Chapter Ninety - The Price of Love

The Sappho was directed to the centre of the station, towards a smaller docking bay near the space where the 'stem' met the 'cap.'

Ivil was interested to note that the insides of the hollowed-out moon was filled with several large buildings, as well as an outer ring near the top of the stem. It looked to her like one of the ancient station rings for one of the earlier artificial-gravity stations, reworked and retooled to decorate the inside of Ganymede station.

There were several ships in the dock they pulled into. A few corvettes, some large yachts, and a few smaller cargo vessels, sleek and rapid-looking. Twenty-Six oohed and ahhed as she did some ship-watching, but other than the notably elevated pricetag, there wasn't too much of note in the ships they saw here.

"So," Aurora asked as she turned away from the communications console to properly face Ivil. "Who are you going to bring with you for this one? Or are you heading out alone?"

"Aren't we meeting with people from the League of Free Moons?" Pixie asked. She was in the process of doing the final post-docking checks, but even though this was her first time with the Sappho, she barely seemed bothered by the complex procedure.

"I'll be meeting with the Emperor directly," Ivil said. "Which... may require that I take on a certain... stance, so to speak. Hmm, it may be best if I do this on my own, to avoid any unpleasantness."

She didn't mean issues with power interactions. Yes, the number of sensory cores being used in such a meeting would be throwing off enough radiation to make the air sparkle, and that amount of uncontrolled gamma radiation was likely enough to fry anyone and anything close, but she could spare the attention to keep someone she cared about safe.

She, of course, would be minimizing her own snooping out of deference and politeness. One didn't walk into someone's home and open their fridge so casually. That would be rude.

No, what she worried about was the potential for embarrassment. The Emperor of Jupiter wasn't always a... subtle man.

"I'll be heading out alone, but I believe that you'll find some value in visiting whatever installation the League has here. I imagine that there will be a few notables residing at this station. People whom you might want to meet, Aurora."

"I imagine so, yes," Aurora said. She shivered. "The idea of talking to an Emperor... no, nevermind. I'll do what I can to warn the League about the threat the Earth Alliance represents. I don't know if I can communicate to the whole of it without being indiscrete, but perhaps I can whisper in the right ears."

Ivil nodded. "Very sensible. Pixie, have we docked?"

"We're locked in," Pixie confirmed. "Are you really gonna visit the Emperor?"

"I am," Ivil replied with a smile. "In... oh, a few minutes. See you all soon. Sonic, make sure Aurora is safe. Pepper, don't spy too hard, we wouldn't want an incident."

"As you wish," Sonic replied.

"Y-yes ma'am," Pepper shot back with a quick salute.

And so Ivil left.

She relocated herself a few dozen metres closer to the station. Well within the scope of her shorter ranged sensory cores, and in a space unoccupied by anyone. A few nearby dockworkers jumped at her sudden appearance in the middle of a long maintenance corridor, but that wasn't her problem.

She could tell where the Emperor of Jupiter was. His power was leaking out around him like light off of a star. It wasn't that bad, however. He was clearly making an effort not to bleed off too much energy, and most of it was contained within the moon he had made his home.

Still, from so close, it was impossible to miss it. He was the sole reason that the Jovian system wasn't flying either the Martian or Earth Alliance flag. Taking over the area would be far too expensive with such a powerhouse guarding it.

He was a wyvern nesting above a heap of shiny scraps. Not impossible to remove, but certainly not worth the trouble of chasing away.

And she was a dragon coming to visit her lesser draconian cousin.

Yes, she liked her analogy. Ivil kept a smile on as she made her way down the maintenance tunnel, then followed a few old signs out into a more pedestrian space.

The station lacked gravity along the length of the stem, but she could tell that there was something like an artificial gravity field near its centre.

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A comfort? She could understand. She'd been keeping up something similar around the Sappho out of the same want. Sure, it was nice to float around on occasion, but it made it so much easier to look down into a cute girl's eyes when one was under the effects of gravity as opposed to merely floating about.

Ivil made good time pushing towards the centre of the station. She had no reason to linger about, and so she didn't. The few security checkpoints she saw were skipped past with a blink, and while she was aware that there was perhaps an alarm or two out and security was looking for her, she didn't expect them to ever make it close enough to matter.

Eventually, she found that all roads lead to the centre of the station, to a single large elevator guarded on every level. Not just by people in uniform--the unofficial uniform of the League of Free Moons, at that--but uniformed people with cores.

The further from the centre they were, the fewer cores they had. The level she was on, deep within the station, had a pair of C-rankers by the elevator door. The two alone didn't represent too much concentrated power, but with more of them on every floor... it added up to quite a bit. Enough for an upper-B-Ranker if they were to consolidate all of those cores.

Or maybe not.

As she tasted the air, she noticed that the two C-Rankers had similar cores. Almost identical ones, in fact. Cores that were buds of one another, or perhaps that shared a common ancestor. It wasn't just one or two of their cores either, but most of them were shared.

"Clever clever," Ivil muttered.

Someone was producing cores en-mass. Splitting them and regrowing them rapidly, only to split them once more. These guards had completed, healed cores, but the ones further out, now that she knew to look, had several incomplete cores within themselves.

Splitting a core took some effort and would deny the splitter a usable core. The split core, once taken by someone, could take months or years to heal itself back to usability. But once healed, both halves could be split again. And again.

In the Martian Navy, there were a number of 'common' cores that had been split dozens of times. They usually presented with tiny, minor variations across splits, in potency and capability, but never so much that they were unusable.

The Emperor was abusing that here, creating a guard force that had uniform tricks up their sleeves. It was also probably guaranteeing their loyalty.

How very clever. And rather wasteful.

Ivil walked up to the guards by the elevator. She wasn't impressed by the marble flooring or the golden bannisters and carefully carded designs upon the closed doorway. Some of that might have showed, as the guards tensed up on her approach.

"Ma'am," one of the guards said as she approached. "This is a restricted area."

"Good, I wouldn't want to be bothered," she said. "Call the elevator up, I need to visit the Emperor."

The guard frowned, then shared a quick glance with his companion.

"MINT ought to have informed him of my arrival. Let's not play silly games," she said. "Those never end the way you want them to, trust me."

She could feel the guards tensing up for a fight, but before anything could come of it a call came over their communication devices. Interestingly, it wasn't in a language she was familiar with, and from the sound of it, the call was filled with incomprehensible jargon.

A way to mislead anyone listening in? She had to give them due respect, it was working, albeit only because she didn't want to put any effort into it.

"I see," one of the guards finally replied. "Just one moment, ma'am, the elevator is coming for you."

"How nice," she said.

It didn't take all that long before the elevator doors slid open into a rather large lift, one with a single mirrored wall to one side and a seating area on the other. There were even a few Earth-native plants within.

She stepped in, then crossed her arms as the elevator started to rise. As she approached the centre of Ganymede station, she could feel the curious brush of a powerful aura slipping past her.

The Emperor knew she was coming, and he was allowing her into his sanctum.

She sighed. Now she had no choice but to be polite. Oh, the prices she paid for love.

***