“Ignition sequence start,” a Vyrăis technician announced as he began to walk through the detailed list in his hands. His clawed hands danced across flashing switches, dials, and buttons. As he worked through the start sequence, needles began to turn toward the red, lights glowed, and the sound of turbines beginning to spin thundered through the floor.

“Approaching critical temperature ... now,” he announced as a subtle hum began to rise through the floor.

“Magnetic containment holding at fifty-five percent,” a second technician announced from his own wall of dials and digital readouts.

A loud thud from under the floor announced when the turbines engaged their resistive mode, beginning to generate power. “Turbine output plateauing at one-point-two-one GigaWatts,” the first confirmed.

“Emitters are warming up,” the second technician announced as he lowered his mirrored goggles over his eyes. The other technicians followed suit, even though doing so meant they were virtually blind. However, a moment later, the thin slitted windows in the wall began to glow with blindingly bright light – even past the similar mirroring within the chamber on the other side. Slowly, the blinding light faded as the emission chamber gradually aligned the light within until only the invisible microwaves remained, and it was safe to remove their eye protection.

A third technician turned to his terminal, where a screen waited for his input. He typed in commands with his claws and waited until a response blipped onto the screen. “Sister Engines are ready for the handshake,” he announced as he began typing again. “Handshake encryption is in place, synchronizing now.” A moment later, he said, “Check alignment.”

The second technician tapped a few commands into his own nearby terminal. “Alignment is good,” he called.

“Starting the Tunnel sequence,” he announced. “Two, thirteen, nineteen, ninety-six,” he recited as he entered the numbers being received from the sister engines: A unique sequence generated at that moment by the random decay of carbon-14, which only the three sister engines would know. A moment later, he flipped the switch, and the Anti-Euclidean Engine came online.

~,~’~{~{@ ((●(●_(●_(Θ_Θ)(○_○)_●)●)) @}~}~’~,~

The General jumped and grunted. The T’nann around him jumped as well but in response to his sudden movement. He leaned heavily on his makeshift cane and doubled over in pain.

“God damn it,” he grunted. He pressed his free hand to his side to stem the bleeding from his gunshot wound.

He felt as if someone had rested a live power line along his spine, and his entire body had clenched – which was where the pain had truly originated. Oddly, the sensation was more surprising than painful. If not for the re-opening wound in his hip, he might have been able to bear the feeling with some decorum.

He could barely contain his excitement as his train of thought suddenly turned to a remembered screen showing a golden box.

“Sir?” one of the T’nann asked, unsure if he should keep working or if the General was about to collapse in pain.

“I’m fine, just popped a stitch. Grab me one of those adhesive sutures,” the General ordered as he stood back up.

The T’nann nodded and eagerly hopped toward their first aid kit. The rest of the T’nann returned to their work; as far as they were concerned, the issue was resolved.

The General turned his head to look directly – he knew – at the nearest Anti-Euclidean Engine, just one Block away. Then he looked up, into the opaque ceiling with its glaring spotlights, where the Anti-Euclidean Engine was bending space like origami.

It could be nothing else. And best of all, the General had guessed correctly – the Gates were the same as the Engines’. He’d not expected this sympathetic reaction from his Gates, but it did lend weight to his current hypothesis. His plan at first had been a sort of extra to the rest – but now, if it worked …

“If that’s what the shock wave feels like, I wonder what it will be like when I open my own Gate,” he whispered to himself. The disks along his spine began to grow painfully cold, and the remembered box in his mind’s eye destroyed all who dared to gaze upon it.

~,~’~{~{@ ((●(●_(●_(Θ_Θ)(Θ_Θ)_●)●)) @}~}~’~,~

The Singer had to shove her fist into her mouth and bite down hard to keep from screaming. She felt it like a thunderclap along her spine that left a ringing in her ears. In its wake, she felt the disks on her spine go cold like someone had dumped liquid nitrogen down her back.

Blood trickled down her arm, and she realized that she’d fallen to her knees. Slowly, she removed her teeth from the flesh of her hand, and her mouth filled with the coppery taste of her own blood.

The T’nann crouching beside her turned a whole new shade of green as she eyed the bloody marks on the Singer’s hand and the blood that left a string from the wound to her mouth. The Singer retrieved her Kevlar hand wraps and began wrapping her wound tightly.

They weren’t alone in this section of the building. A scream was sure to draw down unwanted attention, so the Singer bore the self-mutilation with grudging acceptance. It was better to let the technicians in the other room continue to be distracted by Arnarxx’s denial-of-service attack on their servers. That way, they wouldn’t notice Brettn’s bent wire as it snaked up from under the locked door to pull the handle down from the inside.

“The Anti-Euclidean Engine just turned on,” she hissed, her voice disturbingly loud in the dead quiet of the hallway.

“What!?” Brettn hissed before a T’nann tail wrapped around his muzzle to quiet the Ventusi forcefully. The T’nann directly behind him hissed for quiet, and the others stacked behind him glared disapprovingly.

