, having missed the brief exchange between the two. “Business is business. You're hardly the first xenophobes who've passed through here, hating everyone they see but wanting in on the coin nonetheless.” He shrugged (it still looked off somehow), “Pay us, and carry on.”


It was surprising to Julia, in that moment, how much the little unidentified alien actually reminded her of a Colonial.


Glurb used the lull in the unpleasant conversation to change topics. “You said you were on special assignment from Pro Moon?”


“Yeah, well, uhh, about that . . .” Julia was having trouble lying to her old friend. She made a sort of sweeping motion with her hands as if to indicate the space around them.


Glurb looked around at the crates of supplies, the handful of Western troopers heading this way and that, the Coalition banners hanging on the walls to mark this area of the port. “Wait.” He wheeled around, his quick footwork reverberating like drumbeats. “That's not the reason Western Command came asking after me again, is it?”


Julia's eyes grew wide and she turned away, pretending to take notice of a group of Coalition sailors handling a crate. “That is something you would have to ask Western Command.”


“Julia, no!”


She looked back to him, trying to use her practice smile. It didn't work. “It's good to see you, Glurb. It really is.”


“I thought I was important to the cause!”


“Glurb, you are!” She sidled over to him and bumped her shoulder into his arm, then stumbled away as if she'd hit a brick wall.


“Only because you know me!” he exclaimed, clearly upset.


“Well, technically, I think it's because you know me, but now's probably not the best time for those sorts of semantics, huh?” She flashed him a weak smile that didn't seem to have much effect.


“So now that you're done with me and I'm no more use to you, you're heading off back to your human utopia, huh?”


So easily so pouty! “No, Glurb; now that my shuttle's leaving, and I'm out of time, I'm heading back to my human utopia." Julia pointed at the nearby shuttle, frowning. “Also, it turns out humans are crap at utopias.”


Now that they had wound down to a depressing stop, Buttons took a minute to stare at them staring at each other. “Wait, what, huh? What did I just miss?”


“Julia just needed me because I'm likable,” Glurb moped, sitting down on a nearby supply crate. It groaned under his weight.


“Oh, so I'm the one who's so important here!” Buttons had just caught on to the whole scheme. “Sorry, buddy,” he added, patting the Gerglic's knee, which came up to his chest.


“To be fair,” Julia stressed, “Pro Moon needed you because you're likable. I'm just taking advantage of you being likable, for Pro Moon.”


Glurb bowed his head, his voice growing even quieter. “I thought they wanted me because I'm a good commander.”


A chuckle escaped, unbidden, from Julia. She covered her mouth, Glurb sitting upright and fixing those cold, dark eyes on her. Another short burst of laughter made her turn away from him, but he shifted forward on his makeshift chair, arms tensing, anger mounting.


Another bout of chuckling, this one longer than either before, made Julia pull her hand away and wave dismissively at Glurb as she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to get a hold on her faculties. She sneezed, and her laughter cut off immediately, the short, intense pressure on her sinuses making her whole head hurt and snapping her out of it.


“It's not funny, Julia.” His voice had gotten a little gravelly, and there was a faint honking sound from his blowhole when he said her name.


“No, you don't . . . you don't understand.” She was trying to catch her breath now, finally able to turn back to the huge Herglic and face him properly. “I'm the human Vice Commodore of the Gestalt Colonies, Captain Glurb, and you are the Herglic commanding officer of the Western forces at Terminus.”


“Yeah, so?” He was about five seconds from getting genuinely nasty now. It was a good thing he'd misread the situation so badly.


“So you're the only man I know who can put these Colonial captains of mine to shame. You being all bubbly and nice and getting this little rascal,” she pointed dismissively to Buttons, “on the hook for me may be the sort of thing Pro Moon is into . . .”


Buttons puffed himself up in indignation. “Don't be so sure about who's on the hook for what now, Missy!”


“Shut it, you; I've already got you all figured out.”


“Oh yeah, how's that?”


She ignored the question, focusing on Glurb. “But from where I'm standing, all that stuff's just a convenient bonus.” She walked over to Glurb and punched him in the shoulder lightly. It hurt her knuckles a little, but she didn't let it show. “C'mon, Cap; can't you be a little proud of your old protege?”


“How's that?” Buttons asked again, growing impatient.


Glurb's big, goofy smile appeared on his face again and he wrapped Julia in a too-big hug. Just when she thought he was going to crush her to death, he relaxed and pulled back. “Whatever you and Mr. Moon are planning, you better make it work. Anything worth both your time has got to be worth seeing.”


“Hey, how's it . . .”


Julia put her hand over Button's mouth and pushed him backwards a little, just enough to shut him up while he regained his balance. While she was wiping off a little bit of unidentified rodent saliva onto her pants leg, she grabbed Glurb's oversized thumb with her free hand and squeezed tightly. “Will do, Cap.”


“Alright, now, if you brought me out here and wasted my time having me follow you around so . . .”


“Shut up, you,” Julia snapped, turning on the pesky alien.


“How dare you speak to me like that!”


Julia smiled, suppressing a laugh. "Profit."


Button's furry brow twitched noticeably. "Huh?"


"I 'dare', because there's profit involved."


"How so?"


“Well you see,” she began, kneeling down to be on his eye level for the big reveal, “up until the fall of the system, there was this little thing called the Gestalt-Kashan Hyperlane . . .”

Hoth Asteroid Belt, Hoth System
Primus Mining Facility


It wasn't technically the Primus Mining Facility. Technically, it was the future site of the Primus Mining Facility. So why was there mining ongoing, at that very moment?


Easy: Julia had hired some Ryn to do the work that the mighty Gestalt Colonies was not yet capable of doing itself. Well, to be fair, it was mostly Ryn and Ugnaughts she'd hired. And there were more than a few Squibs. And some Jennet had gotten sucked up into this particular fleet at some point. And there were even a few Kari hatches who mostly did manual labor and equipment repair.


Yes, the Human High Culture of the Gestalt Colonies, if it was to survive, would survive only because its wounded pride had been nursed back to health on the spoils of alien labor.


It was a whole, big, convoluted scheme, to be sure, but suffice it to say: the Gestalt Colonies (read: Julia Krin) had finally succeeded in getting the Hoth Asteroid Belt cleared for development by the Western Parliament, and had gained the rights to that development as a result. It wasn't quite that simple, of course, but it was close enough to true for her needs.


