Location Classified, Graveyard Vault Elysium II 707.7 A.E. (Age of Exploration)

“Leave your personal weapon here, ensign,” the major ordered.

According to her personnel file, she had survived three full tours on the Scuu front before being transferred to a desk job. Officially, it was presented as a promotion. In truth, there were allegations of Scuu artifact smuggling. Due to the high number of casualties in that section of space, nothing had been proven, but the red flags had caused the bureaucratic safeguards to spring into action and shift her to a less prominent role, far from temptation. The woman had objected on the record, though not gone as far as a full appeal. Since then, she had been banished here.

I removed my pistol from its holster, ejected the magazine, then handed both to her. The woman grabbed them as if she were handling contraband and tossed them into a polymer tray on her desk.

“Datapad too,” she added.

“Is that necessary, ma’am?” I asked.

The question earned me an annoyed glance. I had no idea if the woman knew of me or just disliked being challenged. Running a few hundred simulations, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort to argue. Calmly, I retrieved my datapad and placed it on top of my service weapon.

“Anything else, ma’am?”

The major gave me a quick glance over, then went to a nearby wall terminal to register my passage.

“Do you have any military or civilian implants or prosthetics?” she asked, filling in the electronic form. That answered one of my questions—she had no idea who I was.

“I’m a battleship, ma’am.”

The answer made her pause, then turned around, looking for something that would confirm my story.

“It’s in my file, ma’am.”

“I don’t deal with paperwork, ensign,” she replied in a low hiss, before looking back to the terminal. The report must have panned out, for the doorframe leading onwards from the office turned green. “Your stuff will be here when you get back. Go ahead.”

Straightening the shirt of my uniform, I walked through the door. A short corridor continued onwards, leading to an elevator cabin. Out of habit, I tried to check if there were any ships in the area. The moment I did, I found that my comm system had been deactivated. There was no warning, no authorization level request. The local security system had directly bypassed all of my defense protocols and made the decision for me.

“I guess you were telling the truth after all,” I said loudly, and made my way to the cabin.

The planet I was on didn’t exist on most charts and databases. Officially, no ship was allowed within one light year of the system—more specifically, no active ship. If one considered inactive ships, there were millions of us, possibly more. Everyone knew that after the shutdown of a ship, its surviving cores were removed from its husk and taken to a vault for safekeeping. What happened within was one of the most tightly guarded secrets of the Fleet. There were rumors that every core was recycled into a new one. Personally, I hoped not. As my first captain used to say, everyone needed some rest.

Soundlessly, the elevator doors shut, starting its ascent. The walls changed, displaying an endless green field around me. It all seemed so real that I felt I could reach out and touch the grass.

As I watched, an animal appeared from the distance—a gazelle with a bright orange coat. For minutes it would cautiously approach, then run away reacting to my actions. Twice I even reached out to pet it, but all my fingers felt was the cold material of the elevator cabin. Regardless of the effort that had gone into creating this scene, it remained an illusion.

Suddenly, the images disappeared. I had arrived at my destination. The door slid aside, revealing a large shuttle platform. Four people were waiting, all of them outranking me.

“Ensign Light Seeker!” one of them shouted. “This way, there’s not much time!”

“Aye, sir!” I ran towards the nearest shuttle—a small transport used to move officers and VIPs short distances.

Once inside, I took my seat and strapped in. The rest of the officers followed.

“Head out!” one of the men said in the internal com.

The shuttle lifted soon after, thrusting up and forward. I had already been told that we’d be docking to an orbital station, but it wouldn’t hurt to make some small talk on the way.

“This feels a lot smoother than a battlefield shuttle,” I said. “Is it a core shuttle, sir?”

“The only thing with a conscience core here is you, ensign,” the man laughed. He was a captain as far as I could tell, though I was unable to find a personnel file matching his appearance. “You must have pulled a lot of strings to get here.”

“We’ve all done favors for people that count.” I smiled.

“I bet. Salvage or BICEFI?”

“You know I can’t get into that, captain. The powers that be have made a decision. All we get to do is to follow their orders.”

“And what would those orders be, Ensign Seeker?”

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I looked at him, the smile not leaving my face. The man was nearing middle age, but compared to me, he was just a kid. My own adopted son was a great-grandfather by now. Last I saw him he was complaining about the cold wave in his home colony, though not enough to move into the city.

“The Fleet’s orders,” I replied after a while.

The trip was short and smooth compared to what I was used to. I was the only one allowed to get off the shuttle. Everyone else was to wait for me there to take me back to the planet. There was a time when I would have made a snarky remark regarding Fleet bureaucracy. At present, I knew better.

There was no decontamination procedure once I left the shuttle. This was slightly unusual, though considering the number of times I had gone through it to arrive on the planet, I appreciated the change. According to the updated Fleet regulations, a person had to go through decon each time they left or entered a docking area. With fighting increasing on the Cassandrian front, Fleet HQ was concerned that there might be increased instances of spore transfer. So far, nothing of the sort had occurred, but it was always better to be safe than sorry. Against the Cassandrians, one silly mishap was enough to lose entire planets.

“Proceed to hallway eighty-three,” a loud mechanical voice echoed throughout the hangar.

