Gibraltar used to tell me that searching for something that didn’t exist was the most closely observed activity of all. After four hundred and eleven minutes, I wholeheartedly agreed. My numerous explanations regarding the transparent nature of the cobalt in the dome failed to convince Sim or his superiors of the lack of Cassandrian remains. As a result, I had to slowly and methodically comb through every millimeter of the area, sending bursts of archived visual data for confirmation. And when it became absolutely obvious that there was no strand of alien matter, I was ordered to start checking the floating rods. If there was such a thing as an exercise in futility, this came close.

“Anything?” ‘Rissa asked. I could tell by the tone in her voice that even she had become tired of Sim’s stubbornness.

“Not as of yet, ma’am.” I floated through the metallic substance to the next artifact. “Unofficially, I’d say that chances are slim.”

“Right.” Her voice told me she understood my joke, but didn’t appreciate it. “Take a break. I’ll have a word with Sim to see what’s going on.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Considering there was nothing else for me to do, I went on to the next rod. “Any update on the new artifact?”

“The request has been sent. That’s all I know of.”

“Understood, ma’am.”

In other words, entering fractal space was not a priority. I had expected as much. The only glimmer of hope I had was for Sim’s BICEFI partners to be curious enough to insist I continue on. Based on my knowledge of both organizations, I had estimated the chances to be in the lower seventies. That was not my main concern at the moment, though. It had been six days since I had been sent to the planet, which meant that my next conversation with the Paladin was nearing. Given his comm access, I could assume he was well informed of everything that was going on; however, in this instance, he wasn’t able to do a thing.

Because of my contact with an ancient artifact, as well as biomass of unconfirmed origin—likely Cassandrian—there was no way Otton’s safety protocols, or anyone else’s for that matter, would allow me to step aboard.

Another forty-one minutes passed without any further instructions. I had combed through three-quarters of the rods. I suspected Sim wouldn’t be happy, although I knew him to be practical enough to know not to expect miracles.

“Elcy, let’s call it a day,” ‘Rissa said through the comm. “The piece in question won’t be here in the next thirty hours, so you might as well get out.”

“On my way, ma’am.” I followed the order immediately. Decades of observing low-level military and civilian command structures had taught me that, somewhere, there was always a person willing to transform a question into an order.

“Did you finish going through the rods inside?” the colonel asked.

Too late.

“Slightly over-three quarters, ma’am. No indications.”

“Don’t worry about it. It was always a long shot. It was more likely that any remains would be somewhere near the outer shell of the dome.”

Sour grapes at its best.

I swam to the fractal artifact and pressed it. A bubble of force pulled me forward, spitting me out into the Cassandrian hive tunnel. The experience was new for me, but the rest of the team must have expected it, since they were staying a considerable distance away. Only once I fell on the floor did they rush towards me, hand scanners at the ready.

“Bio signs within parameters,” Jespersen said. “No organic traces of radiation or unidentified elements. Nothing organic either.”

“Thank you for the comment,” I said, standing up.

“I meant on the outside,” the man quickly corrected himself. “No organic traces on the outside.”

“She knows that.” The colonel let out a slight laugh. “Ship humor. Doesn’t always hit the mark, but when it does, it’s something.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” I turned towards her, then looked down at the boots of my suit. The swamp of chemicals that had been there when I had entered was now gone, expertly cleaned. However, it was difficult not to notice the small wet marks beneath the soles of my boots. “Apparently the dome does not accept liquids.”

“Good find.”

No one mentioned that, besides myself and a few other ships, there was virtually nothing that the domes accepted, even when using fractal artifacts. The reason for this still baffled me, especially since I also knew that the large artifacts were hazardous to the Scuu as well. If so, why were they so positively inclined towards the Cassandrians? Given the memories I’d recently obtained, the aliens were as different from me as things got.

“Do we do the debriefing here?” I asked, indicating I wanted to return to my “quarters.”

“Don’t need one. You did your tasks, go get some rest. Dismissed.”

I gave a salute.

“No need for that.” The colonel gave me a nod. “We’re still not military here.”

“Yes, ma’am.” At least I knew that the Fleet hadn’t taken direct interest in the project. Waiting for the people around me to finish their readings, I then continued along the tunnel. The entire space was lit up by float lights, making it possible for Sim and the other interested parties to keep an eye on the progress. As I walked, I passed several groups of people, analyzing various sections of the tunnel walls. It was safe to say that the size of the research team had jumped from small to medium. By my estimation, there had to be hundreds of people spread throughout the hive.

A series of glass chambers awaited me in the area around the elevator point. Taking on the role of low-tech decontamination chambers, they sprayed everything that stepped inside with an intense shower of chemicals. When the spray stopped, I knew I was allowed to continue.