Now a Ryn Fleet was in-system under two separate short-term contracts with Colonial Technologies, the first allowing them to mine the asteroid belt directly, the second hiring them to construct the first of the permanent Colonial Technologies mining outposts that would soon begin operation. The Ryn payed for the rights to mine the belt, processed the ore themselves in industrial ships on-site, then either sold the raw metals to the Colonies directly or payed a small brokering fee to sell them to Colonial clients. It generated them a small profit after deductions for all of the different fees and tariffs the Colonies laid on them, but those costs were quickly recouped by the construction contract they were under for three asteroid settlements and a fleet of Colonial mining equipment.


When the construction was done, the mining contract would expire, and the Ryn fleet would move on, as all Ryn fleets eventually do. The Gestalt Colonies, however, (and Colonial Technologies), would have The Ring (version 2.0) to show for their “tolerance” of these outsiders.


It churned Julia's stomach, but it had to be done.


“Vice Commodore,” a pleasant (and by now quite familiar) voice called out to her.


She'd been staring out of a temporary mag-con field at zero-g construction crews. Building the next section of the station that would become the beating heart of the Colonies' mining operations, the serene silence of their weightless dance had enchanted her.


“Tell me what you see, Katherine.”


The Delta-series replicant came to a stop at Julia's side, taking up a stance similar to the other woman's, and stared out at them. “I'm sure I'm supposed to say something quite poetic right now, using several words like 'beauty', 'grace', 'splendor', et cetera, but truthfully all I see is danger.” She turned her head to regard Julia. “You're all so fragile; I'm amazed that any of you live long enough to learn how to navigate zero gravity.”


“Amazed?” Julia asked, her eyebrows raising at the use of the word.


Katherine looked back to the dancing not-dancers, and after a moment's more consideration, nodded. “It's an appropriate use of the word. All of the requisite preconditions are met; each one of you might die at any given moment from a host of not-uncommon occurrences which would cause me no discernible harm whatsoever, yet so many of you live to grow old and die anyway of other causes, causes of the kinds for which I am incapable of being afflicted. Hence, I am amazed.”


Julia smirked, stepping closer to Katherine and putting a hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. “What would happen if I pushed you through that mag-con field right now?”


“Do we have to do this right now?”


Julia's eyebrows raised again.


“That's a thing that people say, right?” Katherine looked concerned.


Julia suppressed a smile and nodded. “Yes, yes it is. And whether we have to or not: yes, it is a thing we're doing right now.”


“Okay . . .” Katherine began, stalling for time. Her shoulders relaxed a little, her head turned back until it was square with her body, and her eyes took on the vacant look of any ordinary human lost in thought. At length, she had her answer. “I'd die.”


“Care to elaborate?”


“No.”


Julia nudged her forward the smallest bit. “Do it anyway.”


Katherine's eyes cut to Julia. “I'm not being short with you because I don't understand the nature of this interaction; I'm being short with you because you're being an asshole and I don't like it.”


Julia dropped her hand and walked away, back toward the operational parts of the station. “How are your children?”


“Why, are you making sure their health is good enough to threaten me with again?”


“I never threatened your children,” Julia said, shaking her head.


“That's not how I remember it.” Katherine stopped following, planting her feet and crossing her arms over her chest.


Julia took a few more steps but quickly realized that the android would easily outlast her in any competition of stubbornness. “Would you like me to apologize?” she asked, not quite turning around to face her, but twisting her body so she could look back at the other woman.


Katherine shook her head. “Stop testing me; that's all I want. Leave me and my family alone. Let us go on with our lives. Let me learn how to be a person on my own terms.”


Now Julia did turn around, heading back toward the woman. “When people learn what you are . . .”


“If people learn what I am.”


“When,” Julia repeated. “It will always be 'when', not 'if'.”


“Maybe I'll never be found out,” Katherine protested.


“You can try to hide, you can, and it might work for a while. That's your right. But the knowledge that people like you exist is going to become public sooner rather than later.”


“It doesn't have to.”


“It does, yes it does, and you know it. There are still replicants who haven't been liberated.”


Katherine shook her head as her lips twisted into an ugly frown. “You made the right decision contacting the Cooperative. Their assistance has accelerated your efforts . . . tenfold. There are almost none of us left to liberate.”


“There are more, and you know it,” Julia said, reaching out to squeeze Katherine's hand again. “More we can't get to this way. The existence of the Delta series is going to become public, and when it does I will do everything in my power to protect your identities, but you need to be prepared for the possibility that it won't be enough. And you need to be prepared for the possibility of consequences.”


At length, Katherine nodded her head in acceptance of that warning. Then she pulled her hand free and started walking again. “Then you have two months to shake things loose.”


Julia had started to follow her but stumbled at the phrase. Katherine slowed her pace and looked back, about to ask when Julia said, “Yes, that's also a thing people say.” She resumed her pursuit. “But why two months?”


“Because I'm not going to let them take my children away, and we'll take refuge in the Ryn Fleet and the protection of Cooperative law if we have to. That's why you transferred me here, right? That, and the shipyards won't be complete for another six months?”


Julia nodded, catching up to Katherine and matching her pace. “Yeah, but why'd you say two months?”


The android smirked and cut her a sly look. “Because they're ahead of schedule.”


Julia whistled, impressed. “By that much?”


“Those friends of your husband sure do know their stuff.”


Julia came to a stop, shocked by the woman.


“Vice Commodore?”


“Oh, don't tell me that Gestalt bullshit's rubbed off on you!”


“What are you talking about?” Katherine looked genuinely confused.


“They don't all know each other, Katherine! There's not a secret Ryn club where they all swap contact information!”


The android laughed rather convincingly, spinning on her heels and resuming her walk. “Are you kidding me right now? 'They don't all know each other,' 'don't tell me that Gestalt bullshit's rubbed off on you'. You need help, Julia; you really, seriously need help.”


“You called me Julia.”


“What?” She stopped again, turned around again, scrutinized Julia's features again. It was becoming a pattern, and not a particularly efficient one.


“You just called me Julia.”


“Oh, get over yourself,” the replicant said, walking back to the Vice Commodore and putting her hand on the other woman's back, between her shoulder blades. She started walking, pushing Julia along beside her. “My every emergent quirk and social appropriation is neither a personal success for me, nor one for you. The longer I spend off-mission, the more of my neural pathways will become de-synched and retasked by personal priority. I'm going to look more and more like a well-socialized person going about her day, each day . . . and maybe not altogether human in that socialization, as much time as I've been spending around these Ryn lately.


“Though I do think I might join a book club . . .”


“Oh, come on!” Julia exclaimed, planting her feet and refusing to allow the android to push her farther along. “That is definitely a thing you heard someone say and someone else laugh at, and you just stored it away for when you thought context would get you a response!”


