Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

16th May 2001 (69:1:33)
— Zero Day plus 05.08.14

The subtle rattle of turbulence gradually tapered off as the blue of the sky outside began to darken. Ahead and behind her, through the transparent surface inches away from her nose, the Atlantic Ocean had been reduced to a featureless deep blue carpet, looming out from under the scattered cloud cover a landmass of brilliantly shining white ringed with craggy brown and green rent through with countless tiny fingers of water. The southern coast of Greenland, the fjords looking tiny and delicate from this height, the enormous ice sheet bright enough to dazzle her eyes, leaving colourful spots behind in the darkness when she blinked. At this angle, she couldn't see much, the Earth straight below her feet, the surface visibly curving away from her as the sky out the window swiftly darkened through shades of blue, the colour leaching away. Pinpricks of stars began to show themselves, Greenland was panning across her view, the northeastern islands of Canada beginning to show themselves to one side...

But then the shuttle turned, with no sense of motion perceptible from the inside, the planet outside of the window seeming to sway, almost dizzying. Their pilot put the back of the shuttle to the planet, the only sign visible through the window a curved soft blue glow to one side, shrinking and dimming as they accelerated into space. And, of course, countless stars, like a dusting of gemstones white and red and blue and yellow, in numbers and coming in colours that were never seen on the surface.

This wasn't the first time Beth Potter had been to space, but the view still took her breath away. She'd never been much for stargazing, had found Astronomy class dreadfully boring, but she had to admit, seeing this almost made her understand the passion some people had for it.

The flight didn't take very long. Beth had attempted to translate some rather more technical materials for Hermione, so she was aware that there were certain limits to how fast they could travel while still in the atmosphere of a planet. Friction was a problem, yes, they had shielding to prevent any damage to the ship — but travelling too quickly with the shields up would cause an unbelievably strong electromagnetic wake, which could have all kinds of weird unpredictable effects. An EM pulse that would knock out any electronics within dozens of miles was one of the more reliable ones — and who the hell knew what that would do to enchanted stuff — but there could be weird shite too, like lightning storms and strips of the atmosphere being fucking ignited, and who even knew, really. Putting that kind of energy into anything made crazy shite happen.

But once they were safely out of the atmosphere, they could kick the engines on full blast without worrying about breaking anything. And it turns out their new alien friends with the Law of Five made some seriously fast spaceships — once they got going, it only took a couple minutes to fly up into the high orbit where the growing space station was waiting. Somewhere over eastern Asia or the western Pacific at the moment, supposedly, Beth didn't have a good angle out any of the windows right now.

The station itself did swing into view out a window as the shuttle maneuvered in to dock, so she did get a good look at that. As part of the agreement to join the Law that various leaders had signed on behalf of Earth not quite two weeks ago now, the Law had promised to provide security assistance until they could catch up enough with this absurd sci-fi tech to start taking it over themselves. Some people might not be entirely uncomfortable with an alien military floating around in their solar system, but there were still scabs out there — the war with the first aliens Earth had ever encountered had resulted in the deaths of literally billions of people — and the Law had already managed to demonstrate their good intentions pretty convincingly. Their end of the deal involved a lot of material assistance and training to help them catch up, and of course they'd already started sending aid before the treaty was even signed — the devastating famine that'd been burning on ever since the scabs first attacked five and a half years ago had been more or less ended only within a month of first contact with the Law. Some people were still a little paranoid, but Beth didn't expect any issues, it should be fine.

Besides, the Law really wanted magic. They'd given Earth a very favourable deal, and wanted them to be happy about it — she didn't think they'd do anything to fuck it up.

There were still ships from the Exploratory Command in the solar system and mapping the space around them — though they were going to be handing that job off to the Defence Command soon, since they were considered to be inside the Law's borders now — but the space station in orbit over Earth was a more permanent contribution to their home's defence by the Law. Since they didn't have the industrial capacity to build huge, super-advanced shite like this, the Defence Command had sent the core of it out to them, pre-built. It'd supposedly taken at least a couple months to get all the way over here, but they'd started sending it well before the treaty had been signed — since they were giving Earth such a good deal, they'd been confident it'd be accepted, so they'd gotten out ahead on preparations. The plan was to add to it over time, as they got more modules out here and as Earth developed the industry necessary to deal with it themselves, but for now it was just the basic defence station model the Law's military could plop into space anywhere they needed to keep an eye on on short notice.

Of course, since it turned out the engineering capabilities of spacefaring civilisations were absurd, the "basic model" was still fucking huge. It was a wide, somewhat flattened cylinder — more of an oval-shaped cross-section than circular — with a fatter not-quite-spherical blob at the center. The whole thing was made out of the dark, silvery metal that Beth had seen in the Law's military craft before, glimmering dully where it caught the sunlight. There were these thin branching scaffolds extending out from it at a few points, which Beth knew were places to dock for ships that were too big to fit in the landing bays — there was a ship attached to one now, a big blocky ugly thing that she knew was a heavy freighter, more supplies coming in for the station and/or Earth, the bridge connecting the ship and the station delicate enough it almost vanished against the blackness of space. The entire surface was bristling with tiny features she didn't quite know enough about their technology to identify...but some of them definitely looked like oversized gun barrels of some kind. The shite they fired looked like lasers, but apparently they were actually, like, superhot plasma accelerated to stupid speeds, she didn't know...

The shite was powerful, she knew that — she'd seen video of them melting right through scab ships like the ones they poor Earthlings had needed to resort to nuclear fucking weapons to deal with. These things seemed way safer, and much less likely to blow up and permanently poison something important if you missed.

There were also missiles on this thing, in addition to the not-quite-lightspeed plasma guns, which Beth knew might well exceed the yield of all the nukes on Earth put together, which was kind of a freaky thing to have hanging around in orbit. She wasn't worried, though. The Law wanted to be friends, and if it came down to a fight, Beth was sure they'd figure something out. It'd seemed like they were fucked when the scabs first showed up too.

The fucking craziest thing about the space station was that it was fucking huge. The round blob at the middle was a half a kilometre wide, and the cylinder part was about one and a quarter kilometres end to end. Just thinking about the amount of resources it would take to build something this big kind of made her head hurt. And the Law had a bunch of them, over various important planets or hanging around travel routes, and they had plenty of spaceships this big too. Or, well, she didn't think many of their military ships were this massive — some were about this long, but they tended to be thin and needle-like, not as thick around. (Smaller target?) The sheer size of interstellar civilisation, the number of people they had and the volume of things they built, was just absurd to think about.

Of course, that was working to their benefit at the moment, since with an economy of the Law's size developing a 'primitive' planet of just a few billion people was trivial to them. (Definitely worth the investment to get their hands on literal magic.) So, not really complaining, when it came down to it.

The shuttle hadn't turned to put the space station in view of the windows until they were getting pretty close, slowing down and changing the angle it was approaching at to aim toward the landing bay — so by the time Beth could see it at all it was already huge, smooth dark alien metal crawling with oversized weapon emplacements filling practically her entire vision. And then it just got bigger, as their momentum brought them closer, the ends of the cylinder disappearing past both sides of the window, the docked freighter slipping away under her feet, swaying back and forth almost dizzyingly as their pilot made maneuvers—

A shudder ran through the ship, hard and sudden enough Beth teetered in place, caught herself with a hand on the window. (It looked like glass, perfectly clear, but to the touch it felt like some kind of metal polished smooth.) She held her breath for a moment, but it didn't seem like anything was wrong. She noticed that the constant subtle vibration of the engines in operation had cut off entirely, the ship going unusually still and silent. The station outside of the window was still getting closer, the round blob at the middle growing to fill her view, but then beginning to slip to the side as the shuttle turned in place. She glanced over her shoulder, but the few other people in here with her didn't seem concerned. This must be normal.

"They caught us in a gravity anchor," the nearest one said, in Minnisiät. He was kharson — red skinned, fleshy tendrils drooping from his lip to dangle under his weak chin, a pair of bony ridges extending from both sides of his temple back along the top of his bald head — and out of uniform, wearing trousers and some kind of wrap top made out of a shimmering synthetic cloth of some kind, a colourful mix of blue and orange and black and red. Coming back from shore leave or something, maybe? Giving her a thin-lipped, wide-eyed expression she read as a reassuring smile, he explained, "For safety, craft are not to fly under their own power too close to the station. They will draw us in the rest of the way."

"Right, that makes sense. Thanks."

"Sure. That is a Dimitran military uniform, yes? Is this your first time up?"

"It is, yes." One of the issues they'd had to deal with right away was just what the fuck they were supposed to call themselves, now that they were dealing with a whole big alien civilisation. Earth was a little odd in that they had so bloody many spoken languages — most space-faring planets were old enough that they'd winnowed down to a single shared culture ages ago, and at least generally agreed on what their planet was called, or had even been settled by a single culture sometimes back millennia ago. There'd been a big debate about it between the diplomats, they'd narrowed it down to a handful of options which people had then voted on. It wasn't like every single person on the planet had been able to vote, in the timeframe they'd had that just wasn't logistically possible, but there'd been hundreds of millions of votes, anyway. So, on official documentation with the Law, Earth was called Dimitra now, and the rest of the planets in the solar system had gotten what were more or less the normal Greek names, with a couple minor changes.

Beth wasn't quite sure why they'd ended up going with Greek? There had been a vote, sure, but she didn't know why that set of names had won, or why Greek had ended up on the handful of final options in the first place. She knew they hadn't wanted to go with the names used by any of the colonial powers, and there were issues with pronounceability for a lot of options that left over — the -tra was difficult for some languages, but if you swapped in -tsa or -cha or -twa or something like that it was still recognisable, so it wasn't a big deal — so maybe they'd gone with Greek just because the rules they were using excluded so many of the more popular options. Herself, Beth had voted for a set in...some American indigenous language (she wasn't actually certain which language it was), but she hadn't really expected that one to win, she'd just thought it sounded neat. She guessed the Greek names were fine, she didn't really care what the place was officially called so much.

Anyway, she finished her answer to the kharson man. "And no, this isn't my first time in space. I was on the translation team."

"Ah," the man breathed, his eyes going wide, "you must be a sorcerer, then! Weren't the Dimitran translators all sorcerers?" They were speaking in Minnisiät, but the word Beth mentally translated "sorcerer" was in Monatšeri, the language of his people. They had a lot of old stories of mages in their ancient past, and there really wasn't a great word for it in Minnisiät.

"We all were, yeah, that's how we learned so fast." The Law always taught a handful of people from a new contact Minnisiät first so they could properly negotiate a treaty, and the team Earth had put together were all omniglots, for the obvious reason.

As the shuttle was pulled in closer to the station, Beth was pulled into a conversation with the man. Her guess that he was a soldier on shore leave or something turned out to be incorrect — Noqshal was actually an engineer of some kind involved in the spaceport they were in the process of building...somewhere in the middle of fucking nowhere in the Near East, she forgot which country it was located in. Somewhere more or less uninhabited, far away from population centres, which was kind of the point. A lot of the people in charge were still very nervous about letting aliens poke around on Earth — which made sense, considering the events of the last five years — so they'd decided to put the thing as far away from anything important as was feasible. It wasn't like it really mattered where they put it, with the magical transportation methods they had available now. She thought they'd need at least two, one to serve Eurasia and Africa and one for the Americas, but presumably they'd get around to the other one eventually.

He'd been down at the site helping with the early stages of construction, mapping out just where everything would go and smoothing out the terrain as necessary and starting to lay down the foundation. He was actually coming up to the station for a meeting with someone — over a video call, it sounded like — to give an update and revise the equipment and supplies and workers they would need. They were trying to get things going, since having a properly-equipped, modern spaceport on the surface would be a big boost to both their ability to get supplies and personnel down to the surface and help establish communications infrastructure, but it was a little slow starting out. Not a surprise, they were in the middle of nowhere in galactic terms — big construction projects like this took some doing, and they didn't have the necessary logistics infrastructure already established way the hell out here.

Also, they'd kind of made the project more difficult for their benefactors than it had to be when they'd decided to put it way out in the middle of a fucking desert. Noqshal didn't complain about that, though — the Law were well aware that their first introduction with people from other planets had been a long, brutal war with the scabs, they were pretty good about not taking personally the mild paranoia left behind.

Noqshal had a tonne of questions about magic, of course, Beth wasn't really surprised. The Law did have mages among their own people, but they were a very small minority — smaller even than the fraction of mages on Earth, much smaller — and they didn't really know much magic either. For the Monatšeri, their mages had kind of set themselves up as the superpowered aristocracy of a shitty slave empire, but eventually the slaves rose in a revolution and slaughtered all their masters and also destroyed the archives in their magic schools and shite...so then when what Earthlings would call muggleborns started cropping up again, they knew literally nothing about magic, and had to start from scratch. Oops? Other societies across the galaxy had similarly basic magic, for different reasons depending on where you looked, but usually due to them all being killed for one reason or another. It was honestly very strange.

(Nobody had magic as useful as what they had on Earth — there were really very good reasons the Law wanted to be friends so badly.)

Thankfully for Beth, Noqshal didn't end up with too much time to interrogate her with open-ended questions about magic that she honestly hardly knew how to begin answering anyway. The gravity anchor, whatever the hell that was, drew them toward a small gap in the side of the big blob in the middle of the station, the inside a bright white, the rectangular rim lined with a vivid blue-red glow. Or, it seemed small at first, but as the shuttle approached the spot it grew bigger, yawning open, probably over a dozen metres wide. As they neared the shuttle suddenly turned, pointing the nose toward the station — cutting off Beth's view of the gap, instead she could only see the curve of the big blob, the smooth surface of the dark silvery metal occasionally broken up with big damn plasma-guns and other equipment she didn't know enough to identify the use of, the freighter hanging over the station seeming to drop as the surface neared like the setting moon.

It was only a couple minutes of Beth trying to explain what the hell omniglottalism was to someone who didn't know shite about magic — in Monatšeri, Beth had slipped into Noqshal's native tongue without thinking about it, the man breaking into a silent grin — before walls were looming up outside of the window, the red-blue line marking the position of the force field that held back the vacuum of space swept over the shuttle, and they were inside the stark white landing bay. It took a moment for the shuttle to actually land, slowly drifting through the space to reach their parking spot, so Beth had enough time to look around. This landing bay was much larger than the one on the ship that'd brought the omniglot team out for their language lessons — there were several ships in different shapes and sizes scattered around the place, unidentifiable equipment fixed against the walls or into the floor or hanging from the ceiling, boxes and tubes and shite, personnel of multiple different species in and out of uniform bustling around. Beth recognised a copy of the smooth, white-silver, graceful-looking diplomatic shuttle Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe and his staff had arrived to make first contact in, and there were a couple of the blocky light freighters they'd been using to bring supplies down to the surface.

Relief shipments were still going on, Beth recognised the large array of crates stacked on the landing bay floor they were loading into one of the freighters as more food aid. Technical assistance would be coming later, more projects like the spaceport they were starting up, but at this point the food had been the most useful. Though hopefully they wouldn't need the help forever — the brainy types had reverse-engineered the weird terraforming beetles the scabs had set loose five years ago now to restore farmland that'd been ruined in the war, and even greenify fucking deserts. That shite took time, though, the food aid made sure people stopped dying while they spun up their absurd alien tech and magic -powered agriculture. Hermione said the projections she'd seen said they should have a healthy surplus in another five years, but who the hell knew how many people would have died before they managed to get out of the red, the help was obviously still great.

Before too long the shuttle smoothly set down, after a few seconds the door popped out with a hiss of equalising air pressure, swung up out of the way while a ramp extended down to the floor. There were only a few people on the shuttle — not very many people had a reason to take the trip up or down at this point, Beth had had to wait a couple days to catch a ride — Noqshal's continuing questions about mind magic slowing them down enough that the two of them were the last to step out of the shuttle. The landing bay was somewhat cool, since the permeable barrier separating them from space wasn't great at holding in heat, and the air had a funny smell to it, a weird mix of copper coins and seawater and lubricant and something sickly sweet and the sharp, acrid smell that lingered after a magical duel. Normal industrial smells for these people's tech, supposedly, like the smell hanging around a petrol station or something.

Beth half-expected to be met by someone right outside of the landing bay, so she paused a moment, cast a mirror charm with a snap of her fingers. The full-body twitch and wide-eyed staring from Noqshal at the magic wouldn't actually be that much different than she'd get even from a mage — though honestly, it wasn't like this was difficult to cast without a wand, it was just an illusion. In the few hours she'd last checked she hadn't managed to mess up her uniform, trousers and jacket in black and silvery grey, the beret showing the winged torch and stars of the SCFRS. She quick adjusted how the beret was sitting on her head, because even chopped down to short little wisps her hair still had a frustrating habit of getting in the way. She did like the vivid red colour — not something humans naturally had, a magical trait, she'd inherited it from her mother — but the stuff was wild and impossibly curly, it could be bloody huge, so she just cut it all off...every morning, because it always grew back overnight. Annoying. Her face looked fine, the freckles she'd picked up during the war in the tropics faded but not vanished, she hadn't any mess left behind from lunch she hadn't noticed. All right, good. She dismissed the charm with a swipe of her fingers through the illusion, the magic quickly dissolving apart.

"That was fascinating," Noqshal said, looking at where the mirror had been a moment ago, almost with stars in is eyes. "What was that?"

"Just an illusion, I learned that one in school when I was twelve." Not actually in class — they had learned illusions in second year, but she'd actually picked that one up from one of Lavender's issues of Witch Weekly as part of an attempt to get control over her hair (it hadn't worked) — but Noqshal didn't need to know about that. "So, that's the exit over there?" She didn't wait for Noqshal to answer the question, the door leading out was pretty obvious.

"Ah, yes, we're going that way. I'm sorry if I've been a bit, well, prodding, but Dimitran magic is such an interesting subject. I was hoping I'd be able to visit one of your schools or something of the like, but you're all so protective of it. Understandably so, of course!"

Beth let out a little huff, her lips twitching. "Of course they're protective, the schools are where the children are. It's tradition in a lot of places for magic schools to be hidden, to keep the children safe — an old tradition, we had a lot of wars and stuff of our own long before the scabs ever showed up. Maybe start with asking to visit a town market, or maybe a public library or something."

"...When you put it like that, that makes a lot of sense. I'll do that, thank you, Corporal."

"Sure." On the other side of the oversized doorway was a cavernous hallway, walls clean white and floor solid black, the space both wider and taller than she would naturally expect. It was pretty easy to guess the reason for that: not far away someone was guiding along a hovering platform loaded with dozens of large boxes, very similar to the ones that the food aid came in, the load large enough to fill half the width of the hallway and reach just a half-metre or so under the ceiling. She would guess this was a major artery through the station, extra room so they could move equipment back and forth. There were people around, a variety of species in a mix of civilian and military dress, most of them at what looked like a mess or a café or something nearby, the place decorated in Monatšeri style, furniture and walls shrouded in rich fabric decorated with curling organic patterns done in glittery glass beads. It was quieter than she would expect, she thought there might be some kind of force field or whatever the fuck keeping the noise of the mess inside — she knew they could do that sort of thing, one restaurant the language team had been brought to had isolated all the tables from each other to keep conversations private.

