SHAD POV

I was starting to get just a little too comfortable in my dress uniform, and that bothered me. Juana gave me a look over and nodded approval. She was dressed to the nines. We and several other high-ranking members of our expedition had been invited to the Coalition's one-cycle celebration. A galactic standard cycle didn't quite match up to an Earth year from my point of view. We'd been here a little more than 11 months, but for the aliens, this was a milestone to mark. It reminded me of unpleasant anniversaries coming up before too long, and I tried to push that out of my head.

Mila poked her head out of her room. She was already wearing pajamas. She jumped up and ran to give me a hug. "Go see grandma now?"

Juana scooped her up and laughed. "Yes, we'll take you to sleep with grandma tonight," she said as Mila planted a kiss on her cheek.

We dropped Mila off at my mother-in-law's and then met Grandpa and the rest of the invited guests at one of our portals. A minute later, Coyote dialed us into the correct zone, and we stepped out into a winter wonderland.

It looked like Christmas. Snow lay thick on the ground with paths cut through it. Little lanterns at ankle level shone through the snow, turning it golden white. The air was cool but not at all cold. None of this snow should be here. The weather was too pleasant. Trees lined the paths, hung with lights from the branches of the evergreens. Golden leaves still clung to the deciduous trees.

"Is this another elf zone?" I asked Juana as we made our way along the wide pathway toward the party.

Juana shook her head. "It's someone's custom-made scenario. This fragment has been entirely dominated." She sounded sad, and I was too, but at least it meant we shouldn't have any surprises tonight.

There were hundreds of aliens there, sporting uniforms and fancy dress from dozens of worlds. By now, I could recognize most of the logos. I nodded politely as we made our way into the party. NPCs, who were mostly four-foot-tall, raptor-like dinosaur creatures wearing bow ties, wandered around holding up trays of drinks and food on sticks. I accepted a plate from one orange-feathered raptor.

"Have you ever noticed," I said to Juana as I took a bite of the tiny cheese and fruit stick, "that tiny food on sticks is classy, but big food on sticks is not? These things are for showing off and impressing guests, but if you get a corn dog on a stick it's only fit for county fairs."

Juana rolled her eyes. "I don't think I've done enough comparative galactic cultural studies to know if that holds universally true," she said.

Music was playing from somewhere I couldn't see, strains of vaguely classical-sounding melodies, but with a weird zither counterpoint that had my teeth on edge.

"Oh look, there's Veda," Juana said and maneuvered us through the crowd. It was nice to see a familiar and somewhat friendly face.

Veda greeted us warmly. "It's been a few months," she said. "How's your exploit going?"

"Fairly well," Juana told her. "We're definitely turning a profit.”

“I heard you're cycling people out.”

“You been reading our letters, Veda?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Just passenger ship manifests. You've got a whole bunch of slots booked in the next liner that's coming out from Kronos."

"Well, it's been almost a year of our time. Good to rotate some back. The soldiers we brought with us have all done pretty well here. We want to get some fresh blood in. These will go back home, get some R&R, and then be ready to serve as the core of a group for a future exploit," I explained.

"You Earth folk have adapted very well to your new surroundings," Veda said. "I admire that. I suppose having a tamed reality engine on your side helps, but there are plenty of species that take centuries to get as comfortable with galactic norms as you seem to be."

That didn't actually make me feel better. I got a finger under my collar and adjusted it a bit. "We're just trying to stay alive and keep ourselves out of entanglements."

"But you're getting a reputation for solid work. I've heard you mentioned several times as good mercenaries to hire, that you get the job done with minimal fuss and very few cost overruns. Your kill-death averages are considerably better than the norm for mercenary troops."

"I told you our fancy classes would be an advantage."

"And you were right," Veda agreed. "Kvaltash has been putting in a good word for you as well."

That was nice to hear after our last round with the Patriarch. I decided to change the topic. "So, what exactly is the purpose of this shindig?"

Veda frowned, presumably at whatever her translator had made of the term "shindig." "It's a chance for everyone to let their hair down and, of course, brag a little," she said. "They'll be unveiling the leaderboards here any minute now." She nodded toward the center of the party.