“It’s too soon. Are you sure?” Dar-Tin asked from behind the Singer. The T’nann veteran looked pointedly at the stained Kevlar wrapped around her hand but didn’t comment.

“I’m pretty sure,” the Singer said shakily. The Singer thought for a moment that she could hear music again, but when she tried to listen, she couldn’t pick out anything specific. “I didn’t know that would happen, sorry,” she said.

Brettn continued his ministrations, and a moment later, he jiggled the handle to let the door swing open. The T’nann stacked behind him rushed in, and the shouting didn’t begin until the last tail had disappeared through the door and slapped it shut. Brettn collected his wire and joined the rest of the group as they slipped further up the building.

The moment Arnarxx had started his attack, the entire building had gone into a full panic. Arnarxx had been quietly laying the groundwork for this attack for weeks – infiltrating and enslaving computers all over the station. At the press of a button, each one began to relentlessly make meaningless requests from the station’s servers. Giant server racks, which had once helpfully broadcast and curated articles and videos approved by Imperial law, ground to a halt as they tried to desperately fulfill billions of requests.

The technicians had panicked. The producers had panicked. And all that panic had distracted the Security – which the Singer’s group capitalized on.

The Singer’s attack group overwhelmed the security forces on the bottom-most floor quickly. Their attention had been turned inward, at the servers, and the Singer had come from the outside. The servers on the second floor would likely be no trouble as the technicians were unarmed civilians, they’d be taken hostage for a time, but the T’nann wouldn’t hurt them unless they did something stupid.

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The Singer could accept that.

Her soldiers would commandeer the entire communications network for this half of the station, and another team on the other side of Torus would do something similar. In less than an hour, they’d have full control over all communications within Torus Terminal as well as all outgoing and incoming signals.

The next floor up was where public broadcasts were recorded, everything from the newsroom to the studio took up that entire floor. Brettn didn’t even need his wire for the main door, though, despite the magnetic card reader that controlled the locks.

Brettn simply handed the Singer a can of compressed air. He instructed her to hold it upside down and aim it through the top end of the seam between the double doors. With a hiss of cold, compressed air, the egress sensor inside was tripped, and the electromagnetic locks disengaged.

Dar-Tin rushed in with the rest of their team, all pretenses of quiet entry now dismissed. These would be the last people in the building, and they wouldn’t have the time to raise the alarm while Dar-Tin and her thugs waved their guns around. The Singer followed inside and tossed aside the can.

A tall Vyrăis man tried to put up a fight and might have been shot for his trouble if the Singer hadn’t stepped in. Her command to hold fire surprised both the T’nann about to pull the trigger as well as the Vyrăis. He turned his outrage and fear on her, though she could sense a pearl of hope in his eyes as he stepped in her direction. He’d rightly identified her as the leader of this band of would-be rebels and perhaps believed that if he could overpower the smaller creature, he could drive off the rest of them.

He might have been right, too; the blow to morale would have been devastating.

But the Singer’s voice was enough to stop the Vyrăis dead in his tracks. The Vyrăis couldn’t understand the lyrics to O Death, but that had never mattered before. So long as she could match that sorrowful emotion, she could fascinate a Vyrăis long enough to get close. By the time she reached the second refrain, she’d already closed her hands around his skull, and the giant lizard writhed in pain at her feet.

That was more than enough to discourage further protests from her new prisoners.

The Singer didn’t think it was the way the General would have done it. He would have done something creative and oblique, something that would have not only put the Vyrăis in his place but also made the alien feel like an idiot in comparison. But the Singer was tired of dancing around the issue. She was tired of being useless, and for once in the last ten years, she wasn’t alone, and she finally felt like she had direction. So, she didn’t care if she concussed a few Vyrăis – civilian or not.

“What’s going on?” a finely dressed Vyrăis woman asked, shocked from the Singer’s trance by her sudden violence. She cowered in front of one of the T’nann and stared down the barrel of their weapon.

“You must be the Anchor-woman,” the Singer said as she approached. “I spoke with your cousin, Charlele, and she convinced me to give you the chance to get out of this unharmed,” she explained as a T’nann approached with a plastic script. “Cooperate, and everyone here gets to go home.”

The T’nann handed the Anchor-woman the script, and her eyes scanned the words with growing confusion. “And if I refuse to read this … manifesto?” she spat with wavering defiance in her eyes.

The Singer simply pointed to the curled up Vyrăis near the door, an occasional moan of pain reaffirmed that he was awake but would have gratefully accepted unconsciousness. “Refuse if you like. But interfere, and my friends won’t be as gentle as I was,” she explained. “We’re not here to cause a panic. Your face and voice are familiar; you can help keep this from becoming worse,” the Singer implored.

Thankfully, the Anchor-woman was far less selfish than her cousin, and she agreed.