She'd kind of expected there to be someone here to meet her, since it wasn't like she had any bloody clue where she was going — but there wasn't anyone hanging around the doors to the landing bay, and nobody showed up while she was looking around. There were signs bolted into the ceiling overhead pointing which way to go to get to what, but she had no idea where the office she had an appointment at was...

Okay, she needed to get one of the aliens' weird mobile phones as soon as possible. Their network wasn't compatible with the crystal phones Hermione had helped invent, if she had one of the aliens' she was sure she would have been sent directions, or a fucking map or something. And hers didn't work up here anyway — she took it out just to check, and the thing had gone dead. Well, it still worked, the enchantments were in operation, but it was cut off from the...thing that actually did all the computing work. Signals were sent through the ambient magic on Earth, and that didn't reach up into space. Thankfully she didn't need anything off of this, because she'd be kind of fucked if she did...

"Are you having technical issues there, Corporal?" Noqshal asked.

"Yeah, ah, the network doesn't reach up here." She tucked the useless thing back in her pocket, turned to give Noqshal a sheepish smile. "You wouldn't happen to know where I'm supposed to go, would you? I kind of thought someone would be here to meet me..."

"If I don't I'm sure I can help you find it. Where are you trying to get?"

"I have a meeting with Colonel Størrekh, at the Exploratory Command's mission, but I wasn't given directions."

"The Exploratory Command should be in the East Wing, but... One moment," Noqshal said, pulling one of their handheld-computers-slash-mobile-phones out from somewhere. He fiddled around for a moment, before snapping, "Shath, there he is! Colonel Størrekh—" The name didn't quite come out right, Monatšeri didn't have the Ø sound. "—is the personnel officer with the X.C.! Yes, his office is right in— Follow me to a lift, we can send you in the right direction."

It was a short walk to the lift, a bank of off-black sliding doors set into the white of the wall — they were all closed, Noqshal tapped a touchscreen on the wall to call for one, continuing to chatter on. He'd guessed (correctly) that Beth was here to join the Exploratory Command, had some questions about that. Or at least, he started off with curiosity about her signing on — she probably was the first Earthling to go for it, but it'd only been a couple weeks since the treaty had been signed, and other people had to deal with the language barrier — but those quickly transitioned into asking about the war with the scabs. He was only slightly taken aback when he learned that she'd been fifteen when she'd joined the Army, the UK were hardly the only people to take who they could get in an emergency.

Literal space aliens appearing out of nowhere and setting fire to practically all the major cities in the world all at once was one hell of an emergency.

Before too long there was a low alert tone, and one of the doors slid open. The inside of the lift looked perfectly normal, like something you might find in a more modern building back on Earth, but the controls weren't — instead of a panel of buttons for each floor there was a touchscreen, with a map of the station labelled with various destinations. Though apparently they were still somewhat early in setting this place up, because the destinations were labelled with nonsense, short strings of numbers or letters which Beth assumed was some code to identify different parts of the station, with no information about what was over there. Noqshal had to look back and forth between his handheld and the lift controls, flipping through the map until he found the right one.

"I'm going in straight the opposite direction," Noqshal said, one hand on the doorframe stopping it from closing on him, "so I will let you go. Where the lift will drop you off, you will be right at the bottom of the East Wing, you want to go away from the core — you'll be able to tell which way that is. A short walk that way will take you to the public-facing offices for the military, go to the lobby for the Exploratory Command, and there should be someone there who can point you to the right office. Okay?"

"Got it. Thanks for the help."

"Of course!" he chirped, grinning. "It was a pleasure to meet you, Corporal, good luck out there."

A couple quick pleasantries back and forth, and Noqshal backed out of the lift, the doors sliding closed a few seconds after he was out of the way. The lift was perfectly silent, and there was no sense of motion whatsoever — the only way she could tell she was moving was because the little green indicator on the screen she assumed marked the position of the lift was making its way across the map. It looked like it was bringing her along the curve of the outside of the blob at the middle of the station, she passed by a couple stops labeled on the map with more alphanumeric nonsense before the lift stopped at one. The hallway outside was the same white and black as the one she'd left, she was just moving to take a peek outside when a group of people of an entirely unfamiliar species with scaly orange skin accented with patches of red and blue and backward-turning knees started filing in. She asked if she'd reached the East Wing yet — they spoke Minnisiät with a bit of an accent, but it was understandable — and no, she had a bit of a ride left, okay. They picked their destination on the map and then the lift was moving again.

The group pretty much ignored her, chattering away in their sharp, hissy native language, which was fine enough with her. They stopped at another spot to pick up a couple Monatšeri and a single human-looking but weirdly blue-skinned Chiss, all in uniform, and a bit after that they stopped again to drop off the unfamiliar aliens. She noticed the three... Honestly, he didn't know enough about the Law's uniforms to identify much — the black and red trousers and jacket were a military thing, she was pretty sure, but the design of the jacket was different than she was used to, extending a little bit past their hips and hanging open over a steel grey shirt, blue at the collar and the cuffs, didn't know what any of that meant. There were what were obviously rank insignia at their collars, breast, and even their waists, but she couldn't read those either. Different from what she was used to from security people she'd met before, maybe they were naval officers? with the Defence Command, staffing the station. Anyway, she noticed them eyeing her, curious, but nobody said anything to her, so she stayed quiet as well.

Next the lift came to a stop, the view through the doors was significantly different than previous times. They were at some kind of big open square, worked into the floor tile a massive reproduction of the Law of Five's insignia — a white five-fingered hand on a deep red backdrop, surrounded by a ring of nine six-pointed stars, white on black — various unrecognisable flags hanging from the high walls around, all around the square rooms with glass facings. After glancing around, she decided this was supposed to be some kind of public area, she thought that those glass-fronted rooms were supposed to be shops, maybe? Most of them were empty, though, the rooms inside sterile and bare, only a few occupied, what she thought was an electronics store there, a café of some kind over there.

The three other passengers moved to disembark here, she leaned out to peek around — and then she noticed a sign built into the floor a short distance away labelling this as the East Wing Nexus, and sprang out of the lift herself. This must be where she was meant to get off. The wall the lift was built into was a solid smooth black, except for where display screens had been fitted into it. A couple screens were showing a view of Earth — mostly dark, cities seen as clusters of lights, a slowly growing bright blue crescent of the day side approaching from the left — others what she thought were news programmes of some kind, anchors accompanied by video, scrolling text in Minnisiät or Monatšeri on different displays. It was kind of a lot to take in all at once, she forced her eyes away, blinking — and then noticed the warning over a set of doors leading through the black wall, telling people to take caution with the change of gravity ahead.

She was going to assume that was the blob, and the East Wing, presumably what they called one of the cylinders stretching out from it on either side, was the opposite direction. It seemed like gravity pointed in different directions in the blob and the wings — the lift must have rotated around to match this floor without her noticing — which seemed a little overly complicated to deal with, but she assumed these people knew what they were doing. Noqshal had said the offices she was looking for would be in the opposite direction of the blob, must be somewhere past this "nexus" place...

There were people in the large open space, but not very many — they were most densely concentrated in the café, muffled chatter reaching her out here, a thin stream of people crossing the floor this way or that. It was quiet enough she could clearly hear her boots clicking against the tile. She assumed this was meant to be some kind of public square or something, and it would fill out as activity in and out of Earth picked up. Honestly, she was kind of surprised how many people there were here already, though she guessed the station was bloody huge, so it made sense it'd take a fair number of people to staff the thing. It was hard to imagine Earth was worth this much bother, considering it wasn't like they had any commerce coming in and out or anything, but, magic, whatever.

Also, the Law was fucking huge, so this station and the people to staff it probably wasn't that big of an investment. It was hard to remember that sometimes.

After walking for a few minutes (this "nexus" place was pretty big) she reached the wall opposite the lift she'd come in on. There was an oversized set of doors here, leading into a double-high double-wide corridor, above the doors a sign in Minnisiät, Monatšeri, and Girshæth, reading East Wing — Upper Avenue. She was a little surprised to find that the walls of the corridor, maybe only ten metres long before reaching another set of doors, were entirely covered in display screens. Images of space, mostly, what were obviously settled worlds judging by the lights of cities viewed from orbit, a space station bristling with antennae and shite in a distant orbit over a black hole, the slowly-turning disc of stuff falling into it a mix of every colour of the rainbow and toward the middle burning intensely bright, the sprawling web of what must be a shipyard or something against the backdrop of colourful swirling yellow and orange and blue clouds of a gas giant, the skeletal frames of partly-built ships here and there crawling with tiny jets of fire as some kind of...space machinery maneuvered around, other shots of ships in space, hulls shining and glittering in sunlight, a shot of some gas giant, the clouds mostly blue-green, the camera near the rings, big hunks of ice shining brilliantly, streaks of rainbow colour like sunlight on an oily puddle, but millions of them, twinkling like countless diamonds...

Fucking hell. Random, seemingly pointless thing to do, but shite, it was pretty.

Through the other set of doors was another open square, but this one was much smaller than the previous one, enough room to move around between the doors on the walls. There'd been a sudden colour change, the floor made out of the usual black, but interrupted here and there with a white six-pointed star, the walls the same deep red as the background on the Law's insignia and on their military uniforms. The doors straight ahead had another sign marking them as the way to the East Wing's Upper Avenue (whatever that was), but these doors were closed — as Beth stood looking around, a green-skinned, amphibious-looking alien in uniform walked up to the doors, held something up to some sort of device next to a handle, and then pushed the door open and disappeared inside. Authorised personnel only beyond that point, she guessed. There were doors to both left and right, hanging open, from this angle showing only a narrow glimpse of what was inside, a lot of black and red and white.

Above the doors to the right was the insignia of the Exploratory Command — altered from the Law's default one, the same ring of nine six-pointed stars, the same deep red backdrop, but instead of the hand three narrow, pointed spacecraft streaking across at an angle (she wasn't sure why three instead of five) — so she turned to the right and stepped through the door. Inside was what was obviously a lobby of some kind. The floor was more black tile, the walls red, the furniture made of wood, surprisingly — she didn't think she'd seen any natural materials up here yet. There were two curved receptionists' desks, one to her left and the other to her right, behind them hallways leading deeper into the offices here. There were a few chairs against the wall for people to wait, more wood with thin padding in white. On the walls behind the desks and to left and right were more displays, views of space but this time showing more of what were obviously military craft, a sequence Beth recognised from the introductory video they'd shown when they'd made first contact, a soldier in the Law's uniform reaching down to help up a bloodied and exhausted alien, smoothly transitioning to that same alien now in uniform exchanging fire with two-mouthed aliens she recognised as wakali (genocidal slaver bastards, mutual enemies of the Law), the alien pausing to give a hand up to another...

"Hello there!" She twitched at the voice, eyes turning to the sotšuńalh woman sitting behind the desk to the left, the only other person in the room. Sotšuńalh were one of the more populous Monatšeri species after the kharson themselves — they could probably pass for human in a black and white image, but their skin was a deep unnatural red, hair a funny blueish-black that glittered in the light. They also all had some weird kind of mind magic that was mostly limited to just knowing what people were feeling and kind of compelling the people nearby to feel with them, which was a little uncomfortable but it wasn't like that was a big threat. (Less threatning than veela and lilin, honestly.) Beth's control of her own mind was normally enough to shove it off anyway. This woman was in the Law's military uniform, the cap set aside on her desk, showing her hair had been cut close to her skin, the blueish tinge almost making the top of her head look purplish. "Excuse me, you wouldn't happen to be Princess Elizabeth, here to see the Colonel?" She briefly switched to Monatšeri to say princess, her pronunciation of "Elizabeth" very awkward.

Beth grimaced a little at the title. "'Corporal Potter' is fine."

Something of a wry grin twisting her black lips, the woman drawled, "Of course. If you would give me one second, Corporal..." She poked at some kind of computer set into her desk for a moment, typed out something, a few more button pushes and she was sweeping up to her feet. "If you'll follow me, I'll lead you to the Colonel's office — it's right back this way..."

The woman led her down one of the hallways, doors on both sides. It was surprisingly sterile, the surfaces very clean, little signs next to the doors that she guessed were supposed to hold nameplates but which were currently empty — a couple doors were hanging open, the rooms inside blank, barely even any basic furniture inside. "Quiet place you got here," Beth muttered.

"We're just starting up," the woman said, shooting a smile over her shoulder — Beth felt the mind magic tickling at the edge of her awareness, she ignored it, the magic fizzling out. A faint frown crossed the woman's forehead, but she continued on smoothly enough. "The Defence Command's offices are busier, for the staff on station. This hallway is recruitment, we don't expect to get many prospects coming in for some months at least. In fact," she said with another bright grin at Beth, "you're the first Dimitran we've seen yet."

Beth nodded — she'd expected that much. "I don't have the language barrier to worry about."

"True, true. I've heard about that language magic your people have, it sounds fascinating." There was a curl of something almost suggestive on her voice, another pulse of mind magic prickling at her. Again, Beth simply didn't let it touch her, the magic fizzling out again when it couldn't get a hold on anything. Blinking to herself, the woman shook her head. Muttering to herself in Monatšeri, "Ooh, that feels weird..."

"Sorry, that's me. I wasn't sure if resisting the mind magic you have is rude?"

The woman's step hitched in the middle of the hallway, blinking at Beth for a second, mouthing the phrase mind magic to herself. Beth had translated it literally into Monatšeri, she wasn't sure what her people called it. "I suppose you might call it magic of the mind, mm. And I don't think I'd say it's rude — I haven't met anyone who can do it before! Excuse me, Corporal, I didn't mean to..."

She shrugged. "No harm done. Though I'd try to hold that in talking to other mages, if I were you — some people are a bit sensitive about mind magic."

"I'm not sure I can do that, it's just reflex, but I'll try. Anyway, here we are." The door at the end of the hall was hanging open a crack, the woman didn't bother knocking before opening it further and sticking her head in. She switched back to Minnisiät to ask, "Are you ready to see Corporal Potter?"

"Yes, Khamińu, send her in."

Pushing the door open the rest of the way, the woman — Khamińu, struck Beth as slightly odd-sounding for a Monatšeri, maybe from whatever the sotšuńalh had spoken before integrating — stepped out of the way and turned to give Beth a warm smile. This time she let the emotional compulsion land, but it was just a soft, pleasant, inviting feeling anyway, nothing bad, putting a little twitch of a smile on Beth's face. "Good luck, Corporal."

"Thank you, Khamińu." The hallway was wide enough for them to get around each other without any trouble, and then Khamińu was walking back the way she'd come, Beth stepping through the door into the office. It was in softer colours than the lobby and the hallway outside, the floor carpeted a greenish-blueish colour, the walls creamy off-white. There was a desk with a couple chairs on this side, a few armchairs around a small table to the left, some shelves around, what looked very much like a liquor cabinet over to that side. The office still looked somewhat un-lived-in, but there was somewhat more character to the place, trinkets on the shelves Beth didn't know enough to identify, shapes that looked like picture frames on the desk, a couple on the walls. She noticed one of what she assumed was Størrekh as a young man shaking hands with a familiar Chiss in a spotless white uniform — Mítth-räw-nuruodo, the founding military commander of the Law, long dead now.

She wasn't surprised to find that the Colonel was human, a middle-aged man with a severe, solemn face, his hair starting to grey at the temples. Størrekh sounded like it might be Girshæth, the dominant language of the Republic Beyond the Rift — the original core of the Law's fleet had come from the other side of the galaxy, humans were the plurality over there. Nobody on Earth really knew what to think about there already being humans out there in the galaxy, they hadn't seen that one coming. The assumption was that a population of humans had been removed from Earth back tens of thousands of years ago, for reasons unknown. The alien humans were equally bemused about abruptly rediscovering the actual human homeworld — their assumption had been that they'd evolved on Colussan, the capital world of the Republic Beyond the Rift — but it did have something to do with why the Law were being extra careful about security around Earth. Nobody knew what the fuck the Republic might do if they heard about them, and nobody wanted to find out.

"Have a seat," Størrekh said, gesturing at the chairs at his desk opposite him without looking up from his computer thing.

Beth did so, sitting back in the chair with her elbows on the arms and her hands resting loose in her lap, and she silently waited, watched as Størrekh continued to tap away at his computer. By the speed he was pushing buttons at, Beth thought he was maybe typing out a letter or something — the clicking was very quick for pretty much any other purpose. She thought she was maybe a little early for their appointment — it wasn't like there were very many shuttles coming up, she hadn't had the liberty of timing her arrival — so she guessed it wasn't really a surprise that she might have caught him in the middle of something. If she was interrupting, she didn't want to be a nuisance, so she just kept her mouth shut and tried to be as unobtrusive as possible.

He stopped typing eventually, made a few swipes at the screen she could barely see from this angle, pressed a couple more button before glancing up at Beth. "Update for the higher-ups. Let me bring up..." Reclining back in his chair and turning to the side a bit — the maneuverability of the thing was strongly reminding Beth of muggle swivel chairs — he had one of their handheld computers, his finger squiggling at the screen for a bit, paging through something with a few flicks. He let out a low hum, and then muttered...something in Girshæth, she didn't catch it. "Corporal Elizabeth Hazel Augusta Potter, Princess of Hiraeffermydd and Strathusk." The only Minnisiät in there were of and and — it was obvious he was reading the titles and names off phonetically, barely recognisable.

Beth tried not to grimace, and probably failed. "Just 'Corporal Potter' is fine, sir." She used her best guess of what the equivalent military rank would be in the Law, in Minnisiät. Not that there had been any official decision on how that would work yet, they hadn't gotten that far.

Størrekh let out another hum. "The protocol note says proper address should be Your Highness or my lady. Highness, odd, I assume that's a literal translation."

"It is. I'd still prefer 'Corporal'."

"All right, noted." He made a squiggly gesture on the screen that looked a lot like writing — she hoped he was making a note on her file about not wanting to be talked at like a bloody princess all the time, that'd be nice. "And then there's a long list of other titles and medals after that. Looks like you've been busy, Corporal."

Beth gave him a thin smirk. "The war with the scabs brought me all over the planet, I ended up being honoured somehow by every country I fought in."

"Scabs?"

"Ah, jusannu. 'Scabs' are what we called them, translated."

There was just a little absent nod at that, Størrekh not making any comment at the use of what she realised should probably be considered a racial slur. Not like anyone gave a damn about the scabs' feelings. "I have to admit, Corporal, I can't figure what the hell you're doing here."

She blinked. "Sir?"

"From what I can tell, you've got it made down there on Dimitra. A damn war hero before you even reached adulthood, and a recognisable one at that, could probably walk into half the bars on the planet and get your drinks paid for by somebody. The only reason you haven't been promoted up already is due to your age, I imagine you could swing this record," waving the little computer with one hand, "into any number of lucrative careers. Though you hardly need a career do you? Monarch of your own little country, honestly...

