“Hey.”

  The voice, muffled by a Murkata-branded gel pillow, slowly trickles into Lanis’ awareness. She feels the familiar grip of Mirem’s hand against her shoulder, and slowly peels an eye open.

  “Sorry to wake you up,” Mirem whispers, “but that Murkata officer is back. He wants you to go with him.”

  Lanis slowly pushes herself up in the narrow bunk with a bandaged hand. Her body feels more battered than when she went to sleep, but it only takes a few blinking seconds for her mind to sharpen. She hasn’t truly slept since the Cauldron began, but this is nearly all her augmented mind needs.

  Not so for Mirem. She’s taken a shower and put on clean clothes during Lanis’ nap, but the dim glow of the bunk room reveals a face that has aged a decade in twenty-four hours. She looks not just physically exhausted, but emotionally too, and her voice has a fragility that is unfamiliar to Lanis.

  “Who else is going?” Lanis asks.

  “Just you,” Mirem responds.

  Lanis pulls Mirem into a tight embrace, speaking softly against her face. “I know you’re exhausted. And I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” Lanis says. She pulls away from Mirem, her face reluctant but determined. “But you’re the one I trust most here; and you at least have some idea of how these corps work. I don’t know what I’m dealing with in these meetings. You need to come with me.”

  “Right… I don’t know if they’re going to like that,” Mirem mutters, but she slowly nods her head.

  “Thank you” Lanis says, gently squeezing Mirem’s hand.

  She quickly pads to the bathroom, reluctantly glancing at herself in the mirror, and is glad for the muted light. She fell asleep in the same Murkata uniform that was given to her in the infirmary, and her short hair is an unwashed mess. She makes a perfunctory effort to get some parts of it to lie down. It feels silly, worrying about how one looks with everything else that’s happening, but she’d rather not give the Murkata employees any more reason for superiority.

  She looks up, blinking at herself in the mirror as water drips down her face. I’m going to take the longest, hottest shower when this is all done, she thinks. seems like a stupid thought, what with the world probably on the verge of ending, but Lanis finds it reassuring.

  The Murkata officer meets them back where he dropped them off in the cafeteria. It’s mostly empty now; it appears that most of the others have also drifted off to get what sleep they can. A few of the Fleet delegation still huddle in their little group, silently and intently watching her emergence, but Lanis doesn’t see Lieutenant Tran, so she ignores them..

  “I’m to escort you to the executive offices,” the Murkata officer states, his mouth tightening fractionally as he watches Mirem approach along with Lanis.

  “For what?” Lanis asks.

  “A meeting. Beyond that, I have not been told.”

  “Well, Mirem is coming with me this time,” Lanis replies, trying to keep any hint of compromise out of her voice.

  The man’s eyebrows twitch in disbelief, and his voice grows stiff. “A Kaisho in the inner sanctum is unprecedented.”

  “I’m not Kaisho any more,” Mirem responds, stepping forward and narrowing her bloodshot eyes at the officer. She straightens herself up, and Lanis wonders how she's keeping the exhaustion from her voice.

  “You’ve been through their corporate induction…” The officer says, and he looks like he’s going to say more, but he turns his head slightly, receiving an update from his built-in comms. Whatever he hears, he clearly finds it unpleasant, and he purses his mouth even more tightly.

  He turns back to Lanis, unwilling to give Mirem the satisfaction of his overridden decision. “Fine,” he flatly states. “Follow me.”

  They mutely accompany the officer through a different branch of gleaming corridors, then to another elevator, this one smaller and more ornate than the previous one that led to the committee. Lanis feel the lurch of an even quicker descent, and longer.

  How far down does this complex go? she briefly wonders as the seconds tick by, at least twice as long as the prior journey. Then doors slide open, and once again Lanis is greeted by a towering Murkata security guard, another quintuplet to the ones who were present outside the steering committee's board room.

  The guard performs the same procedure of scanning Lanis’ body, as if Lanis might have snuck something in during her brief time in the Murkata compound. He hesitates for a flickering moment in front of Mirem, as if her presence is not just unexpected, but distasteful. He scans her all the same, but without quite the same understated deference he showed Lanis.

  Behind him another guard looms. The guards outside the steering committee possessed side-arms, but this one cradles a hip-articulated pulse rifle that looks like it could weigh as much as Lanis.