We were in a large open square about 200 feet on an edge, and in the center was an elaborate ice sculpture depicting an orc locked in combat with a giant dinosaur. "You guys been getting a lot of the dinosaur levels too?" I asked.

"Everyone is. Most of the wild fragments seem to be calling them up. I guess because the world never got much in the way civilization.”

The music stopped. A trio of Galactics approached the statue. One of them was Kvaltash, so I was assuming they were the representatives of the coalition. Juana’s hand squeezed my upper arm. She muttered to me. “The elf is Granathoth. He's the representative of Proxima Corporation here, and a bunch of the smaller corps are allied with him like we technically are. The Talonian woman is Shining Scales Representative 8.”

“That's her name?” Most Talonians I'd met had less interesting names.

“She's from a sect that's very into corporate identity, so she prefers to be addressed as her job title."

I shrugged. "You do you, I guess.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

The representatives welcomed us all to the festival and then launched into speeches about just how successful this past cycle had been, how much progress we had made. The Talonian had brought charts. She flicked her talons, and images appeared overhead showing progress we'd made. "At this point, 83.5% of all fragments larger than 0.1% of the reality engine's capacity have been fully harnessed."

My head was already starting to throb, but I got the point. We were doing well from a point of view of how much of this reality engine we had dominated, but there was still work to do.

"Though this situation is rare, we do know when an exploit is fragmented in this way, the greatest gains are always made in the first cycle. Cleaning up the remaining percentages may take several more cycles. This is the part where member corporations of the coalition often wish to pull up stakes and go home as the easy profits of the first cycle disappear. May I remind you, the contracts you have signed do not permit this. None of your gains are to be realized until this reality engine exploit has been declared complete, and the coalition has the ability to level fines on anyone we feel is not living up to their end of the bargain."

I leaned over to Juana. "Is that true? If we leave now, we don't get to keep anything of what we've got?"

"More or less," she said.

I shut up and kept listening, but I was busy thinking.

One of our hopes was to extract some of the fragments we'd managed to ally with intact. Coyote and Kronos had both shown us that having a willing fragment allied with you brought benefits. The galactics didn't like working with fragments because they were unpredictable personalities. The galactics wanted to lock down the reality engines hard and use them to provide housing and material for their civilizations.

Grandpa and Earth High Command were already talking about building more starships like the Ad Astra. It ought to be possible. Kronos had the facilities to turn out almost anything given enough raw materials and ethereum. To operate the ship, we needed fully autonomous fragments that were willing to work with us like Coyote, and we also needed more of the mind crystals, the same strange substance that we used to build the Dominator relays. Our agents were working on determining where the crystals came from and buying up a supply of them, but we didn't want the Galactics to understand what we were doing.

They relied on their own Dominators to fly their ships, which were built on a much simpler design because they were designed to go from one reality engine to another. What the Ad Astra could do was visit systems that had no reality engine and still function. We were certain that could be an advantage for us. We just needed to figure out how. The Grignarians had ships that could get into systems with no reality engine, and one of the ways they maintained their precarious existence was by finding resources no one else could easily get at.

"And now the leaderboard," the Proxima rep, Granathoth, said. He held up one large green hand, and a shimmering scroll of names and numbers appeared. Right up near the top was Proxima with a value in billions.

"Was that in Soul Coins?" I asked Juana.

She shook her head. "Ethereum units."

I did a little converting. The last I had looked, the exchange rate between Sol Coins and Ethereum units was about 250 to 1. I whistled. "That's some serious money. Where are we?"

"Not even on the chart," Juana said cheerfully.

“Then there's at least," I did a quick estimate, "150 outfits doing better at this than we are.”

“We have different goals, remember?" she told me. "We're exactly where we want to be."

Veda was smiling happily. "I've been waiting for that official announcement. It's a big relief. We're doing about 15% better than our initial estimates, and I have documentation showing how much of it is thanks to my teams. I should be getting a solid performance bonus. That'll knock a few years off of my indenture," she said with relish.

"So, uh, no hard feelings about all that?"