"So," he snapped, swinging around in his chair to face her. His computer coming down to slap against the surface, he leaned forward on his arms, staring hard and steady back at her with his eyes narrowed a little in a frown. "What the hell are you doing here? I imagine you know better than to think you can turn an assignment to the Fleet into your own personal luxury cruise — we get a few aristocratic sorts who expect their privilege to reach beyond their own world, but with your history, I'm thinking that's not it."

...She wasn't sure whether she should be insulted or not. "I think my request answered that question on its own. Sir."

Størrekh shook his head, jabbed at his handheld with a pointing finger. "I don't think so — the paperwork answers what you want, not why you want it. That's what I'm curious about."

"With all due respect, Colonel, is that your business?"

She'd half-expected he might be annoyed by the question — that was close enough to skirting the edge of blatant insubordination that some officers might have taken it personally — but instead Størrekh let out a single, low, grinding chuckle, face twisting with a crooked smirk. "In ordinary circumstances, maybe it wouldn't be. But I'm sure you realise, Your Highness," the honorific said rather pointedly, "that these are not ordinary circumstances. We're still new here, and we've been given very clear instructions from our commanding officers and the political leadership that we are to avoid giving offence to your political leadership by any means reasonable. That magic of yours seems damn useful, and there is a strong degree of interest in the rediscovery of our species's original home — to be blunt, we've been warned, myself and the other officers on this station, to not fuck it up."

Despite herself, she felt her lips twitch. "And you're worried I might fuck it up."

"Not on purpose, perhaps," he said, with a casual shrug of one shoulder. "But maybe you can see how having princesses and famous war heroes kicking around might make me nervous — especially when they might have ulterior motives that I don't know about. If something happens, your recruitment will be traced back to me, and someone will make it my problem. Call it an abundance of caution, Corporal."

"I understand, sir." In fact, she was abruptly reminded of a somewhat similar conversation she'd had over five years ago now. It had been in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, when the UK had first been putting together a mixed muggle–magical division which had eventually resolved into the SCFRS. Langley, formerly the head of the Crown's magical security detail, had been put in charge of the thing, and had been extremely uncomfortable with Beth's application to join. She'd only been considered technically old enough because magical British law was stupid, but he'd spent most of his time around muggles, and had thought she was too young...and then there were the politics of her being a Lady of the Wizengamot and the Girl Who bloody Lived to consider. If she weren't an omniglot — and a weirdly fast-learning one, at that — he probably would have never agreed to it.

Størrekh's reasons were somewhat different, but his position still felt familiar, in a way. She could almost imagine she was barely fifteen years old again, sitting across from Langley — desperately trying to seem far more mature and competent than she really had been, at the time. In retrospect, letting her in had probably been a foolish thing to do, but they'd been desperate, what with the invasion by literal space aliens thing. It'd turned out all right, so whatever.

This situation wasn't like that one, though. There wasn't really any good reason for Størrekh to be concerned — she might be famous, yeah, but if she did get herself killed out there in space somewhere, it honestly seemed more likely that she'd end up being turned into a martyr for the cause or whatever. Her public image these days did have the kind of vibes that would lend more easily to that than being angry with the Law, so. Also, while she might technically be the hereditary head of state of a tiny little country, they had a constitution and democratic system and shite, they'd run just fine without her, except without the having a princess part. She planned on never having children anyway, so all that would happen there was that the title would go vacant rather sooner.

There probably wasn't any point in explaining all that, for various reasons, and might not be Størrekh's primary concern anyway. He had brought up little noble shites thinking they could go on an adventure or whatever the fuck, and the idea that she might have ulterior motives — it seemed his bigger concern was that she might do something to make a scandal. That part she could address pretty easily. "How detailed is my history in that documentation you have there?"

"Not much," he said, with another little glance at the screen. "Just a summary of your military career."

"So it doesn't say that I used to own slaves, hundreds of them."

Looking back up at her, he was silent for a couple seconds, one thick eyebrow arched upward. "It doesn't, no. Past tense?"

She nodded. "I freed them as soon as I found out about it. I didn't... It's complicated. My parents died when I was an infant, and I inherited the family's assets from them — including what were essentially slaves, primarily agricultural workers — but I was raised in ignorance, I wasn't told about any of that. As soon as I found out, I freed them all. And, that was complicated to do, it– it's a long story, but it wasn't legally possible to do so, in the magical country I was in at the time. I had to secede to do it, that's how the princess thing happened."

"...I see." It was clear from his tone that he didn't see, not really.

Her lips curling into a humourless smirk, she said, "You said before, Colonel, that I have it made back at home, but as far as I'm concerned I don't. I live in a bloody palace that was built with the proceeds from slave labour. Hundreds of people, over who knows how many years, maybe thousands all added up. I have access to enough wealth to live on and never need to work a day in my life — but where did that wealth come from? They're free now, yes, but if I simply settled in at home and let things continue as they are, I... The only reason they're there is because their ancestors were enslaved by mine. It doesn't sit well, with me. Nobody is angry with me, they want me to stay, to remain at the head of our little country. I guess I've managed to win some good will trying to make things right, they like me down there. But, no matter what anyone else thinks, no matter how much good I'm told I've already done, no matter how much better our people's lives have gotten in a few short years, I still feel like I have a debt to pay.

"I'm told part of the Exploratory Command's mission is to free people in bondage, held by the jusannu and wakali. I want to help — I feel like I owe it, to all those nameless slaves of generations past who built the wealth I live on. Besides," with a self-deprecating little smile, "fighting was the only thing I was ever good at anyway. I wouldn't know what else to do with myself. That's why I'm here, Colonel, and for no other reason."

For a long moment, Størrekh simply stared at her, his face blank, fingers idly tapping at his desk. She just stared back at him, trying to give off an impression of being at ease, sitting loose and relaxed in her chair. Though, she was feeling rather self-conscious at the moment — she didn't think she'd ever spelled that out quite that explicitly to anyone before. She'd had conversations about it with Hermione and Sirius, and hinted at the subject with some of the locals now and then, but she'd never, just...laid it all out like that, bluntly. It didn't help that Størrekh was a complete stranger, and that the Law was rather zealously anti-slavery. Hell, the abolition of all forms of bondage was one of the five foundational principles the whole society was based on, and it was even the one that was normally listed first. She wasn't sure if admitting she used to be a slaveholder would help her case at all.

But then, maybe it would. Between him being human, the Girshæth name, the picture on the wall of him looking much younger and in the old uniform style shaking hands with Mítth-räw-nuruodo, Beth suspected he was part of the original fleet that had crossed the Rift to this region of the galaxy from the Law of Colussan. The government that had dominated the other side of the Rift for going on thousands of years now had gone through periods of relatively progressive governance — they were in one of those periods currently, hence the use of the name the Republic Beyond the Rift — but back in the period referred to in Minnisiät as the Law of Colussan, they'd been very much not. Human-supremacist, to the point of sometimes shading into outright genocide, misogynist, which seemed very strange for a hyper-advanced spacefaring society, an aristocratic shithole with only the thinnest pretences of democracy. Oh, and they'd also engaged in mass enslavement, sometimes of entire species of billions of people. They'd sucked, basically.

When the absolute ruler of the Law of Colussan had sent Mítth-räw-nuruodo to this region of space, he'd probably had bloody conquest in mind — they were really quite fortunate that Mítth-räw-nuruodo had had a better idea. Not like he'd actually had the forces necessary to conquer all of what was now the Law of Five, the whole reason for his political direction had been to make necessary alliances with significant powers like the Monatšeri. Some people could actually be very frank about their state's founding military leader likely not having been particularly enlightened himself, that it was very probable that he'd only done as he had out of practical concerns...and the Law he'd founded looked quite different than it did now anyway, they'd turned somewhat more radical in the decades since his death. But still.

Størrekh was old enough that he'd probably been a junior officer at the time, serving on the old fleet that had crossed the Rift. He would have started his military career in the Law of Colussan, the horrid fascist hellscape.

Beth wouldn't be surprised if he felt he had a debt to pay himself.

After some long minutes of staring, Størrekh began to move. He turned to his computer without a word, breaking their little staring contest, and started doing...something. She couldn't see the display from this angle, she really had no idea. Some swipes and button-pushes, some typing, and finally he spoke. "I can get you on a flight that'll bring you to the academy on Komfar departing on the First. You'll need to switch transports two or three times, Khamińu will get you instructions. Can you be ready to leave that soon?"

So her little story had worked, by the sounds of it, good. The first of the month was a little over two weeks away, which was longer than she wanted to sit around doing nothing — it'd already been nearly two weeks since her special assignment related to the treaty negotiations had ended — but if that was the best he could do... "Excuse me, sir, would it be possible to leave earlier? I realise we're in the middle of nowhere, but I hardly need two weeks to pack a bag."

One of Størrekh's eyebrows ticked up, shooting her an odd frown. "Today's the Thirty-Third. The First is in three days."

"Oh! I was thinking our calendar, sorry. Then yes, sir, I can be ready by then, thank you." She hesitated for a second. "Um, assuming I can get home and back here that quickly — I remember scheduling this appointment was a pain, there aren't that many shuttles going up and down."

Størrekh let out an annoyed little grunt. "Let me finish setting this up, and I'll check."

There was a staccato flurry of typing, broken up into bursts. Filling out some kind of form, maybe. Some more swiping at the display, a little more typing, and then he reached around to open up a drawer, pulled out a little device of some kind — black, looked like it might be plastic, about half the size of a playing card and maybe a couple millimetres thick. Størrekh glanced back and forth between the device and his computer, typing something one-handed.

Once he was done, he waited a few seconds, his eyes on the display, before reaching to set the device down in front of Beth. "That's your passkey," he said, pointing at the little pice of plastic. "Show it to any official in the Law, and they'll know you're an officer candidate for the X.C. travelling to the academy on Komfar. They'll help you get there if you miss a flight or you get lost along the way. It's loaded with a travel allowance — the trip will take a couple days, you'll want to pick up something to eat on the way. I also added a credit for a personal commlink, I suggest you use it."

The term was in Girshæth, but Beth knew he meant the weird little mobile phones they carried around. Probably a good idea, hers wouldn't work at all away from Earth, and wasn't compatible with their network anyway. "Oh, er, thank you, sir. Officer candidate?"

He shot her a look she didn't know how to read, before turning back to his computer to poke away at something. "Magic, Corporal. There's no damn point in sending you to train with the enlisted recruits, since our people will have no idea what to do with your special abilities. And even after you're out of training, whoever you end up serving under isn't likely to understand what you're capable of — I sure as hell don't — so won't have any clue how to command you to best effect. I suspect you'll be most useful as a junior, battlefield officer, where you'll have more freedom of action and can use...whatever the hell you can do to back up your people. I'm sure the instructors at the academy will agree with me. And besides, any prospect with the kind of experience and merit-based honours you already have would be funnelled toward officer training anyway."

...Fair enough.

"Our landing schedule is looking a little tight, on the timing. Does that palace of yours got enough room around it to land on?"

"...Yes, sir."

"Good," he said with a sharp little nod. "I'll assign a pilot to take you there and back, on the diplomatic shuttle."

She blinked at him. That...kind of seemed like a lot. Or was it? She honestly wasn't sure how much of an expense doing that would be — she had only a very limited understanding of how the Law's economy actually worked. And, when she thought about it, she was a dignitary, technically being a head of state and all, it was possible lending her a diplomatic shuttle was only an option for that reason. But that was awkward, so she didn't want to ask. "If possible, sir, please try to assign someone who can tolerate food fit for humans. I suspect someone will try to throw me a going-away party before I can escape — I wouldn't want them to just sit in the shuttle the whole time."

Størrekh let out a sharp huff, but he said, "I'll see if that can be arranged. It may be a couple hours before the order goes through. They'll met you at the Nexus, back the way you came — station security tracks passkeys," he said, pointing at the little black device again, "they'll find you. And that's it, you're all set up, Corporal. Any further questions for me?"

"...No, sir."

"You're dismissed, then. Good luck," he finished with a little nod.

"Thank you, sir."

A moment later, Beth was stepping back out into the hall, pulling the door behind her to hang open a crack, as it'd been before she'd arrived. She paused, staring down at the little black piece of plastic in her hand, feeling a little dazed. That hadn't gone quite how she'd expected, and it'd ended quickly, Størrekh suddenly all business once he'd been satisfied...

...It had gone well, though. Beth hadn't been expecting to suddenly end up with a commission in an alien bloody space navy, but she guessed she'd take it.

Mostly, as the situation she'd suddenly found herself sunk in, she was just hoping she didn't make an idiot of herself at this academy place. She'd left Hogwarts back in '95, and hadn't really gotten any proper schooling since. But she learned stupid quickly, thanks to the omniglottalism — she might be behind on a lot of things when it came to fucking interstellar society, or how the Law's military worked, but she'd catch up in no time.

Her hand closing around the passkey, she slipped it into her pocket. Right, so, while she waited for her ride back home she might as well go pick up one of those mobile phone things. It looked like there'd been an electronics shop or some shite back in the Nexus, maybe they'd be able to sell her one...

Chapter Text

69:2:24 (11th June 2001)
— Zero Day plus 05.09.09

The Law's military academy on Komfar was not quite what she'd expected. But then, that it wasn't really what she'd expected wasn't actually that much of a surprise — it's not like she knew shite about how fucking space militaries ran things.

Komfar was a cold, harsh planet hanging toward the edge of its sun's habitable zone. There was a much more populous planet in this system, Arshator, home to millions upon millions of people. Long ago, Komfar had been used as an outpost of the Chiss Expansionary Fleet — the division of their navy responsible for monitoring potential threats outside their borders, analogous to the Law's Exploratory Command — before the Chiss had been chased out of the system during their first large-scale war with the wakali. The wakali had found the hot, humid, lush environment of Arshator more to their tastes, and had quickly begun to exploit the planet for agricultural use, bringing in millions of slaves to work massive plantations. The project had barely gotten off the ground before the war with the Chiss had turned around, and the system was liberated again, the fleeing wakali leaving countless slaves behind.

Generally speaking, the Chiss didn't annex systems outside their space — their borders effectively hadn't moved in a couple thousand years now, perhaps the most stable polity on this side of the Rift — but they hadn't wanted to leave the former slaves on Arshator to their own devices either. There'd been some significant material assistance, providing them a bit of help in putting together a functional society, or offering transportation to those who still had homes to go back to. Arshator had become stable and comfortable enough that it ended up attracting other refugees from the war with the wakali, these days the planet a diverse, colourful melting pot of different cultures from all around this region of space, most of them having gone through slavery under the wakali at some point in the last couple generations.

When Mítth-räw-nuruodo's fleet reached this region, the various worlds around here had already been in negotiations to form a new interstellar government — the Free Republic of Yipsak–Marinsan had been one of the founding constituent states of the Law of Five. Arshator wasn't one of the Republic's more populous or economically productive worlds, but it was disproportionately influential in their internal politics, and had a quite high rate of enlistment in the Law's military. (Due in large part to the cultural legacy of their parents' and grandparents' enslavement under the wakali, Beth assumed.) When the Law had first begun to implement the infrastructure necessary to support such a thing as a modern spacefaring military, Arshator had volunteered Komfar as a possible site for training and testing grounds, since it wasn't as though they'd been using the less attractive planet for much of anything anyway.

While Arshator was hot and lush and teeming with life, a tropical paradise, Komfar was cool and desolate, wracked with suffocating winters and harsh, arid summers. There was native life, mostly in the form of plants and...well, Beth wasn't certain they were literally fungi and insects, but that's what they looked like. There were a lot of wide rolling grasslands, looking a lot like the steppe back on Earth, larger plants sprouting tall and colourful in the summer only to be killed off when winter came again — the animal life doing much the same thing, segmented leggy bug-looking things in a thousand different varieties seeing a boom in their population in the mild heat, sometimes growing into swarms that threatened to blot out the sky, only for the vast majority to die off in the cold, repeating year after year. The impression she'd gotten from her brief look over the materials on the environment she'd been given was that there weren't really any perennial plants, anything that would stick around year after year, instead quick-growing annuals, desperate to eke out enough growth each season to cast off seeds which would hopefully take root come spring. Life had managed to come into being on this world, but barely, grasping to survive the yearly freeze.

The fungi-looking things were pretty neat sometimes — some of them glowed in the dark. It was late enough in the season that the die-off of plants and bugs had already begun, which also happened to be prime season for the fungi. There wasn't much to see close to the complex, but in the night Beth could see patches of moody blue and green and red, Komfar becoming a patchwork of soft, subtle colour.

The harsh environment made Komfar ill-suited to colonisation, which actually made it a very good place to put a military academy. Putting such a thing on a habitable world was ideal, even if it wasn't a very nice one — space stations were expensive compared to installations on solid ground, square metre for square metre, and were far more difficult to expand when necessary — but people also generally didn't want to put them too close to population centres. There were some secrecy and safety concerns, especially recently, with the scabs' ability to disguise themselves as other species, but also military training generally required...shooting guns? for practice? And the weapons the Law had were sometimes stupidly powerful, so nobody wanted new recruits to be playing around these things anywhere near where civilians might be wandering around. Komfar was convenient due to being a habitable but unpopulated world, within the same system of a settled world, so there was already logistical and communications infrastructure in place, they hadn't needed to start from scratch like they might in a completely untouched system. Also, the old Chiss outpost had been damaged but still standing, so they'd been able to get the place running very quickly.

The structure of the old Chiss outpost formed the heart of the complex, identifiable from the antennae and shit poking out from under the eaves of the tall, angled roof. It was a common feature of Chiss architecture to have sharply-sloping roofs, communications equipment tucked up in the eaves against the wall, with retractable antennae — to keep them protected from heavy snows, you see, like on their homeworld. (And also here on Komfar, though drifting was more of a problem than direct snowfall.) The original structure had held classes once upon a time, but these days it was home primarily to some power-generation and communications systems and apartments for the instructors, space for the students gradually moved out as the academy expanded, more and more buildings popping up around its origin.

The complex was quite large at this point, dozens of different buildings hosting classrooms and dormitories for students tuned to the needs of countless different species and science and engineering labs and shooting ranges and a big fucking swimming pool, all kinds of shite. There were also garages both for the storage and repair of various kinds of vehicles, spacecraft and aircraft and ground vehicles — most of the last hovered, but Beth was surprised that there were some wheeled vehicles too. Seemed like those would be obsolete with the technology these people had, but apparently there were circumstances in which they were useful, it was complicated. She'd expected something somewhat more modest in scale, just for officer...stuff, whatever the fuck that looked like, but apparently the academy here did everything. The programme for commissioned officers, yes, but also basic training for ordinary soldiers, which split up into various different specialised programmes, and shite for naval officers, and various engineering and technical programmes, all the shite that was needed to maintain their big damn space ships and their computers or whatever, the early phases of training fighter pilots, even some shite for diplomatic officers, fucking everything.

There were apparently tens of thousands of students here at any given time which, now that she'd seen the scale of the place, wasn't nearly so surprising as it'd been when she'd first gotten a look at the documentation. It seemed like everything space-faring civilisation did was fucking huge. Seriously, this random military academy was the size of a small city...

