The House of the Reapr welcomes the following Novices to our ranks: Lord Erebus, The Red Dragon, Gael, Gerson, and Manko. Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
As your Fleet Admiral, I, Crimson_Reapr, welcome you, honor your commitment, and thank you for your service. May our power reach beyond the edges of charted space, and may ruin fall upon all who stand against humanity's strength.
---
POV: Mark Shephard
We had already spent the first three months of our timeline tearing the Swift Justice down to its bare, irradiated bones and entirely encasing her titanium-carbide spine in hyper-dense S-Alloy. The teardown was ancient history. The foundation had long been set, and we had already started filling the empty, cavernous shell we'd built. Now, we had a final sixty-day sprint where we continued breathing life back into the remainder of the ship.
After the conversation with Father Michael and Sister Elara, I spent the tail end of the week expanding the charging alcoves along the massive walls of the bay to ensure that the drones would always be charged.
Under Marcos's flawless, multi-threaded command, the swarm hummed with a quiet, terrifying efficiency. After I had done the delicate parts, the drones swarmed the remainder of the reinforced skeleton of the corvette, carrying the remaining miles of optic fiber, hydraulic piping, and internal life-support ducting. At the rear of the bay, the automated hoppers of our nanoprinters were chewing through the very last chunks of the Retribution scrap the Navy had dumped on us. The induction furnaces cast a harsh, white-hot glow across the drydock, constantly synthesizing the raw material into the massive, matte-black exterior armor plates we would need for the final phase.
The air in the bay was permanently thick with the smell of vaporized coolant, scorched copper, and ozone. Since we were on the final stretch of this entire thing, I felt it appropriate to ask Marcos to sift through the dataset of music he'd gotten his virtual hands on and play songs by Daft Punk. The thrum of electric and bass guitars, drums, and synth pianos pumped through the acoustic arrays was the only thing that managed to cut through the relentless industrial noise, keeping us moving in a rhythm that shook off the exhaustion that threatened to pull us under.
I still hadn't gotten an answer from Father Michael and Sister Elara, so while I returned to sleeping in my office, Lyra had been sleeping at the orphanage with the kids, only coming over to inspect our work and spend some time with me in the afternoons. After all, she didn't know if she would ever see all of her friends again.
I dragged a stiff cot out onto the office and slept in fleeting, four-hour shifts. It was all I really needed, and it had been a habit I had gotten into when I had been building the Shepherd with Anahrin. One of the boons of Strathari DNA is being rapidly recharged to have more time in a day to do things. But it didn't stop the grease from permanently embedding itself under my fingernails or the dull ache in my shoulders from all of the heavy lifting and wrestling with tools I had been doing.
We spent the first few weeks of the final stretch assembling the massive internal modules on the ground and then hauling them into the hull, threading the hyper-conductive S-Alloy wiring, and bolting down the newly fabricated command consoles.
"Bring the spinal capacitor bank down three degrees, Kenji!" I yelled over the ambient roar of the bay, standing shoulder-deep in the exposed central engineering deck of the corvette.
Above me, Kenjiro wrestled with the analog controls of the caution-yellow bipedal loader mech. The heavy hydraulic arms of the machine whined in loud protest as it held a bulky, twenty-ton energy distribution module over the open cavity. Corvettes only ran a single fusion reactor, which meant power routing had to be flawless if we wanted to fire a massive slug without browning out the life support. Turns out that simply making the Hellfire capacitor bank bigger was the solution.
"Dropping three degrees, Mark!" Kenjiro yelled back, leaning forward in the canopy, his voice strained. "But the telemetry is showing a clearance variance! If I drop it now, it's going to pinch the primary optic fiber bundles running to the bridge!"
"It won't pinch if you angle it right!" I shouted, wiping a thick layer of sweat from my brow with the back of my arm. I grabbed a heavy kinetic wrench, using my enhanced strength to physically shove the thick, pulsing bundles of cables flat against the newly installed S-Alloy bulkhead. "I've got the wiring flush against the plating. Give me some slack on the starboard mounts and drop it!"