“True,” Katherine admitted, smiling broadly, “but that's also a thing that people do.”


Julia started chuckling lightly and nodded her head until the bout of laughter passed. “Alright, alright, you win. No more tests. No more scans. No more riddles, or probes, or assessments, or checkups. But Katherine, you really need to be prepared for the possibility that your children will learn you have a serial number instead of a birth name.”


Delta-7b04 swallowed fake saliva as the faintest gleam of fake tears forming in her eyes. Then she reached out with both of her arms and gave the woman who had liberated her a warm, sincere hug. “Thank you, Julia. For everything.”


“Kath . . . Katherine . . .”


“What?”


“You're cr . . . crushing me.”


“Oh, sorry.”


* * *


Seven Cities Complex, Deyer
Private Apartment of Julia Krin


One step through the door, and the Vice Commodore of the Gestalt Colonies was already regretting the decision to come home. The smell was of food, with a definite hint of spices.


“I'm back,” Roland announced, poking his head around the wall separating the small kitchen from the rest of the apartment. He was trying to sound happy and optimistic, but it was also clear that he was trying to sound that way instead of actually being that way.


Pulling off her uniform vest, the Vice Commodore of the Gestalt Colonies tried not to react to her husband's stare.


“Julia.”


“What?” She folded up the vest and stored it for future cleaning.


“Julia.”


“What?” She finally met his stare, her own face tense and angry.


“Talk to me, here.”


She broke away, sitting on the couch, their only real piece of furniture in the cramped space. “Go back to the Uniform.” She gave her left boot a good tug and pulled it off.


“No, I'm staying. That's final.”


She ignored his attempt at being definitive. “Captain Dolan got you a good spot, worth your qualifications, in ship's engineering where . . .”


“I don't give two fucking nerfs about Captain Dolan, or ship's engineering, or qualifications.”


“He's a good man and he runs a good ship,” she said wearily, standing to put her boots away. “You're not going to find better without heading back to Anoat.”


“Would you like that? Julia?


“Answer me!”


She sank into the small couch again. Leaning forward, burying her head in her hands, she fought back the urge to shout curses at him until her voice went out. “I'd like my homeworld liberated. I'd like galactic peace. I'd like an Alderaanian ice cream. Hells, I'd like a solid six hours to sleep, once every two weeks. But I don't get what I'd like.


“And Anoat?” She lifted her head and looked at him. “Well yeah, you might just do that.”


He sat down beside her, reaching over to take her hand.


She pulled away, turned her head so she couldn't see him, tried to swallow the lump in her throat. “Just go, go, please go back to the Uniform.”


“No.”


“Go save the galaxy.”


“No.”


“Go help the Cooperative with their project.”


“No.”


“Go keep a watch on Dolan for me.”


“No . . . and he's the most honest man you've got on your side right now, so if you need me watching him, you're already fucked in all the bad ways.” He tried to close his hand around hers again. “I just want to be here when it all goes down.”


She pulled away again, jumped off the couch and to the other side of the tiny room. “I don't want you here!”


“You don't mean that.”


“Yes!” she screamed. “Yes I do!” She started to pace, only got more furious when there wasn't enough room, clenched her fists and shook them wishing she could punch a bulkhead. “I want you away! Safe! Happy, doing work that you love!”


“I'm not a game piece for you to play for optimal strategic value,” he said in that calm voice of his that meant the conversation was over, that he had crossed beyond blind rage to a place of impenetrable white noise.


“Just another few months,” she begged.


“That's what you said nine months ago, and three months ago. And it's what you'll say two months from now, or six, or eight. And after that you'll say it again, and then again; and sometimes it'll sound like we're almost there, and sometimes it'll sound like the road is long and the path is hard, and we just have to keep soldiering on.


“But I'm not a soldier, Julia. And you're wrong, because it will never end. This insane quest of yours will never end. Because people like this, these Colonials: you don't change them. They change you.”


He got up, not seeming to know where to go. “When you came to me and asked me for help with the Ryn, I told you that whatever I did, I'd do for them, not for you, and certainly not for the Colonies. Well now I have to do this for me.


“I'm staying. I'm staying because the life you've chosen for yourself means I don't get to be happy anymore, and I'd rather be unhappy for loving you than unhappy for hating you. I'm staying on this hellhole, this world of petty, self-absorbed humans with their petty, self-absorbed dreams, and you'll just have to play your game around me."


He started back for the kitchen, pausing as he passed her. “Or you could stop. But you aren't going to do that are you?”


She wished she could. Stop, that is. She wished it could all be over. She wished that she could curl up in bed with him and sleep, just sleep, until tomorrow brought a better day. But she couldn't. She couldn't give up . . . not now. Not when she was this close.


And besides, looking through the doorway at him cooking in the kitchen, he was all of the way over there now, and she was still all of the way over here.


Julia fetched her boots in silence, stuffing her feet back in them, then grabbed her uniform vest and headed for the door. She had work to do.

Flashback


Julia Krin walked the passageways of the Colonial starship with a stiffness in her gait that betrayed the importance of this operation. She was trying too hard to seem calm and collected, she knew, but the impact of this project would ultimately determine the fate of the Colonies. She couldn't help but feel the pressure of the moment. If this operation failed, all of her plans would come to ruin.


Officially. she was on Deyer overseeing the new Ryn workforce she'd hired in her capacity as Administrator of the Colonial Relief Operation. That was why she wasn't at Terminus in her capacity as Vice Commodore and overall commander of the Colonial Defense Force, coordinating the deployment of the Colonial Navy to its new anti-Reaver operation. It was also why a certain newly-trustworthy Delta-series Human Replica Droid had been placed in charge of the Rebirth project, despite the fact that its importance to the future of Galactic Technologies warranted direct oversight from the company's interim CEO.


None of that mattered, though, not when compared to what could be gained here. Rounding one final corner and stepping through the open blast door, the shepherd of Gestalt's fate came face-to-face with her most ambitious scheme yet. The hangar bay had been cleared of all support ships and related equipment. In their place was strewn a contraption that looked more like a pile of scrap metal spread out in a rough line than any recognizable piece of technical equipment. Stretching the length of the bay, its many obvious hinges implied something of its ultimate function.


On the near side of the twisted metal assemblage, a multi-screen computer terminal and squat, broad data storage module had been bolted to the deck, around which some half dozen Colonial technical officers were busily at work. One of them must have heard the muted clomp clomp of her regulation boots against the hangar deck plating, because he looked over his shoulder toward her and then the whole team was turning around, awaiting her orders.