Komfar was rather far away from Earth, almost straight on the opposite side of the Law, but Beth had been sent here for one simple reason: this was one of only a couple places that had a programme to bring foreign officers into the Law. She was pretty sure she technically didn't even qualify for this programme. The point was to teach officers with a commission in the domestic military of one of the Law's members or that of one of their galactic neighbours (like the Chiss) in the way that the Law did things, so they could quickly catch up and take a commission with the Law — Beth, of course, wasn't a commissioned officer in the first place. It was possible that an NCO might technically count — the language used in Minnisiät wasn't entirely clear on the distinction — but she honestly suspected she'd been given a special exemption, on Størrekh's authority. Maybe because of the magic, maybe because of her experience with the scabs, maybe for practical reasons, who the fuck knows, honestly.

After letting her settle in in her dorm — a small but comfortable flat shared with several women, mostly Chiss and a single sotšuńalh — she'd been rushed away by some of the instructors for... Well, she guessed it was sort of like an entrance exam. Something everyone in this programme went through, apparently, to get a feel for what skills and experience they might have, and what specific training they would need in order to be brought up to the Law's standards. It'd started off with a lengthy interview with multiple officers about her military career on Earth, to get a baseline impression of what they were working with and possibly also to test her proficiency with Minnisiät. The officers got rather excited when she explained how her omniglottalism worked — it turned out it wouldn't be a problem to arrange small, personal lessons with only a few students, so she could use her cheating knowledge-stealing nonsense to best effect. The classes in this programme were never particularly large, since the incoming officers always had such widely-varying levels of competence anyway, they'd hardly even have to do anything special.

The rest of that first day had been taken up with tests, which had been kind of a disaster. The written exams had been a problem, for obvious reasons — she thought she'd done surprisingly well with the, like, basic cultural and protocol stuff, must have picked it up during the language-learning expedition, but there were also a bunch of a questions on scientific and technical knowledge, which went completely over her head. A lot of her lessons here would end up being about that, since apparently all officers were required to at least understand the very basics of how everything worked, just in case. Then there'd been some weapons proficiency stuff, which had been less of a frustrating disaster, but still complicated. After all, Beth did know her way around firearms decently well by this point (though she obviously still preferred her wand), but the fucking laser guns and shite they had up here were completely unfamiliar to her. They'd brought her to a shooting range to demonstrate with her pistol, which she'd brought with her by force of habit — the other people around giving the woman in the alien uniform firing a primitive firearm curious looks — and she was comfortable with a couple other firearms too, rifles and shite, but she hadn't brought any with her. The instructors decided she seemed comfortable enough, hopefully it wouldn't take too long to catch her up on their fucking laser guns. Because learning how to use them, at least the basics, wasn't optional, even if she'd revert to using her wand for everything anyway.

She'd mentioned she hardly used the pistol in the first place, so one of the officers had asked for a demonstration of some of her magic as long as she was here. Beth had given the target a dubious look — it was electronic, absorbed the blast from the laser guns and fed back precise information on the shooter's accuracy — and asked if they were sure about that, because she was definitely going to break that thing. They weren't worried, so she'd drawn her wand with a flick of her wrist, and sent a simple blasting curse at the target with a casual jab — naturally, the thing exploded into a thousand fucking pieces.

The shooting range had abruptly gone dead silent, dozens of eyes staring at her, and the unassuming stick of wood in her hand.

When she turned back around, she noticed one of the instructors was wearing a wide, brilliant, toothy grin — it was honestly slightly creepy.

(Beth tried to repair the broken computerised target...thing, but while the charm worked, assembling all the pieces back together and reversing the damage, the magic must have fried something sensitive in the electronics, because it didn't switch back on. She had warned them. The next time she was in the shooting range it'd already been replaced anyway.)

The next day, Beth had been tested on basic driving/piloting skills, which had been more mixed. They were aware that she was from a 'primitive' planet, so they started her on a wheeled vehicle that honestly looked a lot like a Range Rover or some shite. It took her a little bit to figure out what all the pedals and buttons and whatever, but once she had a feel for it she went through the little course they had set up without any problems. It wasn't like she'd even driven cars that many times, but it wasn't complicated. After that was a larger troop transport thing, probably enough space in the back for six to ten kitted-up soldiers, with a big damn turret gun on the top — that was a little more shaky, not used to manoeuvering around something so big, but she only fucked up a couple times.

After that they had her in one of those aircar...things, except both larger and faster than the ones she'd seen on the language-learning trip, a military model meant to move around equipment and/or soldiers at speed. The officer in the copilot's seat with her seemed rather nervous as Beth looked around at all the controls and switches and shite, reading off the Minnisiät labels, poking through the basic information on the computer terminal built into the side. But then she took off smoothly enough, after flying around a little bit to get comfortable with it she made it through all the manoeuvres the officers told her to do. She'd never been in one of these before, but it was only flying, she was good at flying — figuring out what the fuck all the controls did was the hard part, once she had that down she was fine.

She blew the speeder bike test out of the water, of course. It was basically just broom flying, but entirely mechanical, and fast. The technology might be unfamiliar, but once she was in the air she was in the air, and that was all that mattered.

By lunch of her second day, they'd already worked up a class schedule for her. A fair part of her lessons was basic political education. Stuff about how the military in the Law was organised and how everyone was expect to act, sure, including a lengthy discussion of military law and ethics codes they were expected to obey — as much done verbally as was feasible, since she'd told them that she didn't retain written information very well — but also plenty about how the civilian administration of the Law worked, some history and stuff about relationships between major member states, it was honestly kind of a lot. Some of this was familiar from the language training, but a lot of it was new. The economics went far over her head, honestly, she simply didn't have the brain for that kind of thing. There was some weapons training, but it was a relatively small fraction of what they had her doing. It helped that she was already rated with firearms, and the actual mechanics of aiming and firing didn't change much. The more complicated part was the computerised elements, controls to tweak the intensity and the focus of the packet, there were a whole bunch of settings, but once she figured that out they were pretty much done.

Beth was a little surprised that they didn't rely entirely on weird sci-fi laser guns or whatever: they also had personal weaponry that fired projectiles, a lot like firearms. The difference was that, instead of using a tiny explosion to propel the bullet, they used super-powerful electromagnets that had the thing zipping off at stupid supersonic speeds. They mostly used energy weapons, though. The magnet-guns were useful for some things — in particular they had better range, the lack of the bright flash of light meaning it was more difficult to pinpoint which way the shot came from, so they were preferred for snipers — but the need to carry ammunition was a major disadvantage, especially with infantry rifles which might burn a large number of shots in a short span of time. Both types needed energy to function, yes, but the magnet-guns didn't use that much less than the laser guns, and they had battery packs that could be swapped in and out quickly, needing to keep track of battery charge and ammunition was just an extra complication that wasn't worth the bother. Not to mention, their laser guns also had nonlethal settings that could be used to knock people unconscious to be taken prisoner, which wasn't an option with the magnet-guns, so they were just generally more versatile. She could see why they didn't use the magnet-guns much, even though they were super quiet and honestly kind of cool. She was more comfortable with them, anyway.

...Though, thinking about it, she was having an idea. There was no reason they couldn't make a version of the magnet-guns that used conjured ammunition — the conjuration only needed to last long enough to hit something, if the spell failed after that it didn't make any difference. Someone must have had that idea already, it seemed obvious when she thought about it. She knew there were occasions in the war when mages had extended ammunition with doubling charms when they'd been in short supply, but she had no idea if there was a team somewhere working on some way to automate that. And, she wasn't an expert, but she didn't see any reason they couldn't copy the trick of using magnets with their enchanting stuff, which meant they'd be able to both eliminate the need for ammunition and electricity, making the whole thing much simpler. But she had no idea whether that would actually work or not, she'd mention it to Hermione later.

The practice with small arms was mostly in the indoor shooting range, but they also had her learn to handle, like, artillery and the equivalent of grenades and personal rocket launchers and shite, and Jesus fucking Christ, some of these things were powerful. Beth wasn't really that impressed by the grenades or the rockets — she could do better with magic, and not need to worry about ammunition or accidental misfires — but the larger, mounted rocket launchers and laser gun turrets and shite were fucking brutal. A single rocket could light up a hillside, but the mounted launchers had ten barrels, could fire all ten more or less simultaneously...and then have another round off in a few seconds — the field of fire in front of the things turned into a burning wasteland very quickly. And, the laser gun turret things had different settings like everything else, one that gave off a constant burst that was more or less the same intensity of a rifle blast, stitch across a group of infantry to easily mow them all down, another setting firing off a stun packet that would burst on impact to knock out anyone within a radius of about ten metres or so — similar to an area-effect stunner, Beth could cast them more quickly but the gun had better range — another setting that fired off single bursts every couple seconds that were obscenely powerful, the bright flash burning into her eyes, they would melt straight through armour, intense enough to basically bisect a vehicle, carving glowing craters into the stone...

Beth could replicate most of it on her own with magic, but still, fuck. Muggles running around with that kind of power available was still kind of absurd to her — it didn't even take much, rocket launchers and big laser guns mounted on those Range Rover -like things, a scaled down, only slightly weaker version of the laser guns on their bloody speeder bikes...

Speaking of the speeder bikes, they actually had Beth practising with those a bit — she was getting other flying lessons too, even starting on the prep work and trying out simulators for spacecraft, but most of her vehicle time was with the speeder bikes. Getting her more familiar with the different settings and assist features and shite — like a holographic map projected up so she could see what was around her and where she was going, that seemed useful — practising flying not just with herself but in formation with others. And, of course, actually using the laser guns mounted on the things. She thought she actually managed to impress the instructors with how quickly she managed to pick up nailing targets at speed, though they did seem weirdly amused when she came to a stop...and once they were done with their comments someone pointed out that there was computer targeting shite, to help the pilot aim. Had totally forgotten that was there, oops? That did make it a little easier, since she didn't have to perfectly line the bike up with the target to hit it, but honestly pressing buttons and shite was too much of a distraction, and apparently her 'free-hand' aim wasn't that much worse than the computer anyway, so whatever.

And they didn't just have her practise flying and shooting with the things, but she also got lessons in the technology that went into them, and how to do some basic maintenance stuff, repairs for common things that might go wrong in the field. Beth got the feeling pretty quickly that they were already figuring out a specific role for her. But that was fine, if they wanted her flying these things she had no complaints — she'd spent a lot of battles flying around on a broom anyway, it was basically the same thing.

There was some physical training too, of course. Obviously they still had to check if she was fit enough by their standards, and it wasn't like her medical records back on Earth were any standard that they recognised anyway. There was a medical exam, but that was thankfully rather brief and not too invasive — their scanning equipment was much better than muggles back home had, unsurprisingly — and she'd been keeping in shape since the active fighting had ended, so the fitness tests weren't any trouble for her. That part was actually very brief, summarily running her through tests to make sure there weren't any issues — the one thing that technically counted as part of their physical training that they lingered on was handling zero gravity. The gravity on their spacecraft was generated, so if something happened to knock the power out (like damage during a battle, say), they might find themselves needing to fix shite or fight while floating around. For those lessons, Beth and a couple dozen enlisted recruits who were getting the same treatment were brought on a training ship up into orbit, once they were ready for the day's lesson the gravity was switched off and they got started.

Some of the others had serious problems, a few even sicking up the first couple times, but the biggest issue Beth had was stopping herself from giggling like a maniac the whole time — it turned out she loved zero-gee, it was fun.

There were a lot of different things she was learning, and the pace they were putting her at it was mercilessly fast — if she didn't have cheating omniglot powers she'd probably find it overwhelming. She thought the number of different subject areas and the speed they were running her through them had at least partially been designed as a test of exactly how good she was at learning things. It wasn't long before she got confirmation of that guess, one of her instructors apologising for how hard they'd been pushing her the first time she managed to give herself a migraine by cramming too much too quickly. He'd suggested they would slow down, but Beth had insisted she was fine. When she did give herself a migraine, then obviously she had to be done for the day, but there was no reason they couldn't pick back up at the same pace once she was recovered — trust her, she'd done this before, it was fine. They didn't know shite about magic, so they kind of just had to take her word on that one. She'd end up curled in her bed completely miserable about once a week — on the Law's calendar, she meant, which had five-day weeks — but she'd rather get through the training part as fast as possible. If it got her out there fighting space slavers more quickly, worth it.

(She was getting the impression some of her instructors had decided she was slightly mad, but plenty of the muggles and mages she'd served with back on Earth had the same feeling, so that was hardly new.)

Eventually, the officers in charge of the academy decided they wanted a demonstration — they didn't know shite about what her magic could do, only rumours leaking out from Earth, they wanted to see what she was capable of themselves. She wasn't sure what kind of demonstration would be useful, after a bit talking with the instructors they come up with an idea of what was basically a small mock battle. So, around the end of her fourth week on Komfar, they packed up and flew some miles away from the station, finding a spot in the middle of a field somewhere they could blow shite up without breaking anything important.

Beth was a little surprised by the resources they were throwing at this thing. For personnel, they roped in a whole insa-koloma — an element she thought of as the equivalent of a troop, two sections (mare-koloma) of four fireteams (orika) of five men each, for a total of forty people. Forty-one, including the officer candidate attached to them. They'd also have a bloody hover-tank with them, and a team of three speeder bikes. The armour wouldn't be manned, automated with computers, because expecting her to take down vehicles with non-lethal measures just wouldn't be fair. They were old models, apparently, they didn't give a damn if she blew them the fuck up — they'd either be used as automated opponents in mock battles or just dismantled anyway.

Forty-one people, three speeders, and a fucking hover-tank seemed like a lot to her, but she realised that the point was to be impressive. The instructors talking to her about it wanted to go for the maximum number of opponents Beth thought she could face while having a reasonable chance of success — they'd been alternately bemused and frustrated with her answers not being very informative beyond I'm pretty sure you'd need more than that. Using stunners did limit her somewhat, with the big guns firing at her too, she thought forty men gave her reasonable odds for success will still making the point pretty damn clear. If she did lose, oh well, they'd be using stun settings too so it wasn't like it'd be the end of the world. Would make their little demonstration kind of anticlimactic, though.

Getting everyone out to the place was a little bit of a pain. Between the number of people involved — Beth, her forty-one opponents, a few of the instructors, a personnel officer from the Exploratory Command (with an assistant), some kind of diplomatic officer (not sure what his role here was exactly), a political official who happened to be on-site at the moment, and two of the three senior officers in charge of the whole damn academy (plus an assistant) — they couldn't fit all of them onto a single transport. They'd ended up splitting them between two aircraft, some of them instead taking one of the senior officers' personal ship, the remainder packed into the hover-tank, which could transport at least a fireteam, if not very comfortably. (It'd be empty for the demonstration, of course.) The aircraft Beth was on carried some of the recruits, the instructors, the diplomatic officer, and the official, the latter two of which monopolised her attention for pretty much the entire (thankfully brief) flight, plying her with questions.

The diplomatic officer was a taqwang woman named K̢amḡau, in the same kind of leggings, tunic, and overrobe Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe tended to wear — while Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe's had been in the black and red of the Law, hers were primarily in blue-ish violet and a pale leafy green, though both of their tunics were belted in with a black sash decorated with white six-pointed stars. Beth had learned since that the style had been adapted from the formal diplomatic dress used by the Chiss, though rather simplified, much less garish. (She'd seen pictures, they were ridiculous, would probably fit right in with British magical nobility.) Taqwang were one of the peoples native to this region of space, long and lanky and furred — not thickly, mostly just a thin soft fuzz, though it was much longer along the outsides of their arms and down their spine up the back of their heads — K̢amḡau's fur a rich brownish-red where it was thicker, fading to a lighter, almost pinkish colour where it was thinner. K̢amḡau had somewhat oversized, pointed ears, face protruding in a way that seemed almost dog-like to Beth's eyes. K̢amḡau had an odd rasping accent speaking Minnisiät, the thin smirk pulling at her lips as Beth described lighting up scabs revealing pointed teeth, had an almost gleeful vicious character to it. Not directed at Beth, but it was still faintly unnerving.

(Some aliens just looked vaguely scary, especially the ones descended from predatory animals. Beth was certain she'd get used to it eventually, as she got familiar with more of the different kinds of people they had out here, and in the meanwhile just tried not to let any momentary discomfort show.)

Qholaš, the political official, had some kind of position in the organs in the Law's government that interfaced with the military, though Beth wasn't certain what his role was, precisely. Civilian oversight? swinging through for some kind of inspection, maybe? Whatever. He was sakhińalh, one of the species of the Monatšeri who'd originally been taken by the kharson as slaves, thousands of years ago, one of the less populous ones. He was very tall, easily two metres and probably taller, his skin a blue so dark it was almost black, completely hairless, and with a gleam to it that almost made it look like polished metal, despite that Beth could see it stretch and wrinkle like normal whenever he made an expression. His facial features were almost human, if somewhat more pointy, though with a very prominent, bony brow ridge, a visible divot running down the centre of his head from the top of his forehead back. (Marking the gap between the hemispheres of his brain, apparently, the sakhińalh skull was shaped such that it was actually visible.) He was much quieter than K̢amḡau, seemingly not interested in the approaching demonstration...though if he weren't interested, Beth doubted he would have gotten himself in to observe — she suspected sakhińalh emotional expression was just more subtle than she was used to, so she wasn't picking up on it. Though he definitely was sceptical that she'd really be able to fight that many people with a little wooden stick, he'd just have to wait and see.

The two flying transports and the Brigadier's spaceship landed at more or less the same time — by the look of it, the hover-tank had already gotten here ahead of them, waiting on one of the low-lying hills covered with deep greenish grass starting to yellow with the change of seasons, flower stalks already stripped bare by the wind. As many people as they had with them, it took a moment to unload, the armed and armoured soldiers milling about, the less thickly-dressed staying back well out of the way to avoid getting nudged with anything hard, but before long they were streaming down the ramp. Well before she reached the doors, Beth could feel the wind clawing through the ship, sharp and dry and fragrant, the smell reminding her of a mix of mushrooms and dried thyme.

Beth eventually stepped down onto the ramp, and was immediately blasted with a merciless autumn winds of Komfar, threatening to steal all warmth from her exposed skin. It was daytime, so it should be above freezing, but between the chill and the wind it still felt fucking cold. Thankfully it was a simple matter to part the wind and keep herself warm with a couple charms. As long as she had her wand out, she offered the same to K̢amḡau and Qholaš, as well as Mirakani, Spethcor, and Kishmalhu, the instructors who'd come along — the soldiers were more bundled up, but the lot of them were just in normal clothing. The charms wouldn't last forever, they'd burn out once the power she put into them was expended, but they wouldn't distract her while she was supposed to be performing, it was fine.