"When I make my shipyard, I'm going to make sure it has direct access to the void so that shit can just be moved in 0g," I said to myself in a low voice as, with a heavy, mechanical groan, the massive module slotted into the deck cavity. It hit the mounting brackets with a concussive clang that rattled the teeth in my skull.
I dropped the wrench, grabbed my heavy-duty plasma welder, and ignited the torch. I dragged the blinding blue flame down the seam, fusing the module's heavy brackets directly to the deck. Once the physical anchor was secure, I reached into the open access panel, my fingers working with surprising dexterity as I spliced the conductive wiring directly into the module's main console hub. The heat radiating off the fresh weld was intense enough to warp the air, but my biology simply absorbed it as I finalized the connections.
Sure, I could be using my armor right now, which has perfect environmental control. However, it was rather awkward and limiting to work in it.
Kenjiro climbed down the ladder of his mech, walking over to inspect the splices I had just made. He ran a gloved hand over the casing, checking the readouts on his datapad.
"You know, Mark," Kenjiro said, his breath pluming slightly in the ambient chill of the scrubbers. "I took the liberty of looking over your capillary thermal-bleed designs for the outer hull before we start hanging the armor plates. I mapped them against the reactor's maximum output."
"And?" I asked, wiping my hands on a rag.
"And they are brilliant," Kenjiro said, shaking his head in disbelief. "When I was at SIGS, I used to get written up for suggesting we run micro-coolant lines through the secondary armor plates. Upper Management said it was too expensive to manufacture and impossible to maintain. But with your printers, you're literally weaving the heat sinks into the atomic structure of the ship. Just like the Vengeance, we won't even need to use modular vents. The entire surface area of the corvette is going to act as a radiator."
"Less moving parts means fewer things for the enemy to shoot off," I agreed, tossing the rag onto a crate.
---
Another week went by, and as the internal decks of the ship finally began to look less like a construction site and more like a naval vessel, we took a rare, extended break. We sat on a pair of empty, reinforced munitions crates on the main deck, eating our very healthy lunch pizza and recycled water.
"So," Kenjiro said, using a clean corner of his shirt to wipe down his glasses. He looked up at the massive, sloped bow we were preparing to plate with heavy armor. "Neutral space, huh?. A whole new station, a whole new world, a whole new life. You're really pulling the trigger on this, Mark?"
"Damn right I'm pulling the trigger, Kenji," I replied, taking a bite of the 2 slices of pizza I had turned into one. "Mechanicus, Elyse, Nova Celeste, Celestine Prime, shit, everywhere within the IUC's borders is a powder keg. Corporations run it all, local gangs get bolder, and we find ourselves sitting right in the middle of it all with some of the most valuable proprietary tech humanity has ever laid eyes on. We have the capital to walk away and build something that doesn't answer to corporate shareholders or Imperial bureaucrats. Away from all the bullshit. It's been months since you've known, but you've never told me where you stand. I'll be packing my bags in a few weeks. If you want to stay in IUC space, I'll write you a severance check large enough to buy your own penthouse on Celestine Prime."
Kenjiro put his glasses back on, looking around the massive, amber-lit cavern of the drydock. He looked at the nanoprinters, the humming drones, and the sheer potential of the facility I had built with massive limitations.
"I've already lived in a penthouse. Trust me, it's not all that," Kenjiro said simply, a genuine, relaxed smile touching his face. "As you know, I was the Lead Thermal Dynamics Engineer of the Novellus System for SIGS. I had the prestigious title, the sterile corporate office, the stock options, the whole package. But my entire existence was reduced to sitting in endless board meetings, arguing with accountants about shaving a fraction of a percent off heat-sinks for ships that were fundamentally designed to fail. I took a leap of faith and quit that after seeing what you had made in such a limited space, and gave me a chance. I left that gilded cage behind. You put my life in danger, multiple times, I must add, and then put me in a ten-ton hydraulic loader mech. Have I had my doubts since I started working for you? Sure. I mean, what happened here with Thorne, the Simulacrums at the courthouse? Mark, you're a danger magnet.... but you allow me freedom. You let me get my hands dirty, actually toying around with design ideas and building some of the most advanced warships this galaxy has seen in a century."