I paused for two seconds to make sure there weren’t any further instructions, then proceeded to the blast door a short distance away. Based on what I had seen so far, I expected it to have a hydraulic mechanism. To my surprise, it slid open the moment I approached it.

“Hi, Elcy,” a tall woman with straw blonde hair said from the corridor.

Her facial features were different, but I recognized her instantly. Her posture and choice of attire were identical to the ones she’d had in her previous body. Officially, she was the department head of the BICEFI. What few knew was that she was also a battleship in a human husk, very much like me.

“Welcome to the graveyard.”

“Thank you, ma’am!” I stood to attention.

“There’s no “ma’am” here.”

“Yes, Lux.”

We walked along a corridor in silence. It had been a while since I’d heard from her. In the past three years, I had completed three serious missions for her organization. One of them wasn’t to her liking, creating a rift in our professional relations. I didn’t expect she’d ever contact me again, but a week ago, she had. The message was encrypted with a double helix cypher and it contained an itinerary, special Fleet authorization to follow it, and the phrase “Ascendant funeral.” There was no way I could refuse to go.

Many claimed that the Ascendant class was one of the most significant advancements in modern military history. A lot would argue otherwise, but we were definitely the most reckless. That was the reason for so few of us to exist. When I had last checked the database, after Lux’s message, I could find only ninety-eight, eight-seven of which were retired. Even if I were to assume that twice as many were assigned to dark departments, it wasn’t a lot.

Lux took me to a vast observation room. There were half a dozen people there, standing in the darkness. Live feeds of ships were on all the walls. More astounding than anything, giant glass windows composed the entire outer wall.

I instinctively stopped upon entering, but Lux nudged me to keep on walking. Without a word, she took me to the windowpane, next to one of the people. Even in this light, I could recognize the markings of an arbiter on his outfit.

“It’s starting,” Lux whispered. “Full authority.”

In the blink of an eye, the empty space beyond the window changed, revealing the massive form of a ship, and not any ship. It was an Ascendant battleship, less than half a kilometer away.

Small automated vessels no bigger than transport shuttles covered the hull light fireflies, systemically drilling into it.

So, this is how a ship is destroyed, I thought.

The closest thing I’d seen to it was during shipyard refitting, when I watched whole sections of ships be removed and replaced with new ones. Here, there would be no replacing.

Milliseconds marched on. Each was a moment I wanted to cling to, but knew that I couldn’t. The outer hull went, dragged away as more fireflies joined in, eating into the engines and weapon systems. Just like insects picking the body of a dead animal, I thought.

“Outer Glow,” Lux whispered. “She was in your cohort.”

I had memories of the ship from our basic training, but that was about it. I had only fought with her on two occasions, early on at the Cassandrian Front. After that, she had been transferred to another part of the war theater. She wasn’t particularly remarkable.

“I didn’t know her well,” I whispered back.

“She was one of our own. Now there are only five of us left.”

That was unfortunate. Apparently, the database records were wrong in the other direction. Only five Ascendants remained on active duty.

The complete deconstruction of the ship lasted seventeen minutes and eleven seconds. I didn’t miss a single millisecond. Once it was all over and the last dismantling crafts disappeared from view, light filled the room. Now I got to have a look at the other people present. All of them were arbiters; more precisely, the person next to me was an arbiter, and the rest appeared to be his assistants.

“Don’t be alarmed,” the man next to me said. “You aren’t in any trouble.”

“Yes, sir. I’m thankful, sir.”

“Bavon,” he corrected. “Call me Bavon.”

He was two heads taller than me, which wasn’t particularly difficult, and not particularly muscular, with broad shoulders and thin hands, suggesting he came from an oxygen-rich planet. His skin was among the darkest I’d seen, almost matching the color of his hair. His uniform was dark silver, with the arbiter insignia on the sleeve just below the shoulder.

“Sorry for meeting under such circumstances, but time is limited.”

“It always is.” I nodded.

“I’d have preferred to have a few more decades before proceeding with this, but there aren’t many Ascendants left. If we don’t do it now, we might miss our chance.”

I tilted my head.

“The war against the Cassies isn’t going well?” I asked.

“It’s not the Cassies or the Scuu. The real problem is the third-contact race.”

It took me ten milliseconds to go through all my memories involving the third-contact race. Unlike the Scuu or the Cassandrians, everything humanity knew about this race was based on artifacts that had been discovered. Based on these finds, it was theorized that the race had the abilities of instantaneous transportation and communication, as well as a possible reason for the existence of the other two races.

“You’ve been preparing for another war,” I said.

“For another contact. Hopefully, it doesn’t escalate to that this time.”

“With due respect, arbiter, it didn’t work out last time.” Twice.

I expected to receive a grumble, but instead, the man smiled.

“That’s why you’ll be tasked with making contact.”

There were a few times in a battleship’s existence when we felt all the weight of the universe. My first time was when my first captain retired, the second—when half of me died, discovering the secret of the Cassandrians, and the third when my fourth captain made me promise I’d raise her son as my own. All those couldn’t compare to the request that had been made just now. In one sentence, the man had made me responsible for the fate of the entire human race.