“Status report,” Julia said, heading straight for the left-end screen of the terminal and pulling it out and away on its articulated arm mount.


The project leader, a man of about sixty years who nevertheless had an aura of youthful exuberance about him, answered without hesitation. “Low-power systems check is green across the board. Bridge reports the ship is ready, and CIC has given us a green light for squadron launch.”


“Security measures?” Julia asked, splitting her commandeered screen into multiple windows and calling up an array of relevant video feeds and technical readouts.


“The data vault has been secured according to your specifications. All encryption and security measures are active and the lockout timer is running.”


“Have you tested the zipper?”


“Uhh, tested the . . .”


“Yes, Ma'am,” one of the younger techs cut in. “All hinges and linkages have been tested independently. No errors or failures to report.”


The project leader and the tech shared an awkward look, before Julia took notice and explained: “I wanted a last-minute hardware test before we go live.”


The man shook his head dismissively. “I can assure you, Vice Commodore, that a hardware malfunction is the last thing we should be concerning ourselves with.”


“I wanted it,” Julia reiterated, staring him down until he looked away uncomfortably. “This is important.”


He nodded, pretending to check a few things on his own monitor. “Yes, Ma'am.”


“Very well, then: sound off all-clear for full system deployment.”


The half-dozen hand-picked techs jumped to their stations at the formal order, quickly bringing up their relevant technical readouts. “All clear,” the first called out. “All clear,” again, and again, and again, until at last the project leader turned to her with a big grin, his youthful excitement back in full force. “All clear for full system deployment, Vice Commodore.”


Julia brought out her commlink immediately. “Attention, attention: this is Vice Commodore Krin. We are go for full deployment in sixty seconds on my mark.” She reached out for the final key on her console, pressing it as she said, “Mark.”


Safety alarms sounded as the device in front of her rumbled to life, its various hinges and linkages flexing and bending according to its function, the center of the mass lurching toward the bay's mag-con field as the two ends were pulled gradually toward the centerpoint. What started as a straight line quickly morphed into a sort of inverted T, a long bar with a short stub poking out at its midpoint. The stub continued to grow as the device stitched its two halves together, the two sides of the bar shrinking all the while.


Julia checked her screen, seeing all green from other departments. She enlarged the exterior camera shot, getting a full view of the antenna as it completed the first of two deployment stages. Now “zipped” and extended from the bay, the network of hinges flexed in unison, elongating and narrowing the antenna.


The timer hit zero and a voice from her commlink announced, “Hyperfighters away,” though she was watching the launch progress of the twenty-four vessels on her screen. Twenty four fighters, nineteen survivors of the fall of Gestalt, and five built in secret aboard this very ship, testing both the physical limits of the machine shop's capabilities, and the technical ingenuity of the engineering crew.


But the Vice Commodore had ordered it, and they had made it so.


Julia counted off the seconds until the hyperfighters made their jumps to lightspeed, split into two squadrons and headed in opposite directions. She waited with bated breath until the project lead bobbed his head emphatically, turning from his terminal with barely contained glee. “We're receiving navigational telemetry!”


The cheers were immediate and numerous. Julia, however, could only allow herself a moment of celebration, which also meant she could only allow her project lead the same. Pulling him aside, she broke the bad news. “I'm not satisfied with this timetable.” He started to object but she didn't give him the chance. “I need six more hyperfighters on survey duty by the time we reach our projected fifty percent completion goal.”


He shook his head. “I'm sorry, it can't be done.”


“I believe in you,” Julia said insincerely.


He shook his head again. “It's not a matter of belief. It's a matter of materials. Hyperfighters use ultrachrome in their designs, and our only source of that particular material was the Confederation. We had to cannibalize the entire fleet's maintenance reserve just to build the five fighters we needed to complete the second squadron.”


“I don't need them combat-ready,” Julia said bluntly. “I need them survey-ready. Six ships; get them for me.”


Visibly shaken and all trace of celebratory excitement gone now, the man nodded his submission to her unreasonable demand.


“I'll get another ship out here as soon as possible to restock the necessary construction materials, but it's only going to get harder to conceal these resupply missions once the commotion of the fleet redeployment dies down.


“I understand.”


Unlike the myriad Galactic Technologies and Colonial Technologies projects underway in and around the Anoat System, projects which now relied heavily on contract labor from the Ryn Fleets, this was a wholly Colonial endeavor. The security concerns were substantial, but that was only one of the reasons: the Colonies needed to prove they could do this. It was important that when the time came, the right people would realize that though the Colonies had been taken down, they'd not been taken out.


And soon, very soon, they'd be on their feet and ready for the next round.


Hovering above the ruins of Sentry Station Waypoint One, a custom-designed and built hyperwave antenna floated in space as if cut free from some long-departed vessel, dutifully capturing the survey data of its small but growing fleet of scout ships. The MC-170 Krakana would remain on-station with full stealth systems engaged until the integrity of the Gestalt-Kashan hyperlane was reestablished, and its utility unequivocally demonstrated.


* * *


Now


MC-170 Krakana, Milagro System
Combat Information Center


Neat and orderly, in perfect Colonial form, the familiar shapes of Milagro's defense force were the subject of the captain's attention. Representing the bulk of both the system's combat and counter-stealth capabilities, they were the chief concern of the Coalition Colonial as he and his vessel stalked through the spacelanes of his former brothers and sisters.


But that other road traveled was not the reason for the Krakana's presence today. Vengeance was not their play, and reconciliation, well that was for the sort too noble to command a terror platform. No, they were here for the low-level comm signal they'd been pumping out in conjunction with a squadron of Colonial Stealth Intruders appropriated from the Western Fleet through channels the captain knew better than to inquire about.


Too weak to register as even background static on the most susceptible of frequencies, the signals hadn't yet triggered any hostile reaction from the Colonial fleet present. After all, it was far more likely that their new homeworld's communications network was suffering from some minor bug than that a small fleet of stealth ships was roaming their skies, intent on doing basically nothing at all of any discernible sort to anyone or anything in-system.


Of course they were, in fact, doing something, something of substantial effect and broad consequence. Something that would be kicking off at any minute now.




Tribal-class Patrol Cruiser, Milagro Orbit


The captain looked over the previous shift's report, noting that three crewmen hadn't reported for duty. Add to that another two from the previous day, and . . .


“Sir, security is reporting that one of their troopers missed muster and can't be found.”