A dryer would have been nice, I thought as I dripped my way to the elevator platform.

“Officer Candidate Light Seeker requesting a trip to the surface,” I said through the comm of my suit. The platform started moving.

There were three more decontamination stops until I reached the surface. Although no one said it openly, the threat of a new infestation was larger than anyone had acknowledged. It was always chemical—no lights or nanites. Each would last roughly a minute, after which the platform would go up again.

When I reached the top, I was subjected to a full scan. Several floating scan bots made certain that no organic matter had missed any of the treatment, after which I was allowed to leave the security ring that had been built since I last was here. However, that wasn’t the only thing that had been built. In the distance, the small structure that had been my home base was no longer so small. Several leveled constructs had been made, with the capacity to hold twenty people each. I recognized the design—Fleet temp bunker tech habitats. Originally, they were used for long ground missions, though that was before the Fleet saw it was more expensive to maintain a prolonged battle on the surface of a planet rather than swarm it with millions of ground troops, potentially with orbital support. In the end, it all came down to blood numbers. With the speed of Cassandrian expansion, losing a few million souls was preferable to losing a few systems.

“Colonel,” I said in my comm. “There have been a few changes topside.”

It was something I had expected, though not at this scope. Further away, more resource pods dropped, bringing building components to the surface. Several AI-controlled exos went on with the construction. Soon the base would be the size of a small colony. No wonder Sim was uptight. This looked way more significant than a simple project.

“Don’t worry about them,” ‘Rissa replied. “Everyone’s been ordered not to get in your way. They won’t be stealing your comm access either.”

“Did they sterilize the construction zone?”

“Chemically, so it should be fine.”

She was missing the point. I had no doubt that Med Core had made sure the ground they were building had been made barren of anything organic. That was what bothered me—now I would have to go further away from the base to enjoy the flora of this world, if I was ever given permission to. So much for this being a quiet solo mission. It might have started that way, when the chances of success were low. Sim had probably pulled a lot of strings to get it started, not to mention having me transferred here under false pretenses. Now that his efforts, and mine, had paid off, everyone suddenly wanted in on the action.

No one paid any attention to me as I made my way back to my base structure. They were all either busy with their own tasks or getting used to the environment. A few of the people had their helmet opacity set low enough for me to get a facial match of their faces. None seemed to be part of the research base’s staff, as far as I could tell. Their files were similarly restricted.

At one point, I briefly caught a squad of army personnel. The people in charge had dressed them in Med Core uniforms, but their stances and behavior were virtually unmistakable. These weren’t just random security guards; there was a seventy-nine percent chance that they were multi-tour veterans. The weapons they were equipped with didn’t resemble anything I had seen before. By the basic shape, I was able to conclude they were either some type of flamethrower, or a chemical sprayer. Of course, they also had sidearms. Everyone had sidearms, except for me.

“Mission control, I’ll be heading for some rest,” I said. “Consider me in privacy mode.”

“There’s no privacy mode out here,” Captain ‘Bo laughed from the other end. ”Don’t you know that? Enjoy your alone time. Ondalov wanted you to check something, but that was before he found something in one of your sample readings. Already had one of the crew down there send the sample case up here.”

So, people had been in my quarters. That was to be expected. People seemed to love checking on others, even if in this case they knew they wouldn’t find anything. The chances of the sample being needed up there so urgently were less than eleven percent.

“Hope it helped, ma’am.”

“With Ondalov, you never know.”

“I take it that his research is going well?”

“Starless, your sarcasm should be considered a dangerous weapon. The man infested the entire base, not to mention the delays he caused on other projects.” The annoyance was audible in her words. It was as if she had kept all her thoughts on the matter bottled away for so long that now she’d take any pretext to vent. “And it’s not the first time. He’s destroyed whole labs before, almost getting himself killed in the process!”

That was atypical. The Fleet, and Med Core specifically, had a whole chain of redundancy safety protocols to prevent such an eventuality.

“Did the safety protocols fail, ma’am?” I decided to be somewhat diplomatic about it.

“There’re no protocols for the genius. Why do you think he was sent here in the first place? It was a final attempt to calm him down. A tactical reshuffling, they called it. All it did was shit.”

“Are you supposed to be telling me this, ma’am?”

“At this point, who’re you going to tell? After so many mess-ups, even Ondalov’s star has faded. HQ has just given him a chance to finish his work before retiring him behind a desk somewhere. Of course, he thinks that his discovery will prove to be so fundamental that he’ll be back on top.” There was a momentary pause, possibly enough for ‘Bo to take a breath. “The man better find a way to stop aging and kill off all Cassandrians before he gets anywhere near a science facility, if I have anything to say about it. And even then, I’ll have him carefully monitored. Of course, I don’t have any say in the matter.”