When they met up with the other officers (and their assistants), Beth went ahead and offered them the charms too. The Commodore — a rather stiff, older-looking human man she suspected had come over on Mítth-räw-nuruodo's old fleet — seemed very dubious about the whole thing, but the Brigadier — a kharson veteran of the Law's original war with the wakali a generation ago — grinned at the feeling of the magic snapping into effect around him, looking almost giddy. There was a little bit of discussion about where exactly they wanted to set up. The hill they were on wasn't very high, but there was still a wide, low spot just over there, their audience should have a relatively good view if they had the 'battle' below. They made a rough guess of how long it'd take to get into place, and decided on a start time, giving them a little bit of wiggle-room to set up. Once they'd made sure their comms were synced, Beth set hers to count off the last five seconds aloud for her — she wouldn't want to be taken by surprise. The speeder bikes zipped off with a whine of high-powered repulsors in operation, the hover-tank starting down the hill with a low thrum she could feel vibrating in her teeth, and with some final acknowledgements to the senior officers the forty-two participants started down the hill.

The soldiers were standing a bit back from Beth, giving her funny looks. It had been explained to them what was going on here, and she guessed it was possible some of them might have seen a video of one of her play-duels with Ḑiguqhȧnna, but that didn't mean they had any real idea what to expect. Forty-one men, three speeders, and one bloody hover-tank against just her would seem like absurd odds to someone who'd never seen magic before — and that she didn't seem nervous at all, casually sauntering down the hill with her hands in her pockets, was probably just vaguely unnerving. She guessed it doesn't help that she wasn't visibly armed at all, and not armoured like they were either — Beth had said they should be, in case they accidentally got hit with shrapnel from her blowing the tank or one of the speeders crashing — instead just in the black and red Law uniform she'd been given since arriving. She'd considered bringing a pistol, so she could hold a shield with her wand and pick off her opponents with off-handed shots, but she didn't think pinning herself down like that was a great idea. That one magic person thought she could kick all their arses was probably very weird.

It'd been a while since she'd been around soldiers who weren't used to magic yet. This already hadn't been a fair match, but these poor sods were even going to be surprised — they were definitely going to lose.

They were maybe halfway down the hill when the officer made his way over to her. He wasn't in the foreign officer programme, signed on straight out of university here in the Free Republic of Yipsak–Marinsan. He was Mara, one of the people native to this part of space (the ones Marinsan in the country's name referred to) — their society were actually native speakers of Minnisiät, the language had been common around here before the Law had spread it. They were very reptile-looking, big and thick, covered in scales ranging from dark grey to deep blue to greenish, with occasional speckles of orange and yellow. They were big and strong-looking people, but the few Beth had talked to had a slow, calm, dignified sort of bearing to them, she actually found them kind of pleasant to be around. Walking up to her, Abisa gave her a languid nod. "Corporal."

She nodded back. "Sergeant." They'd both come out of their respective programmes as lieutenants — the Law divided up the spot in the rank structure she was translating into English as "lieutenant" into more than just first and second lieutenant, but exactly what the rank ended up being depended on their specific posting, it was complicated — but obviously they weren't there yet. She wasn't sure why Abisa was called a sergeant for the moment, actually, just an honorary thing for candidates at some point in the programme? Whatever.

"I am curious as to whether you had any thoughts on how we want to draw up our positions."

"You're the one with all the soldiers," she said with a little shrug. "You can arrange them however you like."

"So, you do intend to fight us all yourself."

"Yes." Shooting him a smirk, Beth drawled, "Limiting me to non-lethal spells almost makes it a fair fight."

With the visor of his helmet up, she could make out his blocky, scaly jaw work in silence. "Spells?"

"That's what I said." Of course, the Minnisiät word she was using made it sound silly, more of the sort of language you'd expect from some charlatan fortune teller or children playing pretend. Not something serious, that would be useful against forty-one sci-fi laser-guns and a big damn hover-tank.

Abisa was silent for a moment, before saying, "I'll admit, Corporal, I have absolutely no idea what I should expect from magic spells. It's difficult to plan for something I've never seen before."

"Fair enough. Want a hint?"

"I won't refuse one if you're offering."

"I'm a lot faster than you'd expect — watch your flank." It would hardly be a very interesting demonstration if she could just apparate around and pick them all off without the poor bastards even being able to get a bead on her. Of course, warning him about that would make it a more difficult fight, but it wouldn't exactly be very sporting otherwise.

He nodded, slow and smooth, giving her a look she didn't know how to read. Sceptical, maybe? She didn't know Mara faces well enough to guess. "I see. I will keep that in mind."

"Sure. Good luck, Sergeant."

"To you as well, Corporal."

As they reached the big flat open spot they'd be fighting on, Beth angled away, after weaving her way through some of the soldiers — wearing similar armour in grey and blood red, but coming in different shapes and sizes to accommodate the physiology of different species — beginning to pull away from the group, opening up some space. She wasn't sure exactly how far apart they should be at the start, though it didn't really matter that much, since she'd be apparating around anyway. The slope of the hill tapered off until the ground was relatively level, but Abisa had a pretty sizeable group, so they'd want to continue on, Beth glancing back and forth between his group and their audience up on the hill...

They came to a stop eventually — Beth stood facing Abisa's group, a good two dozen metres away, waiting with her hands clasped behind her back. She'd noticed that Abisa had collected a handful of people she assumed were the NCOs to himself, as the group came to a halt the soldiers kept moving, shuffling around to take positions. Abisa had put the hover-tank at the centre of their formation. A hunk of the same dark silvery metal they used in their military ships about the size of a small house — the sides faceted to make it more likely to present a glancing angle to any shot reaching it, a mess of hard sharp angles — there was a long gun barrel extending from the rotating top piece, affixed to either side shapes that she knew would normally be built-in rocket launchers. For this test, they'd replaced the ammunition with a special kind of grenade which flung out all this sticky shite meant to restrain anyone that got caught up in it. That stuff might actually be a pain to deal with — Beth should be able to just vanish the stuff, but if they got lucky it might slow her down long enough to get caught with a stunner. The grenades would have been fixed onto little seeking rockets, set to loose their contents once they neared their target, so the bloody things would follow her too.

Though the special concealment charms they'd used against the scabs' biotech should also fool the tracking methods used by the rockets, so it wouldn't be a big problem. Still had a better shot of downing her than most of the other weapons Abisa had at his disposal — especially since they wouldn't be able to use their stun grenades if she was too close.

It seemed like Abisa had ordered his sections to arrange their fireteams evenly in a circle around the hover-tank, forming two rings of twenty men, off set by an eighth-turn so they could cover each other no matter what angle she was coming from. Abisa couldn't get all his guns on her at any one time, but no matter which angle she approached the hover-tank from she'd still have anywhere between fifteen and twenty-five opponents who might have an angle on her (depending on the geometry of the hover-tank on that side). That wasn't a bad idea. He only needed one lucky shot to end the game, so as long as there were some people shooting at her he still a chance, and if the hover-tank was being covered from all angles she couldn't just apparate straight behind it and knock it out immediately. Looks like he'd taken her little bit of advice and made this rather harder for her.

Not impossible, just harder.

It only took a moment for all of the soldiers to get into position, standing in firing stances with their rifles already raised — apparently Abisa had warned them to expect her to appear from any angle at any time, whatever his doubts taking her advice to watch his flank at face value. And then they simply stood there, waiting. The fireteam facing her direction had their rifles pointed right at her, prepared to fire the instant the 'battle' started, Abisa standing just inside the ring with a pistol to hand. And they stood, watching each other, the grasses around them swaying and shaking in the harsh Komfar winds — hardly touching her at all, though she could hear the whistling and the rustling — Beth putting on an act of seeming calm and unconcerned. Maybe a little bit as an intimidation tactic, but mostly just because she was aware there were senior officers watching. Nothing wrong with a little showmanship.

The three long, narrow shapes of the speeder bikes zipped by a few metres overhead with a high whine of anti-gravity engines.

They waited another couple minutes, by the rising tone of the speeder bikes' engines they were coming around for another pass, when a low, vaguely feminine voice in her pocket said, "Five." Unclasping her hands, her wand drawn with an easy flick, "four," the fireteams in sight tensing at the appearance of what they realised must be a weapon of some kind. She shook herself out of her previous standing position with a couple little hops, "three," sucking in a quick deep breath, settled on the balls of her feet in a slightly wider stance, ready to move. "Two." Releasing her breath, she pushed her magic out, thick enough she felt her own aura snap at the air, the interference with Komfar's ambient environment turning it briefly visible. The soldiers noticed, tensing, rifles from the fireteams to left and right adjusting to aim at her, Abisa bringing his pistol into line — nobody fired, disciplined enough not to jump the gun at something freaky happening. "One."

Magic sizzling bright and hot and giddy in her veins, Beth grinned.

She turned into an apparation even as her comm started to say time, reappearing on the opposite side of the formation — rifles zeroed in on her, but before they could fire she cast a wide-angled banishing charm with a broad swish of her wand. A dozen soldiers were sent flying off their feet, some of them bouncing off the tank with a clanging of armour against armour, the faceted sides of the tank conveniently turning them to the sides and out of the way of her follow-up spell. She cast the Thousand Lances with a vertical slash, the angry red spellglow zipping out toward the tank, the lower edge popping off against the ground with a series of explosions—

The entire length of the curse burst into noisy overlapping clouds of fire slightly too soon, from around the flames and smoke Beth could make out the bright white glow of stressed shielding.

...Shielding could block spells. Did she know that shielding could block spells? She wasn't sure if she'd ever tested it before. How did that even work, anyway? Could it only block some spells?

Now seemed like as good a time as any to test it.

But right this second, the soldiers were recovering from her teleporting around and tossing them about and summoning explosions from fucking nowhere, finding their feet or rolling up to their knees, rifles swinging back around to her. She could hear a whine of the speeder bikes coming back around, cast a shield charm — she did know that shields charms could block blaster shots, so in retrospect she should have guessed it'd work the other way around too — catching the first few shots as she turned her head toward the sky to look for— Ah, there they were.

Beth apparated up, reappearing to hang in the air ten metres off the ground — the spot she'd been standing a second ago suddenly lit up with bright blue bursts of the speeders' overpowered stun shots, she could see them just to her right and a few metres under her closing in. As she started to fall, she whipped her wand downward, a bright red spellglow extending out from the tip, several metres long, as one of the bikes zipped by it she yanked back on her wand, casting a summoning charm at the same time with her off-hand—

She grimaced at the sudden tearing pain in her shoulder as she was yanked to the side, the spell itself keeping her wand from simply being ripped out of her fingers, the world spinning dizzily around her, her momentum was carrying her sharply downward, a carefully-timed wandless banishing charm sent her swinging back up in the other direction. A few delicate charms stopped her spin, Beth dragged along by the spellglow extending from her wand, the other end wrapped around some part of the speeder bike, flying five or six metres over the grassy ground belly-down. A quick featherweight charm to stop herself from falling again — which also cut off the pain in her shoulder, should have thought of that first — the bike was turning, Beth's momentum sending her swaying around at a dizzying angle, blue bursts of wildly-aimed blaster bolts coming nowhere near her—

A turn of her wrist and a yank against the tether charm flung her closer to the bike and up at an angle — the spell had tried to pull the bike closer and down, but with their relative masses she was easier to move — Beth released the spell, wind clawing at her eyes and making her hair dance and her clothes ruffle (she was pretty sure she'd lost her cap already), she re-cast the tether and yanked, pulling herself toward the bike, it turned on her again, trying to manoeuvre around to get a firing angle, she pulled on the tether again and angled a banishing charm at the ground to try to cut off her sideways momentum, another tug on the tether to close the distance—

—Beth slammed against the top of the speeder bike chest-first, flailed to hook an elbow around the back of the seat before it could shake her. With the help of another tether aimed toward the tip of the bike, she pulled herself up into the seat, bracing her arm against the handle so she didn't faceplant against it like a clumsy idiot. Her stomach swooped as the bike took a few sharp manoeuvres, trying to shake her off, clenching her thighs and hooking her heels on the posts and holding her tether spell to keep herself locked in place, she poked at the display on the trunk of the bike, bringing up the controls for—

...Son of a bitch. The computer pilot was locked in, she couldn't turn it off. Oh well.

Dropping the tether, she cast a Lance of Modestus right at the controls from point-blank range — the powerful two-stage piercing curse tore through the body of the speeder, a noisy burst of sparks let off as the sensitive electronics within were obliterated. The bike immediately slowed, listing as it began drifting to the ground, Beth pushed up to get her feet on the seat and then jumped, a banishing charm speeding the bike on its way to the ground. Up in the air again, the wind tossing her hair and potshots sizzling by — metres away, trying to get lucky — Beth looked around for the tank and the soldiers. There they were, fuck, that speeder had dragged her along further than she'd realised...

Beth apparated just as she went weightless, the force of her banishing expended, and landed lightly on top of the hover-tank. There was a quick series of clunk-fwoosh-hiss-ing as the tank shot off some of its homing rockets — don't forget about those — while Beth tossed an area stunner in one direction, the reddish ball of spellglow disappearing over the side of the tank, and then a second over the opposite side. She could just blow this thing right now, but she wanted to test if shields stopped unblockable spells — so instead she tossed herself up with a strong banishing charm, the world tilting around her as she leaned over to aim, cast Sirius's favourite vanishing curse with a tight slash, the invisible arc racing down toward the tank. She didn't wait for the spell to land, couldn't sit still too long so close to the soldiers, she picked a spot on the ground and apparated again. Since she'd been turned in the air at a funny angle she landed badly, rolling on the ground once before popping up to her feet, threw up a shield spell, conjured a dozen hawks to go harass the soldiers — even after a decade learning magic transfiguration was still her weakest subject area, but it was more than good enough for something so small — there was a crescendo in the high whining as the bikes came streaking in, she disapparated again, moving about a third of the way around Abisa's formation surrounding the tank, tossed off another group stunner, five armoured soldiers caught in the flash of reddish light and collapsing like puppets with their strings cut, rifles falling from nerveless fingers.

It turned out shielding didn't stop 'unblockable' spells — the tank split open as the vanishing curse tore a fissure through it, sizzling and sparking as the electronics were damaged, Abisa's men wisely scrambling to open up distance in case the thing blew. Noted.

The soldiers were streaming away from the tank to gather together toward one side. She would guess Abisa had immediately realised that the tank was dead weight, and with his reduced numbers — by the unconscious figures on the ground and the number of men she could see through the bolts flashing against her shield charm, Beth thought she'd already knocked out around a quarter of them — staying in their rings would spread them too thin. He was probably too smart to concentrate them too closely, so they could easily all be knocked out with a couple of stunning charms, but he would arrange them into a tight-er formation, so they could keep an eye on her at all times and get as many guns on her at once as possible.

Well, they couldn't have that. Beth apparated up on top of the tank again, teetering a little to get her balance — her vanishing curse had carved all the way through, the two halves fallen to the grass, the uneven ground making the half she was on tilt a little. She got a quick glance around, spotted Abisa standing at the centre of the group of soldiers still retreating from the tank, two streams coming around the dead hunk of metal to join them. Rifles started to swing her way, but she was already gone, reappearing on the ground, a jab and an upward wrench of her wand, "crystallizātam," the energy of the spell burning through her arm. A long wall over two metres high made of blueish-blackish crystal, glittering weakly in the sun, surged up out of the ground between Abisa's growing formation and the streams of soldiers still moving to join them, cutting them off from each other. Abisa maybe had two-thirds of them, the rest cut off. The wall wasn't that long, they'd move around it given time, but she wasn't going to allow them that much.

But first she had to occupy Abisa's section. No, first she had to deal with those sticky rockets, a harsh hissing on the air as they finally came back around. (Moving around all the time must be messing with them.) She quick cast a heat-concealing paling over herself, then apparated again, which should throw them off, problem solved. Sucking in and out a quick breath, she coated part of the ground around her with magic, spread with a wide swirl of her wand — and she transfigured hundreds of blades of grass into snakes, simultaneously. She grit her teeth against the burning in her arm, the bones of her wrist screaming and pins and needles shooting through her fingers, hissed through gritted teeth, «Attack the people behind that wall just there.» The mass of snakes rushed off, the ground almost seeming to shift and roll like a moving carpet as they obeyed, letting out little excited hisses along the way. With only stun bolts to put them down, that should keep Abisa and his people occupied for at least a little bit.

She heard the whine of the speeders' engines approaching again, she apparated across the battlefield before they could get a shot off, as they zipped over her head seeming to wiggle with confusion at her sudden disappearance. Turning, she spotted the surviving soldiers cut off from Abisa, clumping together between her spelled wall and the tank, beginning to move away from her as a group, taking wild shots at her as they retreated, caught on an absently-cast shield charm.

Beth smirked.

A blink later, and she was standing feet behind the soldiers in the 'rear' — or what had been the rear a second ago. She stunned one and then a second before they reacted, spinning around, rifles coming around, so she apparated again, appearing in the middle of the clump of their group, another stunning charm, a flick of her wand cast a stripping hex, sending the rifle of the quickest to react flying out of their arms, she summoned one and then stepped out of the way to stun another, the one she'd summoned crashing into the disarmed one, who'd started rushing to tackle her, both topping to the ground, she caught a rapid burst of shots on a shield charm, apparated away and tossed a group stunner on them, once the light had gone out jumped right back into the middle of the group again, a binding hex wrapping one up in glowing orange light, spun out of the way of shots fired at point-blank range, hooking the soldier by the elbow and yanking him into a stumble, stunning him before he could recover, yanked the last standing figure, trying to flee toward the end of the wall to join the others, with a strong summoning charm, hit them with a stunner even as they were still tumbling on the grass, tagged the bound soldier with a stunning charm just in case...

...and that was all of them. Good.

She heard the high whine of engines pitch up as the speeders approached, scanned the sky — there they were, they'd fallen out of formation at some point, their angles of approach off by nearly ninety degrees. Beth waited for a couple seconds, and as they got close enough to better judge distance she apparated up and ahead, with a twirl of her wand filled the air below her with a storm of glittering rainbow sparks. One of the speeders flew through it a second later, and the sparks seemed to be attracted to the metal of the machine, suddenly crawling with colourful fingers of electricity, she could hear the sizzling from here, the speeder visibly listing as the magic messed with something in there. She turned in mid-air, spotting the other bike, apparated down to the ground, her momentum bringing her down to a knee, tossed up another tether charm, the red spellglow racing upward, a sharp tug had the other end wrapping around the nose of the bike as it zipped into view — perfect timing, ha — before it could pull the line taut she jabbed her wand against the ground. She might be easier to move than the speeder, but the speeder couldn't pull all of Komfar — the nose jerked downward as the line pulled taut, its straight flight swinging into a downward curve, in a couple blinks the speeder crashed hard, with a crunching of metal and a snapping and sizzling of shattered electronics. Beth tossed a complex blasting curse at the wreck, just in case, the bike disappearing in a burst of flames. The other one was still flying, if more slowly and more clumsily than before, so she might as well take care of that, hopped back up into the air and cast sectumsempra with a silent slash of her wand, the whine of engines abruptly cutting off as the bisected speeder began to tumble down to the grass below.