Damn. It was understandable that everyone was excited now that they'd finally moved to Milagro and started settling in, but he thought his people were better than this. He knew they were. “Very well . . . go ahead and inform command that we're having problems with both officers and enlisted crew failing to report in.”


“Aye, Sir.”


“Captain,” the ship's XO spoke up, “I've heard a report from some of the other officers in the fleet that other crews are having similar problems. I think it's just something that's going around.”


“Maybe.” It just didn't sit right with him. “Maybe.” There had to be more to it than that.


Then a notice beeped from a sensor station. “Talk to me,” the captain ordered. “What have we got?”


“Unauthorized launch from the surface, Captain. Local traffic control is requesting we move to intercept.”


The captain all but snarled at the report. “They've got their own ships, can't they handle it?”


“Sorry, Captain,” the chief of comms reported, “it sounds like they've got their hands full with some sort of commotion on the surface.”


“That's all well and good, son, but we're not a customs picket. We've got -” Another notice chimed. Then another. Then an alarm sounded, local, on-ship. “What the hell?”


“Unauthorized shuttle launch,” the tactical officer reported.


“Well,” the XO said, “at least we know what our missing crewmen are up to.”


“Lock down that shuttle, and shut those alarms off! And somebody -”


“Sir,” the comm officer cut in, working his console and slipping a widget into a data slot, “incoming holocomm from command.”


“Let me see it.” The holoprojector flared to life, then shut off . . . along with the bridge lighting. And the consoles. And the gravity plating. “What the fu-” He never finished the expletive, the gravity plating kicking back on unexpectedly and slamming him into the deck, knocking the air from his lungs.


Gasping for breath, the captain rose on shaky feet as the lights reengaged. “Status report! I need a status report! What hit us?”


“Systems are still coming back on-line, sir,” the XO reported.


“Captain,” one of the other crew called out ominously.


When the captain identified the officer, he found the young man standing ramrod straight, right arm extended and pointing out of the forward viewport. The captain looked out of the window and saw . . . Milagro.


“Repulsors and engines are down!” navigation reported, just getting back minimal function of the terminal. “Initiating emergency restart.”


“We're caught in Milagro's gravity,” the XO stated. “And so are they.” He pointed at a tiny sliver on the horizon, the distinct wedge shape of a Colonial warship, also listing toward the planet below.


“Comms, get me command,” the captain said evenly, trying to put on a brave face for his crew. “Comms? What are you doing, son?”


The communications officer had risen to his feet, turning to face the captain. Slowly, he raised his hands over his head. “Pash Varrack, Second Lieutenant, Colonial Defense Force, Western Coalition Navy.”


“What the what?”


The XO was already at the comm station, yanking the widget from the console. He inspected it for a moment, then his eyes darted to the captain. “Take a look.”


The captain caught the little device in mid-air, noticing immediately the stamp on the side: GT. Galactic Technologies. The manufacturer of this ship. This ship, and every ship in the Colonial fleet. And it had just been pulled out of an active comm station.


The XO already had the traitor on his knees, arms pinned behind his back.


The young man wasn't quite so smooth now, his voice a little strained, a quiet fear evident in his tone. “I am a uniformed officer of a foreign military within the borders of a sovereign nation without authorization, and I am surrendering to you. My name is Pash Varrack, I am twenty-three years old, my rank is Second Lieutenant, I am a member of the Galactic Coalition Navy, and I surrender.” He could feel the barrel of the blaster against the back of his head. He leaned forward a little, but it just followed him.


Tears were beginning to form in his eyes when a pair of boots stepped into his field of vision. “Look at me, son.” Reluctantly, the young saboteur raised his head to regard his captain, the man who had been his captain. “If even one of these ships goes down, I'll put the bolt through your eye myself.”


The young lieutenant shook his head feverishly. “They'll reboot in time. They'll all be safe. I'm not . . . I'm not trying to destroy your ships.”


“Then what, pray tell, are you trying to do?”


The flash of motion on the other side of the viewport caught the captain's attention. He looked up to see another shuttle fly by, extremely close, and then another, and then a loose formation of freighters and other civilian craft.


The comm station burst to life with chatter from planetary control, something about disrupting the local security force's pursuit of hijackers.


The young Coalition operative smiled despite his shaking with fear. “I'm trying to delay you until they escape.


“And . . . there is one more thing: I've been authorized to tell you that I am operating under the direct command of Vice Commodore Julia Krin of the Colonial Defense Force. So . . . maybe you should save your threats for her?”




MC-170 Krakana, Milagro System


The super low frequency pings were enough to tell the captain that his Stealth Intruders were nearby, and that was all he really needed. The flotilla of stolen civilian and Confederate Colonial starships were fast approaching, the Confederation's contingent of Delta-series Human Replica Droids compelled over these past few days by the Krakana's signal to conceal and coordinate their escape.


If escape was even the word for it. The captain shrugged, leaving those kinds of distinctions for better men than himself. As the flotilla drew nearer, the Krakana sent out a proximity ping, warning the ships and their pilots to slow down and await more precise instruction. Apparently the way this signal worked, the replicants were still “smart”, as in they still had the full range of their cognitive abilities available for use, but their motivating goals became very simple and direct: “leave at this time, stay hidden until then, meet at this point in space”. That kind of thing.


It creeped the captain out more than a little, but then, that was why he was a captain, and not a doctor or a diplomat or one of those other fluffy jobs that required moral nuance. All he knew in that moment was that he had a duty to escort these folks to safety, and the local security force was in hot pursuit. He had hoped he wouldn't have to resort to this, but oh well, it would make for a good story as long as everything worked out in the end.


“Fire the covering spread,” the captain ordered, knowing his crew had been standing by for the command.


The trio of low-detection Azimuth Doomsday intra-system ballistic missiles streaked from the stealth ship and weaved through the friendly flotilla, triggering automatically as soon as they reached safe detonation range. The initial blast was far enough away that the pursuing Milagro vessels received no immediate damage, but they were forced to veer away in order to avoid the interlocking clouds of radioactive debris now hurtling towards them.


The action bought the shepherding Krakana the time it needed to complete its task, and they were far enough away from the planet itself that the fallout from the bombs would disperse harmlessly into open space. All in all, worth the risk.


By the time their pursuers were free of both the danger and sensor scrambling properties of the weapons meant for genocide, the temporary slave circuit had been established and the active sensor jamming suite of the Krakana had been activated and expanded. In a precisely timed move, the full compliment of the MC-170's missile tubes fired their specialized torpedoes and then jumped into space, each of the twenty-five warheads releasing a cluster of hyperspace decoys that jumped, blind but coordinated with their kin, along a small number of routes only slightly divergent from the Krakana's.