  The first guard grunts his satisfaction.

  “Follow me,” he bluntly states, his gleaming artificial eyes lingering on Mirem, in a tone that brooks no discussion.

  They are led down a short, unadorned hallway, to a large matte-black door, tall enough for the colossal guard to enter without needing to stoop. The guard pauses before it, and he lowers his head for a moment. Lanis can see his mouth moving, almost as if he’s mouthing a prayer; then he looks up, pushes the door open, and stands aside to let Lanis and Mirem in.

  If the boardroom of the steering committee was a corporate cathedral, the office that Lanis and Mirem now enter is a crusader’s mausoleum, functional and grim.

  The walls are paneled in matte black polymer rather than wood, broken only by racks of dataslates and inset weapons cases—some sealed, others holding openly displayed relics of violence: an old Fleet boarding sidearm, a glassed Kaisho security truncheon, and a serrated knife still crusted with some dark substance, among others. The furniture is dense, the desk bare other than a glittering holo-cast of Terra and a half-empty glass of water, and the lighting of the room is dim and uneven.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  The only concession to comfort is a leather chair that looks like it’s been used for decades, its surface worn smooth at the arms. In it resides Morris, his thuggish face heavy and tired. Two hard-looking Murkata attachés stand behind him. Admiral Ren stands before the desk in her perfect blue Fleet uniform, along with the woman Tallin, the Murkata officer who gave the first briefing in the steering-committee's boardroom.

  The door closes with a shuddering click behind them, and the Murkata guard stands next to it, his arms crossed behind his back, as invisible as a seven foot, four hundred-odd pound aug-human can be.

  Morris’ eyes glide across Mirem as if she’s an uninteresting speck of dirt, and come to rest on Lanis.

  “We have some updates,” he growls.

  The holo-cast on the desk expands, switching from a view of embattled Terra to a frozen first-person video frame. The view is murky, mostly dark with a confluence of what looks to be green laser beams. Morris jerks his head toward the officer Tallin, and she begins to speak:

  “This video is from a Planetary Admin Special Sec decapitation team,” the woman says. The video begins then, rapid and jerky.

  “The team was sent in soon after Kaisho’s betrayal became apparent,” she continues, “though we’re just receiving it now. They were able to breach the Kaisho-Renalis media division’s headquarters, and were searching for board member Pryce, the director of that division. Kaisho is currently broadcasting planetary-wide propaganda from this location.”

  Lanis hears the crackle of the decapitation team’s internal comms, layered voices speaking in clipped battle-chatter, overlapping with distant gunfire and coded exchanges from other squads in the building. The cast is briefly lit by a concussive burst, and the view jerks forward through a breached door. Then a sudden halt, the first-person view glitching slightly up as the room ahead spills into focus. Lanis can hear a grunt of what passes for shock from one of the elite Special Sec members.

  The room has the layout of a large open-office, but with all the terminals pushed to the side, clearing a space in the center. Across the floor is some sort of pattern. The team’s pulse-rifles sweep their beams across the floor, and the first-person view magnifies.

  Blood. Lanis realizes, blinking rapidly.

  It’s all blood.

  The pattern is not random or simple, but is rather layer upon layer of geometric complexity, lines curling in upon themselves and then outward. Lanis feels the hairs on her arms stand on end as she realizes that along those lines are sigils, coarse, sharp-edged symbols that have been wetly etched upon the floor in biological matter.

  The camera pans. Along the walls, against shuttered windows and the high ceiling, hang dozens of bodies in paralyzed supplication. Their faces are frozen mid-scream, fingers curled as though they had been tearing against themselves in their last moments.

  None have eyes.

  Beside her, Lanis sees Mirem's hand move to her mouth, her wide eyes reflecting the holo-cast’s red glow. Admiral Ren keeps her gaze down toward the floor, while Morris and Tallin simply stare at the video in dull acceptance.

  The view swings back, lower. Along the edge of the room there’s sudden movement. Dozens of dimly-lit, hunched forms slowly stand: people, or what passes for them; dozens of them, their eyes wide and vacant.

  They begin to shuffle toward the viewer, and Lanis hears the sec-member bark a command. She sees the pulse rifle rise up, swinging between shuffling targets, except they’re no longer shuffling, but sprinting toward the team. Pulse rounds begin to tear through the bodies, but then there’s a jerk, and the video freezes.