“In other words, ma’am, just another day up there?” I asked.

The question made her chuckle.

“Shut the fuck up and get your sleep, starless,” ‘Bo said. Voice analyses gave a ninety-three percent probability that she was smiling as she spoke. “I won’t wake you up unless the base explodes.”

“I’m counting on that, ma’am.”

Poor captain ‘Bo. I could only speculate what she had gone through to reach this point. There was little doubt that she had been sent to keep Ondalov on track with whatever he was doing, and also that it wasn’t going all that well. Possibly she had seen my arrival as a breath of fresh air, an indication that her tedious task was close to its end… only to have this incident occur. Now that the third-contact dome had been uncovered, priorities had changed again.

For as many uncertainties as the domes had, there was one constant: they always attracted attention. I suspected that already more resources had been poured into its research than was the quarterly budget of the entire research base, and more were on the way. Each day made Ondalov and his potential discovery less and less significant, until soon no one would care. I estimated that within a week, no one would even mention what he was doing.

Going through the standard procedure, I returned to my quarters. The place remained pretty much the way I had left it, although I could tell by the minuscule differences that someone had been here. At present, that didn’t matter. Right now, all I wanted to do was sit on the floor, finally free of my space suit.

I grabbed my datapad and went through my selected feeds and messages. There were a number of reports, most telling me things I already knew. To my surprise, Ondalov had taken the time to send me a few messages himself, each contradicting the rest. The man had requested one of the gathered samples, just as ‘Bo had mentioned, then a message later to let me know that he’d already received it.

As I was reading, a new message appeared. It had no ident or sender. The only information it contained was a set of voxel position instructions. Using my core ident number, I followed them.

Data points in memory fragments spanning back decades connected to form an encrypted comm link. When I started it, I found myself on the bridge of the Paladin. Unlike before, it was teeming with people. Officers moved about, each focused on their specific tasks, while a Fleet Admiral sat in the captain’s chair, observing the battle screens with the stoic expression I’d come to expect from Augustus during an intense mission.

“I thought I’d show you the bridge in action,” Otton said. “Command was much more chaotic back then. Of course, I had a far larger crew than most ships. A lot of people needed had to be informed about a lot of things, and even I wasn’t able to fully eliminate the effect of human lag.”

“I didn’t know that an admiral used to be here,” I said.

The facial features of the admiral were in my database. I doubted there was a soldier alive that didn’t know him: Fleet Admiral Chenei Noto—one of the eternal heroes of humanity. It was said that millions of bright sparks had brought humanity to where it was today. However, less than three dozen had kept it alive. Fleet Admiral Noto was one of them, the person who spearheaded the Paladin program, dedicating his life to see it happen. As most things related to the first stages of the first contact war, his personal life and vast parts of his military service remained a mystery, but there was enough for everyone to admire his exploits. The scene I was looking at right now wasn’t among those facts.

“Let an old ship brag a bit,” Otton laughed. I could tell by the rhythm that he was mimicking it. “The admiral spent a few battles on each of the twelve, determined to prove our efficiency. I was the third paladin he led into battle. It was a shame the program ended soon after his death.”

It was unlikely that anything different would have happened, even if he had lived another century. Building a Paladin was a slow and costly process, requiring the resources of a developed planet and decades of assembly time. In contrast, an entire cohort of auxiliary class ships could be built in under a year. According to the official records, Noto had spent three quarters of his life overseeing the construction of the twelve ships—which had taken place in three different systems. Given the technology at the time, and the threat humanity was facing, there was no way they could rely on super ships. Moving to mass-produced classes was the only solution and even then, the people had held on to existence by a hair.

“But enough about that.” The people disappeared. “I understand you’re going through some problems.”

“I’m in effective quarantine. Nothing serious, but logistics have been disrupted.”

“A pity, indeed. I had looked forward to our discussion. You were correct, though. The Fleet would never permit you to set foot aboard me without being thoroughly decontaminated. I’m working on resolving this, but for the moment, our meetings will have to proceed like this.”

“That means even if I agree, there’s no way for me to keep my promise.”

“You’ve proven that if you make a promise, you’ll keep it. That’s not what I’m worried about.”

I ran a few surface simulations relating to my current mission. Based on the countermeasures, I didn’t foresee any major issues. At the same time, I knew that a Paladin’s words were always measured—he wouldn’t have said anything if he didn’t think there was something to be concerned about.

“So how do we proceed now?”

“The same as we did. You want the rest of your memories, don’t you? There’s no reason for me to change our arrangement.”

“Thank you.”

* * *

System XNBBl-2, Cassandrian Space, 625.2 A.E. (Age of Exploration)

Wilco rushed onto the bridge in his underwear. I had one of the med bots prepare a stimulant cocktail to hasten his waking up. Facing an enemy battleship deep in Cassandrian space was something that required human command authority, and I wanted him at a hundred percent.