~,~’~{~{@ ((●(●_(●_(Θ_Θ)(Θ_Θ)_●)●)) @}~}~’~,~

The conical shape of the INV Manifest Destiny floated silently in the void – it’s interstellar drives left behind on the other side of the Anti-Euclidean Engine’s portal, which shimmered in the center of the Terminal’s ring. It still had enough fuel that it could easily plot a trajectory to the other side of the system, or more likely, catch a fleeing civilian vessel.

It was a distinctly solid and military vessel amid a cloud of more porous civilian ships – all waiting for opportunities to offload cargo and passengers to Torus Terminal. Like most of the spidery hulks around it, the Manifest Destiny was far too large and massive to actually dock with the ring-like station. If it honestly had to, it would need to don a heavily reinforced harness that would swing it like a bucket on a string along the outer edge of the station – the equivalent of a low gravity dry dock.

Instead, every ship was waiting for the orbital ballet of shuttles moving between the parking orbits and the station.

The square, bulbous shape of the Manifest Destiny’s Imperial shuttle slowly lined up with the opening in the side of Torus Terminal, rising up to meet it at a glacial pace. To an outside observer, the station spun, and the shuttle approached tangentially. A silent burst of cold gas shoved the ugly craft into the slot in the side of the station. The pressure door began to slide closed as soon as the shuttle had passed the threshold.

The shuttle extended its magnetic landing skids and used a rapid-fire series of gas ejections to keep itself aligned with the floor as the station rotated around it. After a moment, it appeared as if the ship had begun to fall, and gas jets slowed the descent until the magnetic skids made contact and locked the shuttle in place.

Sound returned with a rush of air as the outer doors finally closed, but the large door in the shuttle’s face began to hiss open immediately. Before the door had fully opened, seven of the Manifest Destiny’s Imperial Marines marched out – followed closely behind by the behemoth form of the Inquisitor.

In the black pressure-armor of the Inquisitors, with its silver trim and crossed pistols, Darenius Morgsste cut an imposing figure. With the pleated cape around his shoulders denoting his rank to all others, it was clear that he was a figure of high authority even to those ignorant of the function of the Inquisitors.

Compared to the Imperial Marines, in their red and gold pressure-armor, he was also much larger. Marines, and most naval enlisted, were selected to be below a specific size: better for quickly infiltrating ships in freefall, and crewing stations in the limited space of Imperial Naval Vessels. Their armor served the same purpose, but as enlisted rather than officers, none of them wore a cape.

All of them wore pressure-armor, an Inter-Vehicle Activity suit which protected the wearer from low pressure with mechanical counterpressure – the marines were more fond of the name “shrink wrap.” A small pack at the small of their backs regulated their body temperature with a mixture of water tubes and electric coils. Though they carried no breathing tanks, a small emergency bottle was hooked into an umbilicus connector in their upper thigh. Unlike a typical civilian IVA suit, these suits were outfitted with interlocking ceramic plates capable of deflecting or absorbing the impact of most small meteorites, high-speed shrapnel, or small arms fire.

Darenius lined his marines up for final inspection as the ground crews looked on – frozen with indecision at their Imperial presence. Was it proper to go about their business as if nothing was different? Simply make their inspections and top the tanks of the shuttle. Or were the ground crews meant to wait until they were summoned?

Perhaps it was better to pretend they didn’t work there.

Darenius bided his time by ensuring his marines’ armor were all sealed correctly, and their equipment securely fastened to their harnesses – short-barrel shotguns loaded with flechette rounds, flash bang and concussion grenades, and an excessive amount of detonation cord. By the time he was done, a small group had approached them from across the hangar. These were no ground crew, however. Their disregard for uniform and openly displayed weapons – natural and artificial alike – loudly announced to anyone who looked that these were mercenaries.

Terminals like Torus hired mercenaries to police their ports. Everything from smuggling inspections to anti-piracy efforts. Torus Terminal had a thriving Shett population, which their mercenaries were almost exclusively hired from.

They were similarly outfitted to Darenius’s marines. However, none of the Shett wore the helmets or gloves to their pressure armor – and many of them were clearly missing ceramic plates where they had yet to be replaced. The mercenaries lacked explosives – not something that a “civilian” organization was able to acquire easily, even for mining – and in their place wielded handheld battering rams and pry-bars. These Mercenaries also sported a weapon unique to the Shett species: a huge barb at the tip of their muscular tail, capable of delivering a potent paralytic venom. It made up for their short, quadrupedal stature and short arms just below their squat heads.

One of the squat creatures stepped forward, the pleated ribbon on one shoulder all that denoted him as their ranking officer. “The perimeter is set, sir. We confirmed your information with our own sources, and they say the Human was spotted there only a few hours ago and was not seen leaving. At your order, we can sweep the entire building in seconds,” it said shortly.

Darenius tamped down his frustration at the Shett’s lack of proper greeting. Typically Imperial officers were given at least a brief bow and a welcome, but Shett had never been known as anything but brief. Instead, he felt his anticipation boil in his blood and said: “Then let it begin.”