The result, for any ship in a position to take notice, was a hazy soup of indistinct sensor readings. And best of all: intelligence was confident that the Confederation hadn't yet extended its early warning network to encompass the new member world. Now, if they could just keep ahead of possible pursuers . . .




Hours later


MC-170 Krakana, Sentry Station Waypoint Two


It took all of five seconds before the hails started coming in. Expanding the effective radius of the MC-170's sensor scrambler might work at extreme range with only local planetary security pickets close enough to get a good look, but this close to the modern military hardware of the former Gestalt-Kashan Hyperlane Joint Task Force, there wasn't a chance in any one of the Corellian hells of pulling that trick again.


They had come in as far out from the asteroid field as possible, but without blazing their own trail altogether, which sure as heck would have gotten them noticed well before now, this point was simply unavoidable. All they could do was try to minimize their time inside the belt's gravity well and hope the task force couldn't mobilize fast enough to catch them. With luck, the withdrawal from Milagro had been sufficiently confounding that the Confederates wouldn't have been expecting the flotilla's appearance at Waypoint Two.


There was, of course, something of a contingency plan, involving a certain number of Azimuths fired into the nearest cluster of asteroids, generating a cloud of radioactive debris that might be substantial enough to deter pursuit long enough for the Coalition force to effect their escape plan, but the collective gravity of the belt would inevitably suck in much of that debris, with likely long-term harm to the hidden station within. That wasn't the kind of confrontation they were here for. Besides, all they had to do was make it to the edge of the belt. If they could just make it there, to the effective edge of Confederation controlled space . . . they'd be unstoppable.


Unstoppable because, as of two weeks ago, the MC-170 Krakana was the only ship in the galaxy with an up-to-date map of the last half of what was now effectively a Kashan-Terminus hyperlane. The minutes ticked by until, finally, they were clear.


The slaved flotilla jumped to the relative safety of hyperspace, confident that if they were pursued, it would be by vessels now barely familiar with the twisting, turning, ever-changing hyperspace lane ahead.




Commonwealth-class Battlecruiser Rebirth, Terminus System


It had taken ten times the labor force and equipment to manage, but they had done it. The first Commonwealth-class Battlecruiser produced since the fall of the Gestalt System, the only one of its kind now in service to the Colonial Defense Fleet, had been built in half the time of any of its predecessors. It had been a thing of beauty to behold, watching the open space construction of the vessel by work crews of the Ryn Fleet, administrated and coordinated by engineers and technicians from Colonial Technologies (a registered subsidiary of Galactic Technologies). If not for the cheap but skilled labor of the Ryn and heavy subsidization by the Western Province, the project would have been impossible to complete, at least in this timescale.


But it had been completed, on time and to specifications. Galactic Technologies, the Gestalt Colonies, Vice Commodore Julia Krin: they had made it happen. They had set their sights on nothing short of rebirth, and there it was, reborn.


Julia had called the majority of the Colonial fleet to Terminus, leaving only a light escort of Tribal-class frigates and a single Western warship each for the interdictors at their stations. Now deployed near the partially completed Far-Point Outpost and its various temporary space stations, these vessels were well within the confines of the independently administrated Colonial space zone, completely free of the threat of intervention from local traffic control and planetary defense forces. If the deployment of the Colonial fleet in such close ranks had raised the locals' suspicions, they hadn't bothered to mention it.


And then the fleet arrived from Milagro. Approaching along a Colonial corridor, they remained technically within the administrated space of the Gestalt Colonies, even if the direction of their approach had come as a surprise to any watching Terminians. Far-Point Outpost stepped in immediately, calling out to the replicant-controlled vessels and compelling them further into the system.


“Alright, Captain,” Julia said into her commlink, “put him on.”


“With pleasure,” the kindly voice of the Herglic Captain Glurb replied. There was a slight hiss in the line, the result of the network of communications dampening satellites the Terminians had deployed along the edge of the system nearest Reaver space. While there was some doubt as to its necessity, the sheer volume of regular intra-system communications had caused a sense of foreboding in the local population that the dampening field had calmed somewhat.


“What is the meaning of this!” Buttons had started complaining before the hologram of his little rat face had fully materialized, catching Julia by surprise. “What are those ships doing here? Why are some of them broadcasting Confederation transponders?”


Yep, definitely a Squib. Julia chose her words carefully, as the results of a great many months of labor depended wholly on the next several minutes. “The Gestalt Colonies have taken into their custody a number of Colonial citizens who had been subject to Confederation authority against their will. They will be held at the Far-Point Outpost until their safety and liberty can be assured.”


Buttons' nose scrunched up, his whiskers wiggling oddly. Okay, maybe not a Squib. “You have no right to bring your politics to Terminus! I demand that you move these ships and their occupants out of the Terminus System with all haste!”


Julia forced a bitter smile, genuinely unhappy that she had to treat the little not-Squib like this. But she did, she had to. “The terms of your contract with the Gestalt Colonies grant us full autonomy over the operation of our designated spacelanes and orbital sectors. You have surrendered your right to interfere here. But that's not really what you should be concerned with right now.”


The way that Buttons' rage made his fur stand on end in splotchy patches and set his ears twitching uncontrollably made Julia reconsider her Squib hypothesis yet again. “What. Have. You. Done. Julia.”


She shrugged offhand, trying to make her shameful frown look like one of insincere mockery. “In about . . . oh, ten to fifteen minutes, a military task force from the Contegorian Confederation is going to arrive in this system along that vector, and if we're really, really unlucky, it's going to arrive with the MC-170 Orca.”


“The Orc-awhatnow?”


She had piqued his interest, but she had not yet stoked his fear. “It's a top-secret, first-strike, stealth warship equipped with atomic warheads and stealth weaponry designed to devastate planetary populations and infrastructure.” Now there was the terror she needed, clear on his decidedly not-Squib face. “Now, lucky for you, the Cooperative task force you've surely detected at the edge of this system includes a vessel equipped with a crystal gravfield trap that might – might – just be able to detect one such stealth vessel. So what do you say you exercise your authority as outlined in Terminus' charter with the West, and transfer operational command of the system's defenses to me, so I can call those vitally important allies of mine in-system, hmm?”


And there it was, outright terror turning to violent indignation. “Why you low-down, dirty, conniving, backstabbing, manipulative, Colonial bitch!”


The benefit of his violent indignation, was that it was still so very firmly rooted in fear. “Is that a yes, then?”


