Thirty-two days after the imperial ambassador’s murder.

Mining facility, Bellos III, 20:37, 3423 AA.

There were few things that could bother Tarnhold Vor. Fewer still since he had taken the oaths before the Emperor and the Lady Hand to be exalted to a position within the Val Tairi. The destruction of a station in one of the border systems neighbouring the Kingdom, however, was definitely one of them.

Piracy and terrorism were relatively common, but ever since the Uprising, no one had dared to cause destruction on this scale. They’re growing bolder. Various currents were stirring, evidenced by the recent rise in crime and the increased frequency of riots. The insurgency on Jagda only further proved this wasn’t isolated to a single world or even just the Empire. Someone was looking at a far bigger picture. Only, no one else seemed to realise it: not system security, not his peers, and worst of all not his superiors.

“Foolish”, Tarnhold snarled, then with a start banished the thought, almost glancing around to check if anyone had heard. He had momentarily forgotten he was alone in his room.

The Val Tairi make no mistakes, the saying went, but not all had the same thought process. He certainly did not. Whoever proved to be correct, he didn’t mind. Either would aid the Empire.

Tarnhold peered back to the report displayed in front of him, all white letters on a holographic projection screen.

Aside from the destruction of the station, a single miner’s death had been reported, and there was also the report of the guard on watch duty on the night the station fell.

The guard had seen a bright flash of light – the only person who had seen it, Tarnhold noted – in a place where there shouldn’t have been anything and where even the sensors hadn’t picked up any signals. The guard’s claims had been debased to drunken talk, something he had imagined in his inebriated state of which there were plenty of reports for that night, along with a long list of warnings he had received up to this point for negligence and drinking on duty. An unreliable witness. However, something had stirred in the back of Tarnhold’s mind, something that pulled him to look at that guard’s report again whenever he set it aside for too long. It was the feeling he had when he was close to a breakthrough. He knew it well.

It was an uncanny ability. Something that didn’t abide by the normal rules of the Gift, and so not something he wished to carelessly reveal to others. He didn’t know how long he had been using it unconsciously, nor how exactly it worked, just that it did. He had become aware of it for the first time during a mission a few years back – a massive web spun of golden threads in his mind, each thread a perfect recollection of a piece of information. The web caught anything new he heard, incorporating it into the design, or wrapping tightly around it. What it ensnared was always crucial in some way to the task.

It had not failed him yet, and now the web was telling him that this guard was onto something.

Shutting down the projection, he glanced at the clock. Soon, the team would speak with the general manager of the mining facility. With luck, the meeting would end quickly. Tarnhold was sure the man knew as little, if not less than he gave him credit for. And then I will speak to the guard, his thought came quiet as a whisper in his mind.

The others had often told him that obsessing over details made him fail to see the bigger picture, but it had always been his way and he would not change it. Not yet. It has yet to fail me.

The door to Tarnhold’s room slid open with a low hum. Eliseal Davaal stood just past the threshold with her arms crossed, fingers drumming on the crimson sleeve of the Order’s uniform. Black, red, and silver were the order’s colours, though it was the mask that everyone recognised first – crimson, with two slits for the eyes shielded by black glass; the sturdy mask covered only the upper part of the face, while everything below the nose stood behind a veil.

Eliseal, who had spent months convincing Tarnhold to call her Elis, to no avail, wore the mask on her shoulder, where a small mechanism held it in place. This was the rule when not on the field, and when talking to people who weren’t suspects.

“You’re the last one out, Vor,” she said. “I knew you’d be deep in the reports and was almost certain you’d end up late to the meeting because of it. Does tardiness now come naturally to you, or do you have to practice it?”

“I think I can manage even without practice.” He picked up the mask from his bed and placed it on his shoulder. Pride lit up inside him; he stood straighter, and a faint smile flickered across his face.

As he slipped out of the room, Eliseal moved up beside him, then both strode down the right-side corridor. The clanking of their combat boots drifted through the empty floor of the facility. Everyone else was already working outside.

“Apparently you’ve not informed me of your plans for a demotion,” Eliseal said. Being late was one of the many ways that could happen.

“I had them? Good to know,” he said.

“You should be more careful,” she said. “Durahein brooks no nonsense and is notoriously strict. I am aware you have your own… ways, but the leader won’t want to listen to a word of it. There are rumours about you floating around the Order. The leaders have surely heard. Durahein will rather send you back to As’al’Kaar than listen to what you have to say on the matter – especially if it’s something he sees no value in.”

No value. He had heard the words often, spoken by his seniors in the other teams he had been part of, but they still stung just the same. It had made him feel alien, their unwillingness to accept his way; part of the Order, yet not part of it. He pushed the thoughts away. No matter. There was time.

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“It works, Eliseal. I know it does. It’s worked for dozens of missions to this point, and no matter what the leader says I have to follow this lead.”

She sighed. Eliseal was a year younger than his own twenty-eight and had joined the Order a few months after he did. Unlike his own occasional rebellious thoughts – Ascendants forbid they were more than “ideas for improvement”; he would never disparage the Order – she was of firm belief in what already existed and was proven to work. She had always listened attentively to him, though, when he had spoken about his ways and the web, and she had never laughed at him, nor told him to get his head out of the clouds as many others did. There had been reservations in her stare, but she had never tried to push him off his path. He was thankful for it.