  Morris sighs. The holo-cast fades, and the view of Terra slowly replaces the monstrous video.

  “I’ll spare you the rest, suffice to say that the Sec team did not find their target, or survive long themselves.”

  Lanis finally exhales, unaware that she had been holding her breath.

  “So. A nightmare, indeed,” Morris says, thrumming his fingers against the arm of his leather seat, considering Lanis as teacher might observe a surprisingly astute pupil. “We’re having our crypto-linguists analyze the symbology across the floor. It’s nothing they can make sense of, not yet at least. But it seems apparent that this… shrine, for lack of a better word, has certain mytho-genic echoes that cannot be ignored. I find your hypothesis of this entity’s goal of tearing a hole between dimensions increasingly persuasive. And if it can… corrupt people like this…” Morris inclines his head slightly to the holo-cast. "Well, time is against us.” He glances at Tallin. “But, unfortunately, that's not all."

  Tallin speaks again: “With Fleet’s intel, we have surmised that the enemy has, as of yet, taken no Navigators alive. However…”

  The holo-cast spins and focuses on a new location, one that Lanis recognizes with dull shock.

  “It has managed to capture a cohort of the Fleet Academy cadets."

  The words linger in the dark air, and Lanis feels not just her arms, but her entire body go cold. Some expression must have passed over her face, for Morris grunts, almost in sympathy to her reaction. Admiral Ren says nothing, but simply continues to stare straight ahead into space. Tallin looks to the admiral, as if waiting for her to speak.

  When she does not, she continues:

  “Fleet tried to evacuate the Terra-side Fleet Academy students when the attack became apparent. But, due to confusion and the enemy’s speed, they were only partially successful.”

  The holo-cast spins again, showing red and green dots falling down from high orbit down to Terra. Most wink out before they reach the ground, but some, more red than green, manage to land. It appears that Fleet and the Anomaly each had possession at some point of a Home Fleet insertion carrier, and that most of the corrupted Insertion Units that were deployed were answered nearly in kind by Fleet’s own units. However, the majority of both appear to have been destroyed in the atmosphere before landing.

  “The enemy managed to land three Heavy Insertion Units outside the Fleet Academy grounds, whereas Fleet only managed one,” Tallin continues. “Fleet’s Unit was destroyed, though it did take a corrupted Unit out with it. These Units, along with Kaisho infiltration teams, then captured a number of Fleet’s academy cadets. Our intelligence implies that they haven’t been extracted, but are still at the academy grounds, awaiting some… purpose.”

  Admiral Ren finally speaks, her voice a horse croak, acknowledging what Lanis already knows.

  “Our Fleet Navigators appear to have a certain resistance to the corruption, whether through their Warp shielding training, or their augments, or their ship AI pairings. It means that, according to our analysis and Admiral Yuen’s brief communication, none have been taken alive… a result that, given your convincing hypothesis that this entity’s driving motivation is to tear a hole between our dimension and Warp space, appears far preferable to their capture and corruption. Whatever the case, those resistances likely do not exist, or are at a far lower threshold in the cadet classes,” Admiral Ren says, her jaw clenching.

  “All the untapped power, and none of the failsafes,” Lanis whispers.

  “Correct,” Morris grunts. He leans back, his leather chair squeaking, and considers Lanis anew.

  “We can’t do much to help Mars Fleet, and our subsidiaries are now holding the line against Kaisho. So, then, this becomes our highest priority." He glances at Admiral Ren, then back at Lanis. "We’re putting together an assault team. And we need you to be part of it.”

  Lanis meets the man’s eyes with disbelief, and then glances between him, Admiral Ren and Tallin.

  “What? But I’m a Navigator. Barely an Arena pilot. I’m sure your pilots are far better than me.”

  “That might be true,” Morris answers. “Though your relatively brief appearance in the Cauldron was most impressive, you are not a combat pilot with a purpose-built AI and a decade of training. But,” Morris holds up a thick finger, “there is one Suit none of our Murkata pilots can operate. They don’t have the right implants. They don’t have Fleet tech. ”

  The holo-cast view changes again, and there, half slumped in the middle of the Cauldron’s ruined buildings, illuminated by a swirl of Murkata mag-levs and heavy equipment, slumps a Fleet Insertion Unit.