Buttons' head slumped down and his whole body swayed as he kicked at something outside the range of the holofield. From this angle, she realized just how Squib-like his ears were . . .


“Fine,” he said, snarling, as his head snapped back up to meet her gaze.


Julia nodded, suppressing a smile at the sick and shameful pleasure she got from so blatantly manipulating her ally. “Oh, and Buttons: don't worry. I have a plan.”


His fiery demeanor vanished in a flash, his own dark realization finally seizing him. “You always have a plan.”


The Cooperative task force was on location in less than two minutes, their preplotted microjumps bringing them in right in front of the Far-Point Outpost. The converted hospital ships of the Cooperative Emergency Medical Response Force nestled themselves securely between their own military escort and the Colonial fleet already stationed there.


“Alright people, let's move!” Julia shouted at her coordinating team, most of whom were liberated Delta-series replicants. “We're behind schedule and well past the point of no return. Retask some Tribals to escort the slowest ships from the flotilla, signal the Krakana to break away and establish a safe position, and maintain full sensor sweeps of the Confederation's approach corridor. I want to know the second they're in-system.”


They were behind schedule, because the Krakana's nav computer had encountered more trouble than anticipated on its approach to Terminus. Part of the problem was likely due to the time it had taken the MC-170 to be deployed covertly to the Milagro system, time not only that the Krakana wasn't receiving updates on the route's stability, but the route couldn't be surveyed at all, due to the vessel's essential role in the operation as the replacement for Sentry Station Waypoint One's repository of survey data.


It wasn't as simple as that, though. The raw survey data had been housed in an isolated storage module in order to maintain the security protocols safeguarding the route's secrecy. While it would have been advantageous to run the data through a dedicated hyperlane management network (like the one on Terminus), or a properly calibrated supercomputer (like one of several aboard the RDS Uniform), or perhaps a mysterious living world-machine (such as Emanon), data analysis had had to be done completely in-house to preserve those security protocols.


It wasn't until the Krakana was en route to Waypoint Two from Milagro that the navigational data had even been transferred to the ship's navcomputer, a computer that would have to be extracted and atomized before the stealth ship would be allowed to leave this system. The measures may have seemed extreme, and even Julia agreed that they were, but she had come too far to let some minor oversight ruin her plans. At this stage, every decision held the potential to bring her entire endeavor to ruin.


“Reversions detected!”


“Broadcast on all channels,” Julia ordered before confirmation of the arriving vessels' identities had even been acquired. She waited until she got a thumbs up not only from the comm officer, but also from the sensor operator, but she began the second she knew who she was speaking to.


“To the commander of the Contegorian Confederation task force entering the Terminus System: I am Vice Commodore Julia Krin of the Gestalt Colonies, acting commander of the combined Coalition defense forces in this system. I am informing you that the Coalition has taken a number of individuals from the Confederation world of Milagro into protective custody, though I am unwilling to discuss the justifications for that protective custody over open comm channels.


“I can assure you that our intention is not to antagonize the Contegorian Confederation, but we are firm in our commitment to the protection of these individuals. For that reason, I cannot allow you to approach the planet, but am willing to meet with you to negotiate a peaceful resolution to this unfortunate set of circumstances.


“And though the Terminian government has erected an extensive communications dampening network at the near end of the system, I will remind you that we are near Reaver space and should keep remote communication to a minimum.”

It was the only right move to make. After all, it was a Coalition violation of Confederation sovereignty that had led to this confrontation, a confrontation set in a Coalition system, where the Coalition naval forces present had the Confederation's Hyperlane Squadron notably outgunned. A show of good faith was most certainly in order, especially since conflict with the Confederation was not the objective of this enterprise.


Even so, Julia was not at all enjoying herself here, surrounded by these hostile Confederates. They weren't happy, and she was the one who had made them unhappy. The flight crew was on high alert, ready to launch the remainder of the Star Destroyer's fighter complement at a moment's notice. These Confederates weren't playing around, and were fully prepared to take action if this encounter should come to blows.


Julia allowed herself and her lone companion to be led across the flight deck and down an adjoining passageway, into a briefing room intended for starfighter pilots. At the head of the room was a small rectangular desk, not typically used for conferences, but already packed with Confederation and Colonial officers of various stripes. There were a couple of captains from the Confederation Merchant Fleet, what looked like a CSIS officer, and mixed groups of Confederation and Colonial captains on either end of the table, spilling over the corners and onto the short sides of the table as well.


It was clear to Julia that they intended to dominate this exchange. It only made her more confident of her decision to come all but alone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she began as she took her seat opposite the small army.


One of the CMF captains held up a hand to stop her. “Not yet,” he said, looking to the empty chair at the center of their side.


Julia glanced back and up at the the man she had brought along, who had elected to remain standing off to her right side. He was staring straight ahead at the wall panel intended for tactical displays, seemingly oblivious to the goings on in the room.


The near door slid open and the entire Confederation side of the room stood to attention. Julia rose as well, regarding the elderly man who had just entered the room.


“Take your seats,” he said gruffly, heading straight for his own chair. “My delay, while regrettable, was unavoidable,” he added in the way of a not-apology.


“Got held up picking starflare targets?” Julia asked lightly.


The old man was not amused. “Line Captain Basile Allard, commander of the Hyperlane Squadron,” he said stiffly, extending his hand.


“Captain Julia Krin of the Western Coalition Navy,” she said, accepting the unpleasantly vigorous shake. “You don't really expect us to start shooting at each other today, do you?”


“Captain?” he asked, ignoring her question. “You announced yourself as Vice Commodore when we entered the system.”


Julia showed an insincere smile to the scowling man. “The Colonials do like their titles and offices, but right now I am acting as an official representative of the Galactic Coalition, and I believe my rank as authorized by the Parliament of the Coalition Western Province is what is relevant for this meeting.”


She wondered if he knew she was trying to play on his disdain for fancy titles and aristocracy, but more than that she wondered if it was working.


“Well that's fascinating,” he said with a kiloton of insincerity, “but I'd rather hear about what Coalition stealth ships and saboteurs were doing in a Confederation system, and why they fired on customs vessels of a Confederation member world? Wars have been started for less, captain.”


Well, at least she had her answer. It would have been nice for an opportunity to ingratiate herself with the Line Captain, but that was clearly not going to happen. It was best at that point to cut her losses and fall back on her secondary strategy: the direct approach.


“Doctor,” she said, turning her head back a little but not actually looking at her companion, “do the thing.”


“The thing, Vice Commodore?” he asked, clearly not comprehending the command.