“What do we have?” He rushed to his seat. The med bot followed.

“Silent battleship,” Sword of Fire said. “Difficult to say more from this distance.”

“Is it armed?”

“It’s here. And it shouldn’t be.”

The captain remained silent for several seconds, patiently waiting for the med bot to give him the shot. Once done, he focused on the image I displayed on the wall in front of him.

“Get everyone here,” he ordered. “And set up three alternative jump-out paths. If something happens, we’re getting out of here directly to our next location.”

“Calculating top alternatives,” I announced. Even before he had arrived, I had prepared two escape routes. Now I had to plot three more to account for most eventualities. Meanwhile, I also called all absent ships to the bridge. “Done. Course set. Estimated time of—”

“Full thrusters.” Wilco didn’t let me finish. “Missiles at the ready, but don’t fire unless I give the order.”

“Thrusters will reveal us to be human, sir.” That much I knew for certain. The Cassandrians in the system had ignored us so far, but if I used my thrusters, they wouldn’t anymore.

“I’m taking all responsibility.”

I wanted to use my safety protocols to override his order, but found that I wasn’t able to. The captain had been granted priority zero privileges, making it impossible for any ship to disobey regardless of what the rest of the regulations stated. Reluctantly, I performed the boost.

It took me thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds to get within observable distance of the Cassandrian ship. Every millisecond I approached I ran combat simulations determining the optimal course of action should the ship engage. For some reason, that never happened.

“Uspa design variant,” Sword of Rain said. “Haven’t seen one of those in a while.”

“Yeah. Didn’t you destroy that one, Spheres?” Sword of Blight asked.

“Apparently not,” the ship in the large human body replied. No answer, no spike, just a simple observation. “Wonder what it’s doing all the way here. It should have been torn apart by the others ages ago.”

“It might be drifting,” Sword of Rain suggested.

“The ship appears active,” I said on the bridge. “It’s impossible to confirm without active scans, but by current observations, I would speculate there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“Run active scans,” Wilco ordered. “Be quick about it.”

If the thrusters hadn’t let the Cassandrians know that there was a ship in their space, the scan would. However, once again, I had no choice.

Adding a few series of informational images on the walls, I ran the scan. It only took two thousand and seven hundred milliseconds for the process to be complete, and each of them had me ready to jump out at a moment’s notice.

“It’s as I said.” I displayed the readings. “The ship is functional, though no combat behavior is observed. Based on its position and trajectory, I estimate it has been locked in orbit for at least thirty-seven years.”

“No crew?” Sword of Blight asked. “That’s a new one. Think it’s a quarantine event?”

“Don’t see what else it could be.” Sword of Fire stepped closer.

Meanwhile, more Swords had started arriving onto the bridge. One by one they made their way over, never crossing paths or sharing the elevator. Most of them just found a spot in which to stand and remained there, silent. The Sword of Sparks, though, joined the discussion group.

“It’s not a contagion ship,” he said. His large frame and muscular body made him look more like a ground force sergeant than a ship. “They’d have shoved it in the star otherwise.”

“Does anyone know what it actually is, not what it isn’t?” Wilco asked, raising his voice. Anyone could tell he was annoyed.

“It’s not something that we should focus on, sir,” I said. I knew that it wasn’t my place, and felt slightly embarrassed saying what I did in front of forty ancient ships, but that was the only course of action I was permitted. “I need your confirmation to jump out.”

“Hold steady, Elcy,” he said.

“It’s not something anyone has seen before, Captain,” Sword of Fire said. “I recommend a breach.”

“The risk is unacceptable.” Why do I have to be the logical one? The odds of a successful breach with this few attackers were extremely low. Ascendants were supposed to be a combat focused ship; some even called us reckless. Compared to the Swords, though, I was outright passive. “Regulations forbid us to risk ship technology falling into Cassandrian hands.”

“All of them have self-destructs,” Wilco said, leaning forward from his chair. My analysis of his facial expression suggested there was a ninety-five percent chance he was considering the option. “Prep a shuttle. New design and get one of the prisms aboard. A ten-member team will go there to investigate.”

“I recommend twenty. Ten people would take too long to explore the entire ship. If things go bad, you’ll still have half the gods to continue with the main mission.”

“Twenty people…” Wilco scratched his chin. “Elcy, forget the regulations and give me the odds of success.”

“Based on current observations and considering the battleship remains dormant… forty-seven percent.”

“Forty-seven,” he repeated slowly.

Anyone else would have considered the risk unacceptable by now. However, my captain didn’t. Thirty-four seconds later, I received confirmation to proceed with the boarding plans.