01: Ingress
This is the first chapter of Part 1: First Mover Advantage, where we meet our protagonist.
If it’s your first time here, check out the Table of Contents. You’ll probably want to start with the Prologue.
01: Ingress
The heavy cruiser Dauntless blinks into shape. Tens of thousands of tons of armor, sensors, and doomsday devices, all assembled at a reasonable price by VoidTech. Its escort of smaller vessels follow, a procession of killing machines covered in sensors and weapon systems, materializing one by one into the eternal night of deep space.
Her stomach churns. She feels her breakfast rising and barely makes it to the toilet as the ship announces {Translation complete, welcome to Sector 36.} Jump gate travel is instantaneous and allegedly seamless. For most people. Her NeuroSync Rejection Syndrome, a fault in her brain wiring, manifests as intense vertigo during translation. Every single fucking time. Earned her the nickname “Tilt” back in the day. She wishes she weren't the odd one out, but it did save her life, so it's hard to complain.
She flushes, stumbles back to her feet holding on to the sink, catches her reflection in the mirror – a tinge of red streaking her slate gray eyes, brown graying hair tied back in a ponytail, silver graft implants on her temples. She splashes water on her face once she regains her balance, meets her reflection again. Better. She looks, but doesn't quite feel, like she can pull this off.
Back out into her tiny cabin, she gazes out the porthole at the putrid green backdrop of the Viridian Shroud nebula. I never thought I’d be back here. So many memories, so few of them good. Mostly the stuff of nightmares. She's brought back to the present by the ship messaging her:
{Travel time to the Gateway Ring: 1 hour. Please prepare to disembark.} The ship is talking to her, but it doesn’t expect a reply, so she doesn't offer one.
She grabs her backpack. She likes to travel lightly, and she won't be here for long. She checks to make sure her fake ID is handy. The quantum encrypted and signed ID chip lists her as Elena Drake, Vice-President of Acquisitions, Obsidian Holdings. The name is real enough, the job less so. It's a great excuse to travel within Sector 36 without raising too many questions. Credentials that should be good enough not to trip any advanced pattern-matching bullshit detectors the sector’s AI is running. Credentials that give her a reason to be here and travel where she needs to. She’s going to pull a fast one on an Omega class AI. Time to play chess with a god, she thinks. Her versus Ingram. She heads out to the main deck.
The main deck is pristine, all white surfaces at ninety-degree angles, and a wall-to-wall, synthetic sapphire window to the outside. There's a tinge of ozone in the air, a remnant of the recent jump. Some time ago, Elena used to be accustomed to the low background hum characteristic of military vessels. She was able to tune it out. Proper insulation isn’t cost-effective, so military ships tend to be noisier. She's been off duty for long enough that it now bothers her.
Lieutenant Wade and an ensign she hasn't seen before are there, taking in the view. She goes to them.
The ensign is staring through the sapphire glass pane, mouth agape. She looks young, inexperienced if not innocent. With blue eyes and brown hair, she is a bit shorter than Elena, with a smooth complexion and a sprinkle of freckles. She looks very tense, most definitely on her first deployment.
Elena follows her gaze, is stunned. Dozens, no, hundreds of ships cluster around the jump gate. More than she ever saw at the busiest spaceports. More than she saw during her whole deployment. The Dauntless and its escort are just a few drops in an ocean of ships. Wow, she thinks.
Wade turns around to face her. "Captain!" Official as always, wearing a spotless uniform, square jaw clean shaven – the navy ideal personified. His short-cropped black hair is showing only a hint of gray. Lieutenant Marcus Wade, military operator, is level-headed as always, unfazed by the sight.
“Retired, lieutenant.” She hasn't been on active duty for some years now. “The skies are... busy.”
“I've never seen anything like this before” answers the lieutenant. Then, after a short pause, adds “Go figure, the first non-human intelligence we find, we end up exchanging greetings through gun ports.”
Go figure.
“At least things are quiet now” he adds.
“Was it less busy when you were here last time?” she asks. She likes Wade, they spent some time talking during their voyage. Always good to meet a fellow Vanguard. They talked about their respective deployments to Sector 36. He was here just a few months back, during the Tauran war. Coming back for a second tour. She was here long before that, hoping never to return. Yet here she is.
“Aye” he says. “Less busy.”
Less busy, even in the midst of the war. Why is Ingram bringing in so many troops now? Now that it, allegedly, negotiated a truce with the Taurans? Now that they are, allegedly, gone from the sector?
“We’re going to kick some Tauran ass!” the ensign is green enough to be excited about the prospect of combat.
“I'm sure you will”, Elena nods.
“We have to,” she turns pensive. “I heard they eat people!”
“Where in the world did you hear that?” the lieutenant asks.
“People are talking, sir.”
Elena doubts there's been any official reports on this. As far as she knows, the Taurans entered the sector on some mysterious errand, picked a fight, realized it was tougher than they expected, ended up agreeing to a truce, packing it up, and leaving.