Another apparation brought her down to the ground again, landing roughly, she rolled over her shoulder to bleed off the extra momentum. Kneeling on the grass, she took a moment to breathe, passed her wand to her left hand to shake out her right — some of those spells had been a little powerful, but the pain and the stiffness wasn't that bad, she hadn't done any serious damage yet. She only stalled long enough to catch her breath, before popping back up to her feet and disapparating.

She reappeared perched on top of the crystalline wall she'd used to split up Abisa's men. She'd whittled down about half of them, around twenty or so left — they were clumped together in a tight circle, covering each other as they fired at the snakes in the grass, occasionally kicking at one that got too close. Abisa had gathered them all together for her, how nice of them. She tossed one group stunner down at them, and then a second one before rifles spun up toward her, and she apparated away before any of the shots reached her.

Behind the wall, she waited a breath for her second group stunner to go off before apparating a second time right on the heels of the first, appearing in the middle of their formation. A few bodies were still collapsing limply to the ground — it looked like the two group stunners had gotten seven or eight or so — she tagged two more with stunners, rifles were coming in at her, she apparated over to the edge of the group, catching a soldier right on the outside with a binding hex. Hooking an arm around their (her?) shoulder, Beth tossed out another group stunner, and already shots were coming in at her, she ducked behind her captive, letting them get hit instead, sent them flying off at her attackers with a banishing spell and disapparated again.

She immediately stunned another soldier on landing — from inches away, they were down before they knew what was happening — rifles turned to her even as her human shield crashed into a clump of survivors, sending their shots wide — she still put up a shield charm just in case, catching a couple lucky shots. She stunned another, and then another, turned to hex a third but they already had their rifle up, her hair standing on end with a sudden flare of shock, but she saw it coming in time to bat the bolt aside with her bare hand, put them down with another stunner before apparating away again. She was close in, another stunner dropping one of them in a blink, another was lurching forward to shoulder-check her, a tether charm caught their arm and tugged them into one of his fellow's line of fire, she threw up a shield to block further shots from that angle, stunned another, a stripping hex disarming another the instant before they could get a shot off, stunned them too.

There were only a few left, now, she stunned one trying to pick themself up off the ground (must have gotten knocked over at some point), the last three scrambling away, rifles fixing on her. She apparated right into the middle of them, but they hadn't even tried to shoot at her, even as she reappeared their hands already pulling something from their backs, twisting at...

Stun grenades — suicide move, they meant to take her out with them to force a draw. Clever.

Not going to work, though. She waited another second for them to prime the grenades before shoving all three of them down to the ground with a depressing hex — then she simply disapparated before the grenades went off. Glancing around the battlefield, strewn with unconscious armoured figures, spinning in place as she looked— That one was moving, she tagged them with a stunning charm before they could try anything. That seemed to be everyone.

«Are any of them still awake?» The soldiers had managed to stun most of the snakes, but she'd transfigured so many there were still a good dozen or more of them squirming around the place. It took a moment, but pretty soon her little helpers confirmed that all of them were down...with some complaints that they were all covered with hard shells and not good for eating, she couldn't help rolling her eyes. A wide detransfiguration effect dispelled all the snakes, a counter-charm sent at the crystalline wall had it swiftly crumbling to dust.

She spotted the hill the senior officers were on, identifiable by the shapes of the transports they'd taken over — so she sent them a cheery wave, and a smug smirk they definitely couldn't see from that far away.

Their observers didn't start coming down the hill immediately, by the look of it discussing something up there. Beth quick messaged Mirakani to confirm that the 'battle' had been called before moving to revive the unconscious recruits scattered around. She did know an area-effect revival spell, but she didn't want anyone to get hurt flailing around — revival spells were a hell of a rush — so she did them one by one instead. The officers didn't seem to be in any rush to join them down here, and Mirakani hadn't told her to return to the top of the hill either, so.

Once he'd gotten his bearings, Abisa seemed a little embarrassed that he'd gotten his arse kicked so badly by a single woman. It hadn't been that easy, though, it could have been worse — she'd actually had to be careful about her initial approach, and that had been a lot of apparating to do in such a short period of time. She tactfully didn't explain that they would have been fucked instantly if this were a real fight. (If nothing else, she could have just dropped fiendfyre on them and stood back while they were all incinerated.) No, not everyone on Dimitra was like her, people who could fight like that were one in a million — Sirius had recently joked about her joining the scary bastard club or whatever — think of it like facing up against one of those legendary kharson sorcerer-kings if that made him feel better about it. She had said before they'd started that this would only almost be a fair fight, seriously, they did fine.

Abisa checked up on all his men — by the sound of it, some of them had a bit of bruising, but otherwise they were all fine. If she weren't shite with healing magic, and if most of them weren't aliens whose biology she was completely unfamiliar with, Beth might offer to fix them up, but she honestly didn't know what she'd be able to do about just a little bruising anyway. It wasn't long after Abisa had gotten updates from everyone when her comm made noises at her: Mirakani was telling them to come up to the hill, for the recruits to board the aircraft and Beth, Abisa, and his NCOs to report to the senior officers. She was a little confused by the unnecessarily lengthy wording, but then she noticed Abisa started moving immediately, presumably they'd both gotten the same message. Some of the soldiers were still missing equipment, once they'd tracked it all down — Beth summoned a couple things, someone's rifle ended up pinned underneath one half of the tank, she levitated it up a foot so they could yank it out — they all turned to start up the hill.

With the faceplates down, she couldn't begin to try to make out expressions, but the helmets still made it obvious when people were looking at her. They were standing back rather further than they had on the way down, wary. Beth acted as though she didn't notice anything was wrong, her hands tucked in her pockets, casually trudging up the hill.

She'd seen that kind of reaction before, from people who were new to magic, or just hadn't seen someone like her pull off crazy shite. They'd get over it. And if they didn't, the Law was a big place, chances were they'd never be assigned to the same posting anyway. It wasn't a big deal.

(Even if people being frightened of her did make her rather uncomfortable.)

Just as she was reaching the top of the hill — toward the middle of the crowd, Abisa's people already splitting up to make for the two aircraft — Mirakani called, "Potter! The Brigadier wants to know if you can bring people with you through that teleporting thing."

"It'll make you dizzy as anything the first few times, but yes."

Apparently they were asking about apparation for planning the trip back — some of them had come here in the tank, and that thing wasn't going anywhere anymore. She also got the feeling that at least part of this discussion was only going to include the people who needed to know, hence bundling up the recruits right way. They probably meant to dismiss the NCOs once they were done with the debrief, and she wouldn't be surprised if K̢amḡau and Qholaš were sent off early as well.

Once the recruits had all disappeared into the aircraft, Spethcor pulled up a recording of the 'battle' on a large-screened computer pad. There must have been camera drones capturing the whole thing, she hadn't noticed — not a great shock she hadn't, those things could be very small. Immediately, Mirakani asked Abisa for an explanation of his opening formation. The officers seemed a little bemused by Beth giving him advice before the fight — she had to make sure they put on a good show, of course — and they had to admit that they didn't know enough about magic to say whether his tactics had been decent or not.

Beth offered that it was really the best he could have done, under the circumstances. Had he ordered his people to try to take her out in suicide strikes if it looked like they were about to lose? Clever, yeah, without knowing more about magic that was really the best he had.

They wanted to walk through the whole fight, which was slightly tedious, but Beth was long used to this sort of conversation by now. The teleporting thing was called apparation — common skill back home, but not universal. She could instantly pop herself over to anywhere she could clearly imagine, easiest if she'd been there before, planetary range, she could go basically anywhere on the planet but she couldn't leave the biosphere with it. The power necessary increases with mass, not distance, but there's kind of a psychological block people run into that makes it difficult to go large distances. It wasn't actually any more difficult to apparate a thousand miles than it was to go one mile, it just felt like it should be to humans with their squishy monkey brains, which kind of made it more difficult, if that made sense. Yeah, well, okay, but magic was just like that sometimes, don't think about it too hard.

Right, that was just to push everyone out of the way so they wouldn't get caught in that big curse that followed it. Thousand Lances, it... Well, it was hard to explain if you didn't know enough about magic — it blew shite the fuck up, leave it at that. She'd knocked out scab ships in one shot with that curse several times, one of her favourites. How it blew up against the tank's shields was exactly how it'd look if a mage blocked it with a shield charm, apparently shields interfered with envelopes too (which then lead into a diversion on what a spell envelope was). She'd wanted to test if the shields would catch unblockable curses — spells with envelopes that went right through standard shield charms — but she got distracted by the speeders. The plan had been to steal one, and use it to shoot down the other two before making a few strafing runs at the men on the ground, but the computer was locked out, so she'd given up on the plan.

The video of Beth spinning wildly in the air at the end of her tether charm looked ridiculous, she couldn't help wincing a little. Fucking insane, she knew, but it would have worked if the computer hadn't been locked, so whatever. The NCOs explained that they'd tried to shoot her out of the air, but she'd been moving too quickly and unpredictably, and also stun bolts had a more limited range — they might have gotten lucky with full-power shots, hard to say.

That was a group stunning hex, think of it like a stun grenade. That was the Sword of the Void, it was a vanishing curse — vanishment was making something disappear, basically, and this curse vanished everything in an arc, the depth it could go to depending on the power the mage put into it. It didn't matter what the material was, Beth knew that armour was great against conventional weapons, but against a vanishing curse it might as well be tissue paper. And it turned out shielding couldn't stop unblockable curses, that was what she'd been testing. Good to know.

After a little bit explaining what transfiguration was, and also parseltongue — she didn't know how the fuck it worked, magic was weird sometimes — then the officers wanted to hear from Abisa and the NCOs about what fighting her had been like. Super scary fast, apparently — it hadn't seemed like it at the time, but from what they said and looking at the video, she'd been moving faster than humans probably should be able to. Which, yeah, she'd heard that could happen. Pump enough magic through the human body and it could do that. It took a certain amount of power, though, it wasn't something any random mage on Earth was capable of, and honestly she didn't even really notice it when it was happening, too in the moment...

"Those were Jedi speeds, easy," K̢amḡau said, if anything her eager bloody smirk only turned more vicious than it'd been before the demonstration. "Did you see how she deflected that bolt with her open hand? How the Jedi use their light-swords, that is the sort of speed they require, it must be the same phenomenon."

Beth blinked. "I did what?"

K̢amḡau's expression went a little softer, maybe more amused than bloodthirsty. "Show her, Lieutenant."

"Yes, ma'am, one moment." Spethcor fiddled about with his pad for a few seconds, before turning it back around to an angle Beth could make it out. The image was somewhat jittery, the camera drone fighting to remain steady in the wind, focussed on Beth in the middle of a pack of armoured soldiers, looking down on them at an angle. A shield charm snapped up long enough to catch a couple shots, and before it'd even quite fully dissolved Beth stunned one soldier, and then a second, before the limp body of the first had fully slumped to the ground, turning to a third — the Beth on the image seemed to hitch up for a second, her free hand coming up, and then there was a flash of blue-white light, fired from the third soldier's rifle, and then a flash of red as they were stunned, Beth vanishing into apparation a blink later. After a short pause, the video went back, this time zoomed in on Beth facing that third soldier, in such slow motion the figures on the screen hardly seemed to move. Except a streak of blue-white light spat out by the soldier's rifle, fast enough that even as slow as the video could go it was still a blur, meeting the back of Beth's hand, and then there was a little nudge, for a blink Beth's hand and wrist moving unnaturally fast, and then the streak of light was flying off at an angle...

...Huh. Apparently she could deflect blaster bolts. Noted.

Fighting to summon her voice, Beth cleared her throat, frowning down at the pad. "Ah... I didn't even realise I did that — I didn't think about it, just acted on instinct. That's hex deflection. The magic is similar to a shield charm, but instead of casting out the mage concentrates it in their hand. It's weaker than a normal shield charm, but with it you can interact with the envelope of a spell just long enough to alter its trajectory. Stay in contact longer than a split second and the envelope will crack, but that's long enough. It's risky, but a neat trick to keep your wand free in a rapid-fire exchange.

"But, honestly, if you'd asked me ahead of time if I could deflect blaster bolts, I would have told you no. Blaster bolts are much faster than spell envelopes." They weren't actually lasers, their weapons fired packets of magnetically-accelerated plasma — blaster bolts didn't move at literally the speed of light...just at a not insignificant fraction of it. Hundreds of times the speed of a spell, probably thousands. She wouldn't have thought it was possible, but there was a video of her doing it, kind of hard to argue with that. "I wasn't thinking, I just did it. We should practice that, to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and that I can do it the next time I need to."

"Excellent idea, Corporal," Mirakani chirped, with a very suspicious smile. "It wouldn't do to stun you repeatedly, but I imagine safety bolts should do nicely. We'll add it to your weapons training schedule."

Beth winced — safety bolts didn't do any real damage, they just stung like a bitch — but it had been her idea, and it wasn't even a bad one, so she just nodded.

Turning to the Commodore, K̢amḡau said, "You know what this means, of course." There was a vibrant trill on her voice that Beth was sure carried some kind of emotion, but she wasn't familiar enough with taqwang to guess what it meant.

"It does look more promising by the day, yes," the Commodore grumbled, low and gruff. The human man's face had hardly shifted, as cold and dour as always.

"Now now, don't be so dreary, Korlani. This is good news!"

His eyes all but sparkling, the Brigadier drawled, "You know Simol, Kamḡau, he must see results before he can allow the slightest hint of optimism."

"That video sure seems a result of a kind, to me..."

"Excuse me," Beth said, "what's good news?"

"Of course, Beth, well." K̢amḡau hesitated for a moment, eyes tipped upward, her head wiggling back and forth a little as she thought. "We have been very comfortable, with the Republic being left ignorant of our existence. The Law of Bastion knows of us, yes, but intelligence regarding this region of space was kept in such secrecy that it was lost when Colussan was taken by the Republicans — and we preferred it that way. There are some among us who were rather unsettled when the Republic learned of us. And through a pair of Jedi, at that."

Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade, Beth was aware, they'd stumbled across a Law outpost on the frontier with the Law of Bastion over a dozen years ago now. Their private ship had been allowed passage through Law space in the waning days of the war against the scabs, to search for Zonama Sekot, which was a whole confusing mess that wasn't worth thinking about right now. Beth knew very little about them, besides that Skywalker had founded the contemporary Jedi Order after they'd been wiped out a generation previously, had defeated the god-king of the scabs in single combat, and that his sister had been important in the revolution against the Law of Colussan and had become the Republic's second President, that was really it. There wasn't much about the Republic included in her history and politics lessons, it wasn't a priority. "And what does them being Jedi have to do with it?"

"Think about it, Corporal," Qholaš said — there was a lilt to his voice that sounded almost condescending, Beth tried not to take it personally. It was hard to be certain with species she was unfamiliar with anyway. "The old sorcerers of the kharson started as a native tradition, that is true, but in time they were greatly influenced by the ancient Jedi, granting them the ability to dominate their entire society. And later, the Jedi and the Republic of the time led a war against the old kharson, not only to defeat them but to eliminate them — the explicit goal was to destroy kharson society and their practice of sorcery, utterly. As terrible as the empire ruled from Tommutškas came to be, those who came to our side of the Rift did so fleeing a genocide. And terrible that rule was, until our brothers and sisters among the kharson achieved their own liberation from those old sorcerers, in so doing freeing all their neighbours from the threat of conquest and enslavement. The Jedi are not well-loved, here, for many reasons.

"And our friends from beyond the Rift," said with a nod to the Commodore, "have their own reasons to distrust them. Have you read of the Jedi Insurrection of Year Sixteen?"

"The basics, yeah." From what she'd read, that whole situation was...complicated. Palpatine, the President of the Republic at the time, had been drawing inappropriate emergency powers to himself (there'd been a civil war or something?), so the leadership of the Jedi had decided to arrest him and take direct control of the government until a replacement could be selected. The intervention of Jedi loyal to him had ended the coup before it could succeed, if only barely — and unfortunately for the Jedi, Palpatine had anticipated the move, and had their confrontation recorded, instrumental in the wildly successful propaganda campaign to follow. Palpatine used the opportunity of the attempted coup to declare the Jedi Order enemies of the state — with the exception of only a small handful of individuals, those who swore loyalty to the government and to him personally — and had them all hunted down and exterminated.

Within weeks of the coup, Palpatine had himself declared emperor for life, so the Jedi had been right to worry about the power he'd been accumulating. At the same time, though, the Jedi had tried to do a coup against the legitimate government — it was also reasonable for people to be wary of some weird religious cult with magical superpowers wielding that kind of direct political power. Especially since the Jedi Order had been entirely self-governing, funded primarily by the state, and had had basically no oversight whatsoever, yeah, fucked situation.

Oh, also? That particular iteration of Jedi had been child thieves — if they found a child who had magical potential, they were stolen away from their parents and handed over to the Jedi, through a court order if the parents resisted. And of course Jedi had had basically no personal rights at all, entirely under the authority of the religious authorities of their order, with no ability to go to the civilian government for protection. Super fucked all around, just, freaks. Beth still only knew the absolute basics, but it didn't really seem to her like there'd been good guys in that situation. Was both the Jedi and Palpatine getting fucked an option?

Well, they were both gone now, so she guessed that had been an option...

"So you might understand how many of us might be...wary, of the Jedi Order being reconstituted."

Frowning at Qholaš a little, Beth said, "But the Jedi now aren't the same as the Jedi then. That's what I've been told, at least." Skywalker had basically started over from scratch — both in the sense that their magical knowledge had been lost, but the political institution had been destroyed as well. The impression she'd gotten from her lessons was that the modern Order was a far more decentralised, ad hoc, secular organisation, and didn't have nearly the influence the old Order had. Skywalker himself was a big-time war hero, so he had personal influence, especially back when his sister had been President, but that wasn't really the same thing.

"Perhaps they aren't," the Brigadier said, "but it is still early to know for certain. The news we have been getting from that side of the Rift is that the Jedi have been trending toward taking more of an institutional position in their government — partly as a result of the chaos of the war with the jusannu, partly thanks to their increasing numbers and organisation. Some hold commissions as high-ranking officers in influential positions. Perhaps you might understand how some among us may find that development concerning, especially as they are now aware of our existence. We have no formal relations with the Republic, contact between us is still very minimal, but even so."

...Yeah, when he put it like that, she guessed that did make sense.

"Finding Dimitra was a spark of good fortune, for multiple reasons." K̢amḡau was smirking again, shifting in place a little, almost seeming giddy. "Of course, it was good that we could free your people of the threat of the jusannu in your system, and I'm certain Dimitra will have much to contribute to our society in the decades to come. But one of the greater concerns of contact with the Republic is the return of the Jedi. We have no counter to Jedi, save overwhelming firepower — and history has shown that firepower alone is often not enough against such sorcery. One of the open questions since the discovery of your people, speculated about in certain circles, has been whether you might provide that counter."

Right, she understood now. "And you're coming to the conclusion that we can fight Jedi. So we don't have to worry about them, if it comes down to it." A war with the Republic would be devastating, since they had an enormous advantage in numbers, but having one fewer thing to worry about wasn't nothing.

"I am, yes. Jedi can't teleport like you can, but they are very fast. Like you were, in that video," she said, nodding at Spethcor's computer. "This is great news, Corporal, honestly, you have no idea how many will be relieved to hear it."