He took a bite of his own slice, pointing the half-eaten pizza slice at the ship. "Besides, I don't have much of a family tying me down to the core worlds. I don't have a wife, or kids, or parents to take care of, or an ancestral estate to worry about. I just want to create things that matter. The salary you've been paying me is good. Obviously, it's not SIGS-executive levels of good, but it's more than enough to keep me motivated. If you're building a place out in the black where we can push the boundaries of engineering without asking for permission from a boardroom or the government... then you can count me in. I'll go pack my bags."
I felt a profound sense of relief wash over me. Kenjiro was one of the best engineers, and I didn't want to build this empire without him. I reached over and slapped him on the shoulder. "Glad to have you, Kenji. We're going to need all the hands we can get."
And hands were exactly what we were currently lacking.
Building a functional settlement out in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere in unconquered systems required more than just automated drones, two genius engineers, and a massive bank account. It required a populace. It required a community. If Lyra was going to convince Sister Elara and Father Michael to bring the orphanage, they couldn't be the only civilians living under my roof. A society couldn't function on shipwrights and orphans alone.
As the final month of the rebuild commenced, I gave Marcos his most complex and delicate directive yet.
I was suspended sixty feet in the air on a repulsor-lift platform, carefully welding a massive sheet of matte black S-Alloy onto the corvette's port-side engine cowling, when I opened the private comms channel.
"Marcos," I grunted, my voice tight with exertion as I guided the plasma torch along the seam. "What's it looking like with the civilian recruitment initiative. Talk to me."
"Been scrubbing the G-Net shadow-nodes for the last nine days, Mark," Marcos replied, his voice coming through the comms with the casual drawl of a guy kicking his feet up on a desk. "Gotta tell you, filtering out corporate rats and syndicate bootlickers was a headache and a half, and I don't even have a head. But I got what you wanted."
"I don't want spies, Marcos," I said, killing the torch and inspecting the weld. The seam was completely invisible, the plates fused flawlessly. "I don't want anyone who owes some corporate slug a favor, or who reports back to Imperial Intelligence. I want desperate, hardworking people who need a fresh start."
"Yeah, yeah, no corporate stooges, I heard you the first time," Marcos chuckled. "I totally didn't bypass the usual recruitment boards, but I went digging through planetary foreclosure registries, blacklisted union databases, and outer-rim refugee manifests. Ended up with a final selection pool of exactly eight hundred and twelve people. Good, tough folks who won't crack the second the lights flicker."
"Eight hundred," I repeated, signaling the nearest crane drone to bring down the next multi-ton armor plate. "That's a solid number to start a colony. Give me the breakdown. Anyone standing out?"
"A few top-tier acquisitions," Marcos replied. "First up is Elias Vane. Fifty-two years old. Generational agricultural specialist from the Verdant Ring. AgriHub seized his family's subterranean farms over a bogus seed-patent violation and forced him into indentured labor. The man knows how to yield massive hydroponic harvests in terrible conditions. He's bringing his entire extended family."
"We'll need him to feed eight hundred mouths," I noted, watching the crane lower the plate. "Who else?"
"For infrastructure, I secured Valerius Dorn," Marcos continued. "He was actually a lead structural architect for Aegis Aerospace. He got blacklisted and ruined financially for whistleblowing on the exact same kinetic-shear vulnerabilities you just spent three months ripping out of that corvette. He's incredibly eager to build habitats that don't crumple under micro-meteor impacts just to save a few credits."