She looked up at him, her forest-green eyes meeting his coal-black. Tarnhold had often found himself at a loss for words whenever she stared at him in silence. Her eyes were almost like seeing the forested hills outside his hometown; and through those eyes he was there, sitting on the verdant slopes, weaving his hand through dewy grass, the scent of damp earth and wet trees wafting to him from behind. A happier time. With a shake of the head, he drove away the thoughts, then quickened his pace.

“And if it doesn’t work?” she asked. “If it goes as slowly as it did last time?” She stopped in front of him, blocking the path towards the stairs. “Look me in the eye, Vor, and tell me that helping you now is the right thing to do.”

He had planned on counting on her this time; there was no one else to trust after all, not with this. But if she wouldn’t…

“It’s real, Elis,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder. Half a second later, he flinched. It was just her nickname, yes, but to her, it had more significance. Oh, she had told him she had never liked her name, thinking it too old-fashioned, it was the truth, too, but there was more between the lines.

And here he was, being touchy and calling her nickname. He despised himself for manipulating her like this, no matter how much he needed her help. Too late now. It would be more cruel to take it back, so he could only press on. His method worked – it did – though often slow or leading in a winding, spiralling path before finally reaching a conclusion. He just had to prove it once. “It’s real,” he said.

She stared at him for a few moments more, her beautiful green eyes studying his face for any sign of doubt. Calmly, confidently, he held her gaze. Finally, she nodded.

“I swear, working with you should further reduce the time until my retirement,” she said, then headed down the stairs. The meeting room was two floors below. “Just be quick about it, otherwise we’ll both be demoted, or kicked out.”

“At least you’ll get your early retirement.”

“Do you know women to be ruthless, Vor?” She smirked. “No? Keep being witty with me and you’ll find out.”

Not knowing how to respond, he continued, “I’ll finish before anything seems amiss. Now, put on your best cold expression. Think of having dinner with Valeri.” A fake hard expression settled on her face, though it was more than just an act. There was real bitterness there. “That’s it.”

Sora Valeri was another member of their team, a woman five years Tarnhold’s senior, who believed in acting rather than wasting time on talk. Eliseal and she had often fought about whether it slowed or sped up the missions to the point they could not endure being in the same room together.

Half a minute later, the two stood before the meeting room door. Tarnhold straightened his uniform and cast one last glance at Eliseal. They were as ready as they could be. He opened the door.

A long metal table occupied most of the meeting room. Group Leader Durahein stood at the other side of the table, his back turned towards them, gazing out of the window at the surface of Bellos III. Valeri sat on the right side of the table, chin propped up on her hand, her blond hair braided and hanging halfway down her back. Next to her were the other two members of the team.

The general manager of the facility sat on the chair closest to the door, Daum Xedor, already dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief, just under the thin strands of hair matting it.

“Sit,” said the group leader, his voice a low rumble. As he turned around, the scar across his right eye became apparent – it was said he had received it from an augment around sixty years ago, though the man never spoke of it, and nobody had dared ask. The streaks of grey in his brown hair and the strength of his voice said little of his age, which must have been close to ninety.

Eliseal and Tarnhold sat on the left side, a point Eliseal made to always be some distance from Valeri, though the other woman never seemed to notice or care.

“You’ve all looked over the reports,” Durahein said, “so you know the alarm was sounded an hour before the falling. The patrol was destroyed at around the same time. Their blackboxes revealed the enemy ships that destroyed them had only just jumped in-system before opening fire. We need to know who their accomplices, the people who had arrived prior to them on Razan station, were.”

“M-my men are already digging out the remains of the station, what c-c-c-could be salvaged that is,” the manager stammered. “It’ll all be done within three days, m-my lord.”

“We’ll find half-truths and more lies even if they retrieve all the records,” Durahein said, frowning intensely at the table. “I’m getting tired of this system and its lack of security. The troops and procedures appear only when there’s an inspection.” The plump man wiped a few beads of sweat off his forehead. “If you can’t manage your world better, I might need to send more inspections down your way. People will end up without jobs, but give it a few months and things will run as smoothly as in any other system.”

More sweat trickled down the manager’s fast-paling face; the man barely had time to wipe it all. “I-I will spread the message to all the spaceports. There won’t be problems of this kind again.”

“Or perhaps we should go and see the miners,” Durahein continued as if the other man had not spoken. He walked over to the window, peering down at one of the drill shafts. “I would not want the negligence that caused one of them to die to spread to other areas. Production increases significantly when there’s someone watching them, but as soon as we take our eyes off them, they go back to slacking off and the next thing you know they’re mixing ores with something else to meet demand.”

“N-no! No, no, never. Never. We wouldn’t dream of doing such things – praise be to the Emperor, may he live forever – we would not dare. We are loyal citizens of the Empire, my lord.” The manager shifted nervously in his seat. “The adepts who brought the shielding spelltrinket had told us there would be signs if something was amiss with it. We just didn’t expect it to malfunction out of the blue. It won’t happen again. We don’t have any adepts on the planet, so we scheduled a maintenance check to ensure everything is in order.”

“I hope, general manager Xedor, that you are being truthful. It would not be good for your business to have one of ours judge the people of this world.”

Durahein looked in turn at each person in his team. “You’ll have three days to find out everything from the wreckage,” he said. “You start in an hour. I’ll be overseeing your work” – his gaze lingered on Tarnhold a moment longer than the rest – “so I expect twice the effort and time on this.”

Swallowing a curse, Tarnhold glanced at Eliseal. She was looking at him. Stall him, he pleaded with his eyes, and for the briefest instant, he thought he saw her nod.

“Dismissed.”