...Yeah. Yeah, that made a lot of sense when she thought about it. Especially since the Jedi were known to operate independently, sometimes even outside of the authority of their home government, meddling in the affairs of neighbouring states, well. Now that the Republic knew the Law was here, it made sense that they'd like to have some magic of their own to protect themselves.

Though K̢amḡau was probably getting a...misguided impression of how useful Earth magic would be against these Jedi people. Beth still didn't know much, sure, it wasn't a priority in her lessons, but they had been mentioned — honestly, she might have learned more about them during the language trip, talking about the old kharson sorcerers. And her impression was that they...couldn't really do much? The stories made out like they were all Seers, which was only sometimes useful, and they could move fast, they could fuck with people's heads, and could, like, move objects with their minds? There was some more weird esoteric magic that came up in stories, but for the most part it was just basic shite. And a lot of their arts had been lost when the Law of Colussan wiped them out, Skywalker's Jedi were even more limited.

To put it bluntly, judging from everything Beth had heard about them, she wasn't impressed. They didn't sound very threatening.

"That's not how it'd go," Beth said. "If it were a real fight, I mean, that's not how I'd do it. No offence, Sergeant," with a glance at Abisa, "but if I were actually trying to kill you, you and your people wouldn't have lasted five seconds."

There were some funny looks between the people gathered, but the Brigadier just nodded, some expression making the ends of the tendrils dangling over his chin twitch and sway. "Show us what else you can do, Corporal."

"...You might want to be in the air for that, sir."

After a short moment of discussion, Abisa and the NCOs, Spethcor, and Kishmalhu boarded the aircraft — they would be somewhat cramped, but they would all fit, and it wouldn't be so uncomfortable they couldn't tolerate the relatively brief flight back to the academy. The remainder — the Brigadier and the Commodore, Mirakani, K̢amḡau, and Qholaš — climbed into the Brigadier's ship. The graceful little crescent-shaped thing, painted in white and green and orange, smoothly lifted up off the ground, gliding through the air silent save for the steady, tactile thrum of the repulsorlifts. While they were occupied with that, Beth prepared for her first demonstration, moving to the flat top of the low hill, and then clearing the grass and soil from a wide arc some metres under her, downwind. The soil wasn't very thick here, it didn't take much effort to dig down to the underlying stone — soon she had a trench about two metres wide and maybe a dozen long, making a roughly 45 degree arc in front of her.

Beth glanced up at the ship, hovering in the air ahead of her and to her right. "No, move more behind me," she said, pointing over her shoulder. She had Mirakani on her comm, it was only a few seconds before the ship started drifting around behind her, soon slipping out of sight.

"Whenever you're ready, Corporal."

"All right. Can everyone hear me in there?"

"Yes."

"Okay. This one's called Vulcan's Anvil, it— Ah, Vulcan is an ancient god of the forge, and volcanoes. You'll see why it's called that in a second. It takes some skill with fire magics to cast it at all, and the scale I can get out of it is unusual. According to my uncle, anyway." Sirius, she meant, godfather didn't quite translate. "The secondary effect is just a movement charm, call it telekinesis, I guess. Stay back there, I wouldn't want to hit you with it." Her explanation and her warning delivered, Beth scritched her feet against the dirt, widening her stance a little. She took a long, deep breath, and let her magic surge through her body, warm and eager and crackling in her chest and spanging down her limbs, her aura snapping at the air around her.

With a hard push, the force making her wand arm burn, Beth brought her wand down in a sharp slash — there was a flash of heat, a burst of steam gusting up off the ground, and suddenly the exposed stone was glowing an angry reddish-orange. The little features and textures of the stone had vanished, transitioning in a blink into the smooth surface of a liquid, beginning to pool up against the down-slope side of the trench. It might have eventually risen high enough to pour down the hill on its own, but before it could flow very far, Beth inundated all of the molten material with a thrum of magic, with an upward thrust of her wand sent it all flying up into the air. Streaks and clumps and countless droplets of liquid stone were flung upward and outward, hanging in the air for a moment like a great wave approaching the shore, before it began to crash back to the Earth, hard slapping and plunking noises, like rain and tree branches beating at a tin roof in a furious storm but deeper and louder, a constant angry hissing scream of the water in the grasses and the soil being flash-boiled...

The wind quickly chased away the clouds of steam, revealing that a large cone in front of her had been scorched black, bits of rock still glowing red here and there, streams of brighter orange lazily oozing downward to collect in a basin between hilltops. She heard what she was pretty sure was swearing through the open comm line, though she couldn't tell who it was from.

"Okay, that's one. I've got three more big ones to show off. Could you turn the ship around so I can see the ramp?" A short pause, and the ship rotated in mid air, turning to point the ramp toward her — at her request, they'd left it down so Beth could easily get up and down. A quick jaunt through apparation space, and she was standing on the slanted metal surface, the wind tearing at her, like a thousand fingers grasping to yank her back out. A sticking charm fixed her boots to the floor, an anchor charm aimed at the ceiling of the airlock was fixed to her waist to hold her upright, she recast her wind-deflecting paling, and then she was more or less comfortable again. "All right, here we go.

"Some spells use energy pulled from the environment to power them, to pull off things no ordinary mage could do themselves — all of the three I have in mind work like that. This one is called the Circle of Yáo Hàoyǔ. It's a little obscure, but you'll find mages from the East now and then who know it. All right..." This spells wasn't nearly as much of a power sink, but she wasn't as familiar with it, so she actually had to use the incantation. Which was in Classical fucking Chinese, because of course it was. The spellglow was somewhat extended compared to most, a pale pinkish streak zipped down toward the hilltop she'd just been standing on a moment ago, when it struck the ground a circle about a metre wide erupting into unnatural green flames.

After a delay of about a second, there was a quick series of secondary explosions, pop pop pop pop, more blobs of green fire stretching down the hill in four overlapping spirals. Each arm laid down seven or eight rings of green fire before the spell decohered — the green colour swiftly leeched out of the flame as the magic failed, before long overtaken by natural oranges and yellows. The fires kept spreading, of course, the couple dozen, metre-wide circles chewing at the grass around, the wind swiftly tugging them into angled streaks, the spreading fires building into an audible roar.

"That's what happens when there's nothing there," Beth said, raising her voice a little, "the secondary explosions stretch out in a big spiral until the spell burns out. But if there was a target there I was aiming at — say, a group of soldiers — the magic would follow what I want to happen, and the secondary explosions would seek them out. That green shite might not have looked like much, but it's nasty, it'll burn right through armour. Even the fancy stuff you guys have, it's a vanishing effect, like the one I used on the tank. With a little luck, I could take out a whole section with that in one hit.

"And here's number three. The spell literally translates to reduce and set loose — it's like the vanishing effect I explained before, but instead of just disappearing the mass is converted into energy to fuel the explosion. Get ready for a big boom."

"Wait a second," Mirakani snapped, her voice sounding slightly alarmed. "Corporal, was that a fission reaction you just described? Does we need to put up the shields for this one?"

"No, it's not radioactive." At least...she didn't think so? She wasn't sure whether it'd ever actually been tested. "It's not physics, you know, just magic. Remember I explained transfiguration and conjuration before? Vanishment is the inverse of conjuration — it's taking the energy that would go into conjuring the material and putting it into the secondary effect."

"...But that hill isn't conjured."

Mirakani couldn't see her at the moment, so there was no reason she couldn't openly smirk. "It's magic, sir. Don't think about it too hard."

There was a brief silence on the other side of the line. "Very well, Corporal. Proceed."

Beth tossed off the curse — this spellglow was actually invisible, which made it plain unfair to use in a fight — and then ducked, covering her face with her off arm. Despite closing and shielding her eyes, she could still make out the blinding flash of white light, the noise coming an instant later, the heavy-bone shaking boom thrumming through her, the shockwave making Beth teeter in place a little. (The ship stayed perfectly still, though, the force no threat to such a powerful machine.) Her ears ringing a little, she could barely hear the grinding of stone against stone, the pattering of debris falling back to earth, a few bits plunking against the side of the ship.

Where the hilltop had been was a smoking crater ten, twelve metres wide. There was more cursing over the line which, you know, fair.

"Okay, big spell number four. I'm going to need a fresh hill, and I'll need to go down there for best effect. Don't move too close to the academy, this is a big one."

"I think you've made your point, Corporal."

"You'll like this one, sir, trust me."

There was a brief hesitation, Beth could hear a discussion going on through the door behind her (Mirakani had muted her comm), after some seconds the ship began to move, the world below swaying and tilting as the Brigadier manoeuvered. They didn't move far, only a few hilltops over. Once the ship came to a stop again, Beth dismissed her tether charm and apparated down to the ground.

"All right," she drawled, trying to keep any hint of smugness off her voice. This was...well, she wasn't sure how they were going to react to it, she guessed they'd see. "This curse is called Hellfire."

"Are you certain this is a wise idea?"

"It's just a name, sir — I'm not literally summoning demons or anything." As far as she knew, hell didn't actually exist, but six years ago she wouldn't have said aliens existed, so who the fuck knew at this point. "Mages back home can be very melodramatic sometimes. Stay at least ten metres above the ground at all times, and it should be fine. Keep the ramp turned toward me, I'm going to need to get out of here fast."

There was a brief pause, then Beth was a little startled when the Brigadier's sharp guttural kharson voice suddenly came over the line. "You're paying for the repairs if you damage my ship, Corporal."

She felt her lips twitch, fighting a grin. "Yes, sir. This one is called Hellfire. Like the last two, this one pulls in energy from outside to fuel itself — except this one, it uses the internal energy of living things. It will burn until either everything within reach is dead, or it's duplicated itself enough times that it's made enough mistakes to fall apart." Not a great explanation — the problem was actually the building of interference as it spread — but she thought that was good enough for laymen. "This is a commonly-known spell in the part of Dimitra I come from, but most people can't cast it very well. The more power you put into it, the cleaner you can cast it, the fewer errors it starts with, the longer it will last. Most people might only get a few seconds out of it, which is still very dangerous at close-quarters — but I'm very good at fire spells. Ready?"

After a second, Mirakani's voice said, "What are the chances this Hellfire will spread as far as the academy?"

"Zero."

"Are you certain of that, Corporal?"

"Absolutely."

"Very well, you may proceed when ready. Get back up here as quickly as you can."

"Yes, sir." Beth took a quick second to breathe, gathering herself, focussing on the necessary intent to fuel the spell — the clearer her intent, the cleaner the curse would be, the more impressive the demonstration. Not that the intent was particularly difficult to summon. She'd gotten plenty of practice with fiendfyre in the war with the scabs, and the curse was motivated by a harsh, vicious, almost mad rage, the overwhelming urge to destroy. When Sirius had first taught her this one, she'd had more difficulty summoning the proper frame of mind, but ever since the horrible violence of the initial scab invasion on Zero Day, nearly six years ago now, she'd had no trouble at all.

A thin stream of deep red fire erupted from her wand, billowing out as it went, some metres away resolving into the figure of a charging stag, splitting into more figures as it spread, more leaping deer and snarling lions and writhing snakes, leaping up off the ground on the wings of hawks and dragons, flames deep red and solid black, dark magic thick and vicious on the air, the roar deafening and the heat stinging at her exposed skin—

Beth continued to pour magic into the spell for one second, two, five, screaming its way down her arm, the bones of her wrist and hand flaring white-hot...that was enough. She cut off the flow of magic, teetered a little at the sudden lurch, light-headed. Free of her control, the mass of fiery figures began to swirl and and race outward, including back in this direction — shaking off her dizziness, she glanced up, spotted the ship overhead, turned on a heel—

—and reappeared on the ramp, staggered, clung onto the hydraulic strut near the end. She caught her breath for a moment, waiting for her head to stop spinning, before she stomped her way up the ramp, stance wide against the slant of the surface and the subtle swaying of the ship in the wind. A push of the button had the ramp pulling back up, Beth closed out the call with Mirakani, her demonstration over.

She found the officers in the cockpit, silently watching the fiendfyre spread over the hills, through the windows or on the various displays around the little room, all switched over to shots of the ground from different angles, piped in from cameras fitted into the hull. A couple of them briefly glanced at her, but for the most part the cockpit remained still and silent, eyes fixed on the red and black living flames burning their way across the desolate Komfar countryside. It didn't take long for the epicentre to burn out, leaving behind white ash and little glimmers of glass green and black and blue, the fire forming an expanding ring, continuing to spread out, and out, and out...

Eventually, the spell exhausted itself, leaving behind a large, lopsided scar on the earth, stretching across multiple hills — the ruin of the tank had been caught in it, reduced to melted scrap, the angry glow of the superheated metal bright enough it was easily visible against its dead surroundings. It was hard to tell, looking down from overhead and with no clear landmarks, but making a rough estimate using the outline of the tank as a ruler...the fiendfyre had covered an area maybe a quarter kilometre wide? something like that?

Jesus, she was a little taken aback herself, honestly. It'd been a while since she'd just let fiendfyre burn like that, that was definitely the largest surface area she'd ever covered with that spell at once. Maybe Sirius had a point about her joining the scary bastards club...

Forcing as much casual calm into her voice as she could, Beth said, "Like I said before: Abisa wouldn't have lasted five seconds in a real fight."

The dumbfounded silence from the officers was honestly a little gratifying — it took conscious effort to keep a smirk off her face.

Chapter Text

5th July 2001 (69:3:12)
— Zero Day plus 05.10.03

Somehow, Hermione had managed to stumble her way into a senior position at the new research institution of the International Commission for Co-operative Development hidden deep in the Alps. She wasn't entirely certain how this had happened, but she blamed Payne, the director of her first team back in Groningen. The way he'd talked up her contribution to the development of PCR tech, this seemed like something that was ultimately his responsibility.

During the original war with the invaders over five years ago now, the UN had started building a complex deep in the Alps — isolated, with both physical and magical defences enough to hide and defend it, to act both as a command centre to run the war from and a defensive fortress should the aliens attempt to take Europe. Military operations in this region of the world were still overseen from here, but the purpose of the site had increasingly turned toward other uses as the aliens were chased off the surface and the war had cooled off. One of the larger segments of the growing installation was what would become an international university, directly under the authority of the planetary government instead of any particular nation, right nextdoor to the headquarters of the ICCD for all of western and central Europe and the northern and western Mediterranean.

The Commission had gone through multiple restructurings and renamings over the less than six years of its existence, but hopefully this would be the final one...though Hermione would argue for one last change of the name to something more immediately interpretable. The use of Co-operative Development made sense if one was familiar with previous names the Commission had used, was aware that the purpose of the organisation was to bring together experts from both magical and nonmagical worlds — co-operative — for the purpose of accelerating the creation of technology which utilised the knowledge and techniques of both — development. But the term was somewhat obscure without the background knowledge, or being tipped off by the use of Commission, far too easy to assume the organisation was involved in economic development, or helping to build up infrastructure in regions of the world either overexploited or devastated by war, or perhaps a group responsible for using the beetles they'd reverse-engineered from the invaders' to transform the soil, it could be any number of things. Troubling herself with the name was maybe somewhat frivolous, petty, but Hermione couldn't help it.

Some smaller teams were still operating in their district, but most of the Commissions' resources were going to be increasingly concentrated at the complex hidden away in the middle of the Swiss Alps. As isolated as the location was, that might ordinary have been a problem, but the implementation of the gate network across Europe made the commute trivial. From her house in Reims, she would apparate outside of the local gateport, where she'd walk through a gate to Paris, where she'd take another gate to Bern, where she'd take a third gate straight to the installation. The longest part of the entire trip was probably the security check before being allowed through the final gate — she had ID which would get her waved straight through, but there was always a line. Unfortunately, she couldn't simply apparate from her kitchen to her office, or even to the Bern gateport, anti-apparation wards included among their security measures.

The installation's miniature gateport was just under the surface level, high up in the mountains, magically-reinforced windows revealing steep jagged surfaces of grey stone capped with snow burning white in the sun. Deep within one range or another, there was little to see besides stone and ice, further down the slopes a few signs of stubborn scrub. In the right conditions, she could catch narrow glimpses of greener valleys low in the distance, but the peaks around them did a good job of blocking any clear viewing angle, seemingly cut off here from all the world. It was a short walk from the gateport to the correct hallway, coming to a wide, sweeping spiral staircase. Given how far below the surface the installation was, the stairs might seem an intimidating prospect, but mages had been involved in the design — a short distance, perhaps only enough for a single storey, and Hermione was stepping out onto University Avenue, the folded space of the stairwell transporting her a kilometre down and about a quarter kilometre to the side.

University Avenue was meant to be the heart of the entire academic complex in time, a grand arcade with a high arched ceiling turned warm and bright with true sunlight (produced by an enchantment, of course), room enough for a strip of greenery down the centre, grass and brush and even several trees — there were flowers showing themselves here and there, others bearing buds of growing fruit. Halls leading to different departments and living areas associated with the university all joined here, hence the name, as well as the Commission and a number of other programmes, and there would be cafeterias and lounges and shops and whatever else. That was the plan, but for now it still seemed quite empty, the windows of what would in time be shop fronts showing only darkness beyond, the side of the Avenue belonging to the planned international university showing obvious signs of construction, equipment and supplies sitting around, a clump of workers just there standing sipping at steaming mugs. The Commission's offices here had been operating for some months already, but classes at the university likely wouldn't be starting up until 2003, or maybe autumn 2002 if they were fortunate.

The Commission's centre of operations here was enormous, of course, a sprawling complex of libraries and laboratories and computer halls woven through the stone out and over her head and under her feet, but the offices and meeting rooms and the like were conveniently near the main entrance. There was a security check at the lobby, but Hermione went around it, the door opening with a touch of her PCR phone to a panel at one side. A short walk from there brought her to her office — most days she'd barely be through the door before she'd be cheerfully greeted by her assistant, a middle-aged woman named Marie-Ange Roche who'd had some kind of secretarial job in local government somewhere in France before the war. She'd normally have a stack of cards loaded with the progress of a wide variety of projects and experiment data that Hermione was keeping an eye on — normally far too much for her to closely analyse in a day, but she could skim over it, just to keep informed as to the state of things — some news related to the higher-level politics in the Commission or events proceeding outside of their walls, and a reminder of her schedule for the day, ending with a question of whether she needed anything right away.

It normally took some effort to get through the conversation without letting her awkwardness show — this situation was still very weird to Hermione. That she had a bloody secretary at all was already strange, but Ange had to be twice her age. She'd wanted to stay with the Commission, of course, but she hadn't expected to be given so much responsibility so soon. For whatever reason, she'd ended being accorded far more credit for the invention of Programmable Crystalline Resonance technology — the concept of PCR Transmission, an enchanted substitute for EM radio, and then later the development into the modern computer — than she personally thought she deserved. She'd been the one to have the original idea in both cases, but she hadn't had the scientific or magical knowledge necessary to make them work. It wasn't as though she'd made no contributions to the development of the technology, and she did have a very thorough understanding of it, having been involved from the beginning, but people tended to have an outsized estimation of how much of the original breakthroughs had been her own work.