"Sounds like he'll fit right in with Kenji," I chuckled. "What about medical or education? We're taking an entire orphanage with us. They need schooling."
"I got those secured as well," Marcos confirmed. "Dr. Aris Corven. Former dean of the Coreward Academy. Fired and stripped of her pension for trying to organize a teachers' union. She's already drafting a curriculum based on the preliminary specs I sent her. I also locked down Jada Rhol, a heavy machinery mechanic who can maintain the loader mechs while you and Kenji focus on the foundries."
I smiled beneath my heavy welding mask. "Good. Have you extended the offer?"
"Sent out blind contracts across encrypted channels this morning," Marcos reported, sounding entirely too proud of himself. "Guaranteed housing, fair wages, and zero corporate overlords looking over their shoulders, as long as they don't mind a little neutral space. The response was pretty much immediate. These people are desperate, Mark. They're ready to jump."
"How will we be moving them?" I asked, wiping sweat from my brow. "I can't exactly hire a transport fleet to move eight hundred people across the border into unconquered space. I highly doubt anyone would be willing to do it."
"That's the best part," Marcos laughed. "Some of these guys actually own their own rigs. Absolute rustbuckets. Freighters that should've been turned into razor blades fifty years ago. Elias Vane is flying a bulk hauler that looks like a bruised tin can. They look like hell, but I pinged them off the local net and ran some remote diagnostics. Miraculously, they can still jump. They're going to be the bus drivers for the rest of the crew."
"A fleet of flying scrap metal," I chuckled, shaking my head as the crane drone lowered the next plate into position. "Perfect. Have them rendezvous at the designated coordinates just outside of this system exactly four weeks. We'll begin our journey together."
---
By the end of the final month, the exterior of the Swift Justice was complete. I had thickened the armor plates significantly, giving the ship a brutal, heavy, predatory mass. But it was the interior where the true miracles had occurred.
I was walking through the newly expanded central crew decks, running my hands along the cool, dark metal of the bulkheads, when Marcos finalized the real estate negotiations.
"Hey, Mark," Marcos chimed in my ear, pulling my attention away from the flawless environmental seals of the new airlocks. "Just wrapped up the haggling on those three properties we looked at before your vacation."
"And?" I asked, stepping onto the newly minted bridge, where the command consoles were wrapped in protective plastic.
"Turns out those listing agents were smoking some serious copium," Marcos snorted. "I dug into the actual station manifests. All three options weren't just in bad neighborhoods, but they had been completely abandoned decades ago. Rusted out, racking up massive back taxes. The corporate owners were practically begging someone to take them off the books."
"So you squeezed them," I grinned, leaning against the captain's chair.
"Oh, I put them in a vice, alright," Marcos replied in an absolutely smug tone. "Brought up their tax liabilities, threatened to walk away, the whole nine yards. We got Option Three, the intact manufacturing hub orbiting the moon with the thin atmosphere, down to a flat five hundred mil. Clean title, no liens, keys in hand."
Five hundred million. A third of my total capital. It was a massive sum, but for a fully intact orbital manufacturing hub and an entire moon, it could be considered the steal of the century.
"The atmosphere on the surface is still unbreathable, though," I noted, looking out the reinforced viewport of the bridge into the amber glow of the drydock.
"Yeah, well, you can't have everything," Marcos replied breezily. "Unless you feel like terraforming for the next century, you, Lyra, the kids, and our eight hundred new friends are going to be living in the orbital ring or the surface biodomes. But hey, at least the glass is thick."
"I guess it is a give and take," I said lowly. "It's better than living next to a pirate armada, and I don't have the time or the manpower to rebuild a derelict ruin from scratch. Option three it is. Where exactly are we going, Marcos?"
"Place is called Aurelius II," Marcos said, pulling up a star chart on the bridge's main tactical display. The map zoomed out of the IUC core worlds, plunging deep into the uncharted, black expanses of the unconquered systems. It settled on a remarkably isolated solar system. "Orbits a stable Orange Dwarf out in the Aurelian system. Nice and toasty lighting, and absolutely nobody around to bother us. Not a single corporate mining claim within ten light-years."
"Aurelius II," I repeated, testing the name on my tongue. It sounded ancient. It sounded permanent. "Screw it, Marcos. Authorize the transfer and get us that moon."
"Done and done," Marcos said, instantly switching his accent to a swave British one. "Welcome to homeownership, Sire."
"Only took 2 lives to become a homeowner," I said to myself as I let out a soft chuckle.
The final week of the deadline was an exercise in absolute, meticulous perfection.
We expanded the interior layout drastically. I had ripped out the cramped, claustrophobic corridors months ago, utilizing the superior density and strength of the S-Alloy to thin out the internal non-load-bearing walls while simultaneously increasing the ship's overall durability. The corridors were wider, the crew quarters were actually livable, and the munitions magazines were wrapped in three layers of redundant armor.
When the final day arrived, the drones polished the hull to a dark, light-swallowing finish. The faint, dark crimson undertones of the metal caught the amber light of the drydock, making the corvette look like a weapon forged in the depths of hell itself.
It was time to finally hand her over to her owners.
"Marcos," I said, standing on the gantry, my hands finally clean of grease, dressed in my heavy leather jacket. "Open a secure comms channel to the 7th Fleet High Command. Get me in touch with Elena."
A few moments later, the audio channel clicked open.
"Mr. Shephard," Elena's voice came through, sounding crisp and authoritative. "I was wondering when I'd hear from you. Please tell me you have good news regarding the Swift Justice."
"Bring a crew, Commander," I said smoothly, a confident smirk touching my lips. "Your ship is ready for pickup."
"Say no more," she said and ended the call.
Three hours later, the heavy personnel doors of the drydock hissed open, and Commander Elena Rhen stepped onto the gantry. She was flanked by her standard escort of heavily armed IUC Marines and a seasoned naval pilot wearing a flight suit. Elena stopped dead in her tracks the moment her eyes locked onto the colossal, matte black warship resting in the primary cradle.
The sheer, brutalist presence of the Swift Justice seemed to suck the air right out of the room.
Elena slowly walked up to the observation railing, her eyes wide, entirely abandoning her strict military composure as she took in the sight. "By the stars..." she whispered, her gaze sweeping over the thickened armor. "Shephard... she looks... different."
"She is indeed, Commander," I said, stepping up beside her, leaning casually against the railing. "I took a few liberties in rebuilding her. The original schematics were a structural liability waiting to happen."
Elena tore her eyes away from the hull to look at me, her brow furrowing in confusion. "Liberties? What kind of liberties?"
"I completely changed the interior layout," I explained, gesturing toward the vessel. "I stripped out the inefficient corporate bulkheads and used my S-Alloy to expand the internal habitable space by twenty percent. Her jump drive containment is five feet of solid proprietary metal. She is essentially the same ship on the outside, but an entirely different, infinitely more durable beast on the inside."
Elena stared at me, her mind clearly struggling to process the sheer scale of the unauthorized upgrades. Fleet Command paid for repairs, not complete, ground-up reinventions of naval architecture.
"Mark," Elena said, her voice dropping into a serious, guarded tone. "You understand that you are not getting a single extra credit of pay from the Navy for this, right? The contract was for a standard salvage and repair. I cannot authorize a bonus for unauthorized structural overhauls."
"I don't want your extra credits, Elena," I chuckled, turning to face her fully.
"Then why?" she asked, genuinely baffled by my motives. "Why would you go so far as to do this much more than you were asked? This had to have cost you millions in raw materials and labor."
I looked back at the Swift Justice, feeling the immense, burning pride of a craftsman who knew his work was flawless. "Because I enjoyed it. Because I hate seeing good metal wasted on bad designs. And because I want the 7th Fleet to survive the coming years. It also didn't really cost all that much more."