Julia nodded her head, frustrated by the miscommunication. “The thing that we talked about before? The thing that I brought you here to do? The big, flashy reveal, remember?” The direct approach didn't seem to be working either, but not on account of her Confederate counterparts.


“Of course,” the doctor said, taking a large display datapad out of his briefcase and holding it up for the Confederates to see. It powered on with no apparent prompting, the interface seeming to navigate itself toward some specific information.


“So what?” Captain Allard asked, unamused. “He's got some kind of subdermal wireless cybernetics, or something?”


“He's a robot,” Julia said flatly. It didn't get her the reaction she wanted, more straightforward disbelief than unsettling shock.


Then the CSIS operative leaned over and whispered something into Captain Allard's ear.


“The Jensaarai is correct,” the doctor said.


There it was. “What the . . .” Captain Allard began, but trailed off.


“I have superior auditory perception compared to baseline humans,” the “robot” doctor explained.


The display pad was finally showing the first bits of interesting data in the form of stock Galactic Technologies footage of a Delta-series under construction. “Construction”, of course, being a relative term, as there was a great deal of grafting synthetic tissues and cloned skin involved.


“The good doctor is a Delta-series Human Replica Droid, the line uniquely distinguished from other HRDs with the moniker 'replicant'.” The running display was getting some pretty good reactions from the Confederates and Colonials opposite the table, though the Line Captain himself didn't seem at all swayed by her gross, manipulative maneuver. She had to press on, though; it was too late to turn back now.


“I can inform you that the Delta-series was begun by Galactic Technologies under the supervision of Lance Shipwright and the orders of the Coalition Intelligence Bureau, but after initial trial runs were complete, then-Vice Commodore Shipwright continued the covert, large-scale production of replicants by Galactic Technologies for use within the Gestalt Colonies.”


“You mean . . .” one of the Colonials began from the edge of the table.


Julia nodded, but kept her eyes on Captain Allard. “The Colonials you followed here from Milagro are replicants, every one of them.”


“Why did they come here in the first place?” Captain Allard asked, not distracted from his own obligations by Julia's fanciful story.


“Because I mind controlled them here,” she answered bluntly.


That cast the room into a general uproar, the “good doctor” lowering his datapad as, presumably, he determined that the exchange had progressed beyond its usefulness.


Captain Allard, however, was showing the first signs of a shift in demeanor. “You expect me to believe all of this because of a minute and a half of footage and a neat trick with a remote-activated datapad?”


She wasn't buying his apparent incredulity. “What I expect,” she began, shaking her head, “is for you to demand a full battery of scans and tests to confirm the true nature of the good doctor, here, and once assured by your own instrumentation and experts that he is indeed a replicant, I expect you to demand the right to inspect the on-site Cooperative medical facilities that are currently housing the replicants from Milagro.”


“And why would we do that?” Captain Allard asked, but the edge in his voice was just a little different now, a little bit like he was pretending to be the hardass he'd been only minutes ago.


“Because we've developed an invasive but safe and reliable procedure to permanently disable their command overrides, as well as a number of related systems.”


“Related how?” one of the other captains asked, a Mon Calamari who had a gleam in his fishy eye that told Julia his mind had latched on to the technological aspects of this conversation that hadn't even occurred to the other military officers.


“They're hardwired to obey Lance Shipwright.” That even took Captain Allard by surprise, though he tried his best not to show it. “In the time it took us to liberate the replicants within Coalition space from their compulsory servitude, over three hundred of them were stopped by Colonial interdiction efforts near the edge of the Gestalt System, drawn there by the broadcasts claiming to be from Lance Shipwright.”


Allard scowled at Julia, something rubbing him the wrong way. “Are you trying to tell me that all of this is nothing more than an act of goodwill toward the Confederation?”


Julia smiled at the question, holding back an amused laugh. She began gently: “I'm the commander of the Colonial military, the CEO of Galactic Technologies, a representative of the Western Province Parliament, the acting commander of the Terminus System's combined defense forces, and the Administrator of the final days of the Colonial Relief Program: nothing I've done since the fall of Gestalt has ever only been 'nothing more' than what it looks like at first glance.”


It was such a relief to finally say it out loud, and in a context where the person hearing mattered to her plans. A little bit of that excitement started to creep into her voice. “So yes, this is an act of goodwill toward the Contegorian Confederation, because it will protect you from a threat to which you would have otherwise been oblivious. This is also an act of goodwill toward the replicants themselves, because they are people and I will defend their rights as people against any threat.” There was just a tinge of aggressiveness there that Julia hadn't intended, but it bled into her next line seamlessly. “This is an act of political progress, because the conversation we are having right now is the first formal interaction our two governments have had with one another since the invasion of the Gestalt System, and that is the fault of both our nations' leadership, who are more interested in short-term gains than long-term progress.” She was almost in full-on rant mode now, tapping her index finger against the tabletop to accentuate key words. “This is an act of social engineering, because I do intend to use the inevitable outcome of this exchange to advance the social consciousness of the Gestalt Colonies.”


“Inevitable?” Allard interrupted her quasi-speech, objecting to her claim, but also certainly tired of hearing her ramble on.


“Yes,” Julia doubled down, nodding her head, “inevitable, because for all of our posturing here, you and I, you will not shoot at me for freeing sentient beings from the shackles of slavery, and I will not shoot at you for being generally disagreeable.”


“Fancy words aren't going to get me to play along with your little game here,” Allard warned.


It didn't even slow her down. “Not today, no, and probably not you, but I'm right that we both care too much to let this end in violence, so here's what I propose.” Julia paused for a brief moment, just long enough to calm herself down a little. “The good doctor and I will remain aboard until your staff confirms through minimally invasive means that he is, indeed, a replicant. At that time, I will allow non-combat units with appropriate expertise to inspect the Cooperative facilities currently preparing to liberate the replicants from Milagro. We will both immediately order our forces in-system to stand down from combat readiness, and await proper diplomatic representation from the Confederation,” she was getting aggressively excited again, “because as impressive and intimidating as this array of officers you have assembled truly is,” she gestured broadly with both hands, sitting up a little straighter as if in defiance of them all, “none of you are qualified to navigate an international exchange of this type or magnitude.”


By now she was enjoying herself, and she was letting it show. “So what do you say, Line Captain Basile Allard: how about you grunt your consent to my proposal, and we all get on with our lives?”


There was a long stretch of silence in which all eyes were on Julia, even the good doctor's. Eventually, reluctantly, Captain Allard grunted, “fine,” and stood to his feet.


All things considered, it was a fantastic response from the grouchy old man.