Still, they managed to reduce Echo Point to a wasteland and create enough chaos for years to come.
Plenty of mysteries remain though. What were the terms of the truce? Ingram is fuzzy about it. Will there be more fighting? Ingram says “no” while amassing more military assets. How do the Taurans look like? What is their culture like? Their biology? Their physics? How much do we know? Ingram says “classified for security reasons.” She is here to get to the bottom of things, and she doesn't fucking trust Ingram.
The Dauntless glides towards the Gateway Ring, a massive ring structure built around a small moon, in close proximity to the jump gate, as the main port-city and logistics hub of the sector. The traffic doesn't get thinner. More military ships dot the green gas background of the nebula, more civilian ships waiting for outbound travel approval.
“Is it how you remember it?” lieutenant Wade asks.
Elena deployed here a few years ago, her first (and thankfully last) time seeing direct action. No Taurans that time, good old human-on-human, machine-assisted killing.
“No. No it isn't.” Her mind serves up a montage from the past, teammates screaming, blood, stuff she'd rather not remember. She shakes it off. "I've never seen so many ships in my life either, lieutenant."
“You think this means more war?” he asks, even toned.
“Above my pay grade.”
She wishes she had an answer for him.
The silhouette of the Gateway Ring is quickly taking shape in the distance. Ships are everywhere. Thousands of them cluster around the megastructure and extend into the void.
“You're heading coreward after dropping me off?” She asks the question mainly to pass time. Where else would they go? All military ships are headed towards what used to be the frontline of the war.
“Aye. NS-36-A system. Eureka Base defense.”
Through some powerful connections, her organization was able to arrange inbound travel to the Gateway Ring on a military ship. Her not-made-up, ex-military background helped. Once on the ring, she is on her own. She needs to make her way to Verdant, connect with the asset, and bring him back.
“What's your name?” she turns towards the ensign.
“Lila Navarro sir! Ma'am!”
“You keep those people safe, ensign!” she exchanges a brief, sour smile with Wade.
“Aye aye!”
The Gateway Ring is now taking up most of the view. The megastructure has always been the heart of Sector 36, pumping people and freight coreward to what used to be Echo Point and the now heavily guarded Eureka Base; trailing to Verdant, the agricultural world; spinward to Forge, the mining and industrial hub; and rimward to Nova Prime, the capital, and further out to the frontier Horizon Station. Its slow-spinning black outer shell is pockmarked by blinking lights. Behind its rim, the ring's interior radiates with the glow of a million streetlights.
Rings are miracles of engineering. Like jump gates, they’re impossibly expensive to build and operate. OmniCore Solutions and Dominion Nexus have the megastructure duopoly. She learned this factoid while putting together her Obsidian Holdings cover. A VP of Acquisitions should know this after all.
There are only a few dozen across the galaxy, and seeing one is always awe-inspiring. Even if she was on it before. But the miracle of engineering pales in comparison to the volume of vessels making it look like the galaxy’s largest beehive.
She spots a few other heavy hitters like the Dauntless: large, heavy cruisers with immense firepower. Around them, frigates and corvettes, slightly less deadly but nimbler. And an assortment of other special-purpose ships. Some of them she recognizes: transports, tugboats. Others she's never seen before. Countless ships.
Mixed between the clusters of military ships are civilian ones. Cargos, ferries, skimmers, all shapes and sizes. Some have likely been waiting to dock for days if not weeks, but the Dauntless is military and has priority. They take an ingress vector through the swarm. Smaller ships move out of the way, clearing a path wide enough for the heavy cruiser. It decelerates as it approaches the megastructure, slows down, stops.
{Docking complete} announces the ship.
She says her goodbyes to the ensign, then to Wade.
“Godspeed lieutenant!”
He nods, meets her eyes briefly.
“Safe travels, captain!”
“Retired” she adds, smiles.
She shoulders her backpack and heads out. The gangway is starting to get crowded. Crew members are disembarking for the short port call, last stop before whatever may happen. She joins the crowd, doesn't recognize anyone as she makes her way off-ship.
She wonders how long it will take her to find transport to Verdant. She expected some amount of chaos, given the recent war, but this is beyond imagination. With the sheer number of ships she saw, she wonders what's the impact on in-sector travel.
She wishes she had better intel, but the jump gate bandwidth is almost exclusively used for translating military ships into the sector. Outbound traffic is reduced to a trickle. Broad strokes do get out, but not enough to form a clear picture. The few civilian ships that manage to translate out bring conflicting information and strange rumors. She is sure someone must be receiving detailed briefs, but these don't make it to the general public. Didn’t make it to Spark. Didn't make it to her. The lack of intel is a big risk for her mission. Her instincts tell her so and she trusts her instincts.
She steps out of the dock, into the street, and is shocked anew.
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