Elena held my gaze for a long moment, searching for the deception, the hidden corporate angle. Finding none, her stern expression softened into one of profound, genuine respect. She reached out, offering her hand.
"You are a strange man, Mark Shephard," Elena said as I took her hand, shaking it firmly. "But you built a hell of a ship. I'll be in contact the moment we have another casualty."
"You might have a hard time reaching me on local comms," I noted, releasing her hand and slipping mine into the pockets of my jacket.
Elena raised an eyebrow. "Oh? Why is that?"
"Because Shephard Orbital Works is moving shop," I revealed, the words feeling incredibly liberating as they left my mouth. The grand exit was finally happening. "I've purchased a new property. We are packing up what's ours from the drydock and leaving Mechanicus Station at the end of the week."
Elena's eyes widened in genuine surprise. "Leaving? To where?"
"A moon called Aurelius II," I answered, watching her face carefully for any sign of recognition. "It's orbiting an Orange Dwarf in the Aurelian system. Deep in neutral space."
Elena blinked, processing the navigational data. "The Aurelian system? That is completely off the grid, Shephard. You're moving out of IUC jurisdiction entirely."
"That's the point," I smiled.
Elena let out a short, incredulous laugh, shaking her head. "Well, congratulations, Mark. It takes a lot of guts to strike out into the unconquered systems alone. But I will make absolutely sure to remember the location."
She stepped closer, her voice dropping so her Marines wouldn't overhear. "The kinetic stress tests they ran on your last ship up at Fleet Command came back yesterday. They showed significant, unprecedented improvements to the corvette's armor deflection ratings, all while reducing the overall weight of the vessel by fifteen percent. The admirals are losing their minds trying to figure out how you did it. Wherever you set up shop, SOW is going to have a very lucrative, very exclusive contract with the 7th Fleet."
"I look forward to it," I nodded, genuinely pleased that the S-Alloy was performing exactly as I had engineered it to.
Elena turned to her pilot. "Get aboard. Boot up the primary drives and let's get her out of the cradle."
As the pilot and the Marines jogged toward the boarding umbilical, Elena turned back to me.
"Before you go, Commander," I said, reaching into my jacket pocket and pulling out my encrypted datapad. "I need a favor. A personal one."
Elena paused, looking back at me. "Name it."
I tapped the screen, opening a direct, heavily encrypted audio recording file. I held the pad up to my mouth, my eyes locking onto Elena's as I thought of the man lying in a stasis tank in the military med-bay.
I hit record.
"Vicii et qui mortem meam struxerunt tempore debito poenas dabunt," I spoke clearly, the ancient, guttural syllables of the dead Terran language rolling off my tongue with absolute certainty.
I hit stop, finalized the encryption, and forwarded the file directly to Elena's naval datapad. Her pocket chimed softly.
"Show that to Kaelen," I instructed, my voice hard and entirely uncompromising. "Play it for him the moment he wakes up from the medical coma."
Elena pulled her datapad from her breast pocket, looking at the audio file, her brow deeply furrowed in complete confusion. She looked back up at me. "What does it mean? What language is that?"
I raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised. Kaelen had spent years guarding her, working closely with her in the upper echelons of the Navy. "He never taught you Latin?"
"Latin?" Elena repeated, clearly recognizing the name of the dead language, but possessing absolutely no knowledge of how to speak it. "No. Kaelen isn't exactly a man who shares his hobbies. What did you just say to him, Shephard?"
I smiled with a cold expression. I wasn't going to translate it for her. I wasn't going to tell her that I had just declared that the Vickies would pay and that the ones who had plotted my death would pay the ultimate penalty in due time.
"Don't worry about it, Commander," I said, turning away and walking back toward my office to begin packing up my stuff. "Just play the message. It's something Kaelen will understand perfectly."
---
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