Veda shrugged. "I don't particularly enjoy being forced into it, but this is the perfect role for me. I'm enjoying the hell out of myself, and I'll be able to go straight into phase two every time now. I've got a license and a reputation I can uphold. I really don't want to ever be involved in a phase one again. No offense to you guys."

"None taken," I muttered. “I don’t either.”

"Kvaltash's people are whispering that they may have a way to skip phase one entirely from now on. I hope that's true. There'll be a few hurt feelings, but honestly, phase one is usually a huge loss for the big corporations. Only small outfits like my family really can make any kind of profit there."

"And it's cruel," I pointed out.

"Yes." An uncomfortable silence grew. Juana said some polite nothings, then Veda excused herself and wandered off into the crowd.

I took a deep breath. "Anyone else we need to talk to?"

"We're mostly here to be seen," Juana said. She nodded her head, and I spotted Grandpa across the way. He was speaking with several alien dignitaries. "Your grandfather's more interesting to them, and I meet with these people regularly. So no, we can just wander."

"Then let's do that." I took her arm, and we slowly began to saunter around the edge of the party, the way you do when you know you need to be there but you don't really want to be.

About a quarter of the way around the circuit Juana stopped to talk to someone she knew. I was standing a little way away when a man wearing a red and white uniform appeared out of the crowd. He was scowling, and it took me a second to recognize Major Waters. He was skinnier than the last time I'd seen him, tired-looking, and his uniform looked out of place here. It took me a minute to realize he looked like he worked for a living as opposed to all of the rest of these rich assholes who clearly didn't.

"Williams," he said abruptly.

I nodded to him and tipped the hat I wasn't wearing. "Waters, always interesting to see you."

"I've been trying to contact you for weeks now, but your damn System won't take my calls."

"Coyote holds a grudge," I said. "He's not a System; he's a person."

"Whatever," Waters growled. Then his expression changed, and he held his hands out toward me pleading. "Listen, Williams, I want to come home. Kronos has me on a persona-non-grata list; I want you to get me off it.

"Now why the hell would I do that?" I asked him.

"Because," Waters was clearly scrambling, “I, I'm tired of working for these aliens. I want to come home."

"I'm so sorry that your treason hasn't worked out for you," I told Waters. The man seemed to slump in on himself.

"You're right," he told me. "What I did is unforgivable."

"So why the change of heart?" I asked. I wasn't gloating at his misery and misfortune just because the man had spent the better part of two years as a constant thorn in my side and had threatened my family on more than one occasion. Just because he'd tried to sell out the human race to the highest bidder didn't mean I should be enjoying his suffering now. Juana was always trying to get me to overcome my baser instincts and become a better person. She was right about that, but I still couldn't resist turning the knife a little.

"I can't help looking at what you've done," he said, his hand gesture encompassing not just me, but a broader range of people. Maybe he meant misfits, maybe Earth. "I thought we humans had had it, but the best anyone could manage was to take a good buyout package and let the galactics roll over us. Now I see what you've done, and it makes me regret my choices. Maybe if I had worked with you, I could have been part of it."

"Maybe," I allowed. "You have to see why we don't exactly trust you."

"I just want to come home. I can't go back to Earth. My money won't keep me in ethereum for more than six months. It's got to be a reality engine, and Kronos has me on the banned list. If there's anything I can do to get off it, tell me. I'll do it. Anything."

Honestly, I believed him. He had the desperate air of a man who's realized he has nowhere to go. I hesitated. I didn't want anyone to think I was turning soft, but...

"I'll ask Coyote if there's anything you can do to get off the naughty list," I said at last. "Don't call us. We'll call you."

With that, I turned and stalked away through the party. Juana found me a little later.

"Are we done here?" I asked.

She shrugged. "I think we've been seen by everyone who needs to see us, so yes, I suppose."

As we left, I told her about Waters. Her eyes narrowed.

"I think he's on that naughty list for a very good reason," she said. "I hope you didn't believe what he was saying. Coyote has got another spin on things."

"I don't know." I scratched my head as we walked through the Winter Wonderland setting back to where Coyote was holding the portal back to Ad Astra open for us. “I almost feel sorry for the guy. Almost.”

Juana laughed and leaned against my arm as we walked. “Going soft in your old age? Never thought I’d see the day.”