But, somehow, she'd managed to become acknowledged as one of the world's foremost experts on PCR tech — to the point that her work had even earned her a couple honorary degrees from universities and recognition of mastery from guilds...despite technically having dropped out of Hogwarts before even starting her fifth year, and never even started muggle secondary school. Granted, she had worked very hard to catch up ever since being taken on as a student associate with the Commission, but she'd still been dumbstruck when she'd been offered a position as one of a handful of principle researchers on site. It wasn't an administrative position, technically, but she was sort of in charge of the Commission's efforts to design novel applications of PCR technology, especially as integration with the Law of Five's systems was concerned. Despite being the youngest person on the team, and completely unqualified.

That was how it felt like, at least, she knew that wasn't actually true. Well, obviously she was the youngest person on the team — at this point she was fervently looking forward to a day when she couldn't say that any longer — but she wasn't actually unqualified. She had been when she'd started with the Commission, granted, but that'd been nearly six years ago now. It was true that she'd never gone back to school, but she'd still ended up with a modest set of official qualifications anyway. As the war had cooled off they'd managed to get academic publications off the ground again, she personally felt her published work was far more impressive than the degrees with her name on them — they felt earned, in a way some educational institution or guild deciding to hand her a certificate didn't. And she could admit that experience counted for a lot. There simply hadn't been anywhere she could have attended classes to learn about the field she was now considered an expert in, because it'd been invented as they went. Universities were putting together programmes on it now — she'd even been asked for her opinion on curricula and classroom materials several times — but there arguably still wasn't anywhere to learn what Hermione already knew...

...except at the Commission, working with the foundational experts in the technology. A small list of people which happened to include Hermione herself. So, yes, while it might still feel weird to her, she knew it wasn't necessarily inappropriate. She just felt her age sometimes, was all.

Especially on days like today — if everything went according to plan, they'd be making a call through the Law's subspace network with a PCRT device for the first time. She was only somewhat confident it would actually work.

The Law had computers that were far more advanced than anything they here on Earth could even imagine, but they still had certain limits. In particular, spoken language couldn't be easily translated into cold programmable logic — they had developed algorithms that could be used to translate any language into any other, but they required training in the new language before it could be effectively used. That had been a large part of the purpose of the trip Beth and the other omniglots had taken off-world: to learn Minnisiät, the dominant language used in the Law, so they could train these algorithms to translate back and forth with Earth languages. The Law normally expected societies to use a single language, but omniglots picked up languages far more quickly than others, so even with their compressed schedule they'd still had time to train these algorithms in French, English, Russian, Spanish, and Chinese, and they'd already begun the programme for a list of other languages by the time they'd returned to Earth.

Hermione had gotten her first taste of the results early, well before Beth had actually returned home. As soon as the Law had managed to get a stable line of communication between Earth and wherever the omniglots had been ferried off to, Beth had immediately sent her translations of various scientific and technical texts — and the Commission's efforts to reverse-engineer these new aliens' technology, started the moment they'd been handed example pieces shortly after first contact, had begun to progress by leaps and bounds practically overnight.

Much of the physics had still been above their heads — still was, honestly, though they were making progress — but a fair fraction of the difficulty had been in interpreting the materials she'd been sent. The process of training the algorithms had been incomplete at the time, and their training materials by then had included very little in the way of technical writing. It'd been clear to her even then that the source language used a lot of compounding of basic vocabulary to make new terms, because, while the documents Beth had sent had been fully rendered in French — mostly, a few bits had slipped through unaltered — most technical terms had become odd Frankenstein words, attempting to form compounds in a way French simply didn't do, or else split up into phrases that didn't always make obvious sense...especially when the algorithm ended up wording the phrase differently in different contexts, made it quite confusing to try to interpret.

But, between who knew how many specialists pouring over the documents all over the world — Hermione had immediately transferred them to the Commission's servers, of course — they had begun picking their way through the mess, to develop an understanding of what they were dealing with. The process had been somewhat simplified when they'd managed to confirm something that the mages who'd gotten near enough to their space- or aircraft had already known.

Some of the Law's technology was, literally, magic. Not that it seemed as though they themselves realised that.

Given her particular area of expertise, Hermione had been assigned to a team primarily focussed on interpreting their electronics, communications, and computer technology, and an early discovery had come out of their group. The Law's communication network operated on familiar principles, not dissimilar to a cellular network on a massive scale, relying on repeaters to ferry the signal further than the small handheld devices could manage. But exactly what that signal was had been more difficult to figure out.

The critical point was something the documentation they'd originally been sent referred to as under-space...or over-space, or space a bit to the side — not literally, but the inconsistent translation had inspired a running joke in the office, referring to this other plane with whatever random nonsense came to mind. And Hermione did mean "other plane", it hadn't taken very long trying to interpret the jumbled mess the imprecisely-tuned algorithms had made of the documentation for her to be reminded of apparation space. Of course, in arithmancy apparation space was generally understood to be a mathematical construct to better explain the mechanics of the magic, and not literally another plane of reality existing separately from the physical one they all lived on...but the metaphorical, arithmantic descriptions of apparation she was familiar with looked almost exactly like the Law's own descriptions of their communications technology.

A significant breakthrough they'd had was when some American in the Commission had translated a description of how encryption worked into something that actually made sense. The relevant functions described a vector, defined in terms of electromagnetic and gravitational forces, situated within a particular electromagnetic and gravitational environment, rotating in space; more complex versions added acceleration to the terms describing the rotation, sometimes including a time offset. The interaction of the vector with the environment created complex field variations, which would constantly change as the vector rotated — this fluctuating field was used to alter the signal to make it effectively unique, and almost impossible to tune into without the precise functions that generated it, the range of options in the different terms and the fine detail allowed by the simulation providing effectively infinite possibilities. One could brute-force the encryption, theoretically, but one would need to have both the precise device address (which could also be masked in various ways), the precise registry of the call to be decrypted, and to then fiddle with the terms of the vector and the field until the signal cleared up. The documentation they had seemed to suggest that, even for the aliens' hyper-advanced computers, cracking an encrypted signal like that was theoretically possible, but infeasible.

Going over these functions, this American had noticed something interesting: some of the maths describing the field interactions were starting to look very similar to arithmancy. The variables were unfamiliar, of course, and they weren't certain what the magnitude of the units used was, exactly, but swap in a few arithmantic terms and suddenly the maths began to make a lot more sense.

Another person in their division had run with that inspiration, and only a day or two later decoded the maths describing how the transmitter worked. These functions were, it turned out, extremely similar to apparation. The antenna was made out of a sort of superconducting wire, coiled into a tight spiral which was then curled around into a U shape, operating within a sort of supermagnet. Something about the particular field interactions produced was necessary to, in a way, punch through 'real-space' into 'under-space' — the opening and closing of this rupture was apparently what caused the gravitational noise they'd picked up from the aliens' telephones. Larger, more powerful antennae could produce a larger rupture, permitting greater bandwidth and a further range, the network relying on enormous repeaters in the form of artificial satellites or attached to space stations to relay the traffic coming in and out of each solar system.

Decoding the functions describing the operation of the antenna, leaning on the work of the American before her, an Egyptian scholar had noticed that the curling of the antenna produced terms very similar to the field inversion of apparation — the same rotation that beginners often needed to physically turn on their heel in order to achieve. The best guess they had was that aliens back thousands of years ago had, somehow, discovered a technological way to reach apparation space, and had harnessed it as a method of effectively instantaneous communication. As absurd as that thought was, the maths did seem to work out, as far as Hermione could tell.

She still wasn't certain how they managed to transmit across space — apparation simply shouldn't work in the magic-poor environment of outer space — not to mention that apparation was not truly instantaneous. (It simply seemed to be to the casual observer, there was non-negligible travel time.) But until they came to understand what was happening more thoroughly, there was no reason they couldn't simply...borrow it.

The problem her team were meant to solve was to find a way to get their homegrown communications network to play nice with their new friends'. They could simply replace their own technology, but that would take an inconvenient amount of labour — and a waste of labour, in Hermione's opinion, since she was still convinced that some of their devices were superior to the aliens' in certain areas. (Not to mention it would be ideal to have the capacity to produce what was required for critical infrastructure domestically, and there was no telling how long it would be until they would get to that point.) Understanding the basics of how their communications technology functioned was only the first step; the goal was to find some way to integrate the aliens' technology, to make them compatible with each other, so their devices would be able to access the interstellar network.

That was a more difficult proposition. Reverse-engineering their encryption method was trivial. The aliens' devices used algorithms to simulate the fields involved, which required a shocking amount of processing power for such a small bit of tech, but with magical computing they could skip all that — in the space of a single afternoon, Hermione had written a script to charge a reservoir with the correct image...only to upload it to the Commission's servers and discover she was one of two dozen scholars who'd already thought to do so. The comparative advantages and disadvantages of their technology made what seemed to be a quite difficult problem for the aliens a quite simple one for them.

In the early weeks, the project had hit a wall right around there. Going any further than that in their efforts to get their communications technologies to play well with each other would require reproducing the antenna itself, an accomplishment they'd been nowhere near even attempting yet. It hadn't helped that they hadn't even understood how the devices were powered — it wasn't simple electricity. Her present understanding was that their circuits involved both electrons and positrons somehow, she had absolutely no idea how that was supposed to work. They had a physics team working on that, not her problem. Her team's ability to make any practical progress at all had stalled with the materials they'd had available.

And then, within the last couple of months, they'd been granted access to new materials — the Law had gifted the Commission with hundreds of computers, both desk terminals and handheld devices, already preloaded with a wealth of scientific and technical materials, translated into Earth languages by the completed algorithms. The equipment might seem significant, but it was truly trivial relative to the size of the Law's economy — assisting new members with what they needed to catch up to galactic standards was one of the Law's obligations, and since Earth didn't have the technology to read their data they'd needed to provide the equipment as well — and honestly Hermione still wasn't particularly impressed by the computers themselves. The Law's supercomputers and the like were unimaginably powerful, but the ones for personal use weren't any more effective for their purpose than PCR devices she'd designed herself. She even thought their homegrown Earth technology was better in some ways, but that could simply be her pride talking.

Those materials, though, had been a godsend. So many things they'd been stumbling over had very quickly begun to make much more sense. Beth's sloppily-translated materials had allowed them to start the project, but it'd begun to progress much faster once they could actually understand what the hell they were looking at — it'd only taken days for them to translate units and variables into terms that made sense, quickly decoding the maths into a format they could interpret. Even the terminology was suddenly much less confusing...

...though in other ways more confusing, annoyingly enough. Early on, their assumption had been that their communications and their transportation worked on similar principles, somehow. This had made sense on the surface, since they both managed to circumvent the universal speed limit, and the documentation Beth had sent referred to both technologies with under-space, or other-space, or space-a-bit-to-the-left — the terms used were wildly inconsistent, so they hadn't initially realised they were referring to two separate phenomena. Their communications tech worked through subspace, which was apparently different from hyperspace, which they travelled through to circumvent the light barrier. And now that the descriptions were more clear, it was obvious that this was the case, since transmission through subspace seemed to be instantaneous while travel through hyperspace did take time.

Also, there was stuff in hyperspace, some sort of exotic matter that aliens sometimes used for power generation. Only sometimes, though, hypermatter reactions were volatile enough that others didn't think the risks were worth the benefits — the Law primarily relied on fusion or fission instead, depending on the use case. They were becoming increasingly confident that subspace was apparation space — though they still weren't certain why subspace transmissions could leave the biosphere while apparation couldn't — but they still had very little idea what hyperspace was. Some analogous parallel plane, clearly, but beyond that.

The technical descriptions of subspace antennae had also been extremely helpful. They still didn't quite understand how the Law's devices were powered, but they didn't need to: they could simply use the specifications in the documentation and their independent analysis of devices they'd been given to build their own antenna with methods available to them. If all went according to plan, today would be the first successful test of that antenna.

In the early days of the project, it'd been suggested that the Law's forebears had once done something similar. It seemed that certain of their technologies — the subspace antenna, the hyperdrive, a variety of gravity-manipulating devices — involved magic somehow, either exploiting magical principles or perhaps even being magic, controlled through a technological intermediary. (Their antigravity felt like magic, inarguably, it was unmistakable to any mage within range of its effects.) The materials they'd been given acknowledged that ancient spacefaring peoples, on the order of thirty thousand years ago, had reverse-engineered these technologies from the work of an even older civilisation. Possibly, they suspected, this mysterious lost civilisation had used magical technology, analogous to what they'd been developing here on Earth in the last few years — lacking the magical understanding to reproduce it, they'd tried to imitate it as closely as they could, and somehow managed to produce magical effects using entirely mundane engineering.

That seemed ridiculous on the face of it, though Hermione did have to admit it was very likely that these ancient peoples had already possessed technology far more advanced than they had on Earth. The wrecks they'd discovered and reverse-engineered had been found in space — in the same solar system, but far from their homeworlds. They would have needed the means to get there in the first place, while here on Earth they'd never managed to reach beyond the orbit of the Moon. And the half-remembered stories suggested it'd taken generations of work to perfect it. In one locale, two different societies had even managed to reverse-engineer subspace communications first, discovered each other and made first contact from a distance, their scientists then cooperating to develop hyperspace travel. Their first formal trip through hyperspace had been to meet each other in person, beginning a friendship between their peoples which lasted to this day, thirty thousand years later, which was an amazing story, honestly...

Hermione didn't have a better explanation for how the Law's peculiar technology had come to be. Which made reverse-engineering it to work with their magical devices sort of ironic, when she thought about it.

After typing out a few messages, Hermione spent some time skimming through the updates she'd been sent, occasionally turning to her computer to look something up or take notes. She was interrupted once by a call from Andrés, one of the alchemists on the team attempting to interpret the functioning of alien electronics. He was wondering if it might be possible to devise a method to store data in a form that could be read by both the Law's computers and PCR tech — his team had been discussing the matter for a while now, but they couldn't quite get the two media to play nice. The Law's computers also used some sort of crystalline medium for data storage, so it might be possible. Of course, whatever physical process they were doing to alter the substrate — Andrés tried to explain it briefly, but it went over her head, deep quantum physics stuff — would be different than charging it with an image, but it was possible that they could design an algorithm to translate between the two. Andrés suggested it should be trivial, if time-consuming, to design a process by which they could physically alter the substrate to be readable by the Law's devices — especially if the storage medium was expanded to a larger size first, the degree of miniaturisation would make it difficult to manipulate by their methods — but the inverse was proving more stubborn. Perhaps, using a few example pieces, model how the physical alterations distorted uniform images of varying character, and use that to build a system to translate the data contained into a format their machines could read? Andrés grew excited partway through the explanation of the basic idea, beginning to rattle off on how they might associate different interference patterns with different arrangements of bits, and how that could be translated into PCR images, before realising he was talking her ear off and finishing the call.

Well, that should give that team several months of work to do — it didn't sound like an easy technical problem to solve. Shrugging it off as not her problem, she returned to going over updates from the various projects she was following. Ah, the researchers investigating the Law's artificial gravity systems were asking for an executive decision to abandon the project, and simply use analogous enchantments instead, interesting. It was possible to create an isolated inertial environment with its own defined gravity — they'd already begun to do so with certain experimental aircraft, to eliminate the issue of inertial stress on the superstructure (as well as the pilot) — so it seemed to Hermione that they already had a perfectly acceptable substitute. As soon as they figured out how to get enchantments to work in space, that is, they were still working on that issue. She was in a senior enough of a position that she would get a vote, she made a quick note about it before moving on.

It didn't feel like she'd been in the office for too long before Ange stuck her head in, suggested Hermione start down to the lab for the test — oh wow, it'd been over an hour, oops. As odd as it was that she had what was effectively a secretary, she had to admit she was far less likely now to miss a commitment simply because she'd gotten wrapped up in one matter or another. Or, you know, forget to eat, that was a much less common occurrence these days...

(Of course, putting it in those terms also made Hermione feel uncomfortable, so she tried not to.)

Hermione was temporarily held up in the halls by one of the associate directors of the spaceflight programme — she'd honestly forgotten his name, there were a lot of people working here — asking about the progress on the computer system for an experimental craft they were working on. (Nothing fancy, basically just a test to try to force enchantments to work in space.) She was directly involved in this one, so she knew off the top of her head that the architecture and the necessary scripting was more or less finished, but they needed to know the exact layout of the interior before they could begin construction, so her team wasn't the one he should be leaning on just now. Some brief complaining about certain perfectionists holding up the design work, and Hermione managed to worm her way out of the conversation, continuing on her way down the hall. She reached the elevators, lucky enough to get one to herself — she'd arrived after the morning rush in, but before people were going up to lunch — and descended down, after a brief pause the 'elevator' lurching to the side, zipping through the sprawling complex...

It was only a short walk from the elevator to the lab space the communications team had taken over for the test. Inside a wooden cabinet fixed into the soft blue ceramic tile of the wall were a dozen dangling amulets, enchanted to isolate a person's aura from interacting with the environment — in most enchanting contexts, magical contamination was more of an issue than physical, sensitive projects often done in an environment analogous to a muggle cleanroom. Hermione looped one of the amulets over her head before opening the door and stepping inside.

The room was rather larger than they required for this particular test, roughly eight metres square, every surface covered in smooth tile a pure white. The ceramic would have been alchemically treated to be as magically inert as possible, and there were runes carved on the undersides which defined enchantments to isolate the internal space from the external environment. Hermione might ordinary be concerned that their thorough isolation procedures might block the signal, but they'd already observed that subspace transmissions travelled across wardlines just fine — the Law's electronics seemed to be far less susceptible to magical interference in general. Some of that was simply due to many of the systems they'd analysed being military issue, and therefore more thoroughly shielded, but they thought it was also a consequence of their differing mechanics, they hadn't fully modeled the interactions involved yet.

At the centre of the room was a (magically-neutral ceramic) table, a PCR computer and their prototype subspace antenna set up on top, seeming small and isolated in the middle of all the available space. The computer was a relatively simple device, a full keyboard taking up most of its surface area, a small ovular bit extending from the top from which the illusions were projected, including a few slots for programme cards. Nearby was a simple PCRT radio with a plain wooden frame, which would have already been paired with the computer, directly attached with silvery wires into the far larger box of the prototype antenna. A rectangular box about a quarter metre high, a quarter wide, and a half metre deep, the sides were constructed with a plain light brown ceramic — it was somewhat oversized for practical use, of course, but they could worry about downsizing it later.

One face of the big box was currently removed, set aside on the table, a couple of researchers (Anouk and Aymen) leaning close together to poke at the innards, and a third and fourth (Jamie and Noemi) standing nearby, all four of them muttering about whatever was going on over there. Rather more than just the five of them had been involved in the project, but cramming everyone in here just to watch would have been awkward, so they'd chosen a smaller group from among themselves to keep things simple. They must have heard the door open and close, Jamie and Noemi looking in her direction — breaking into a smirk, Jamie said, "Ah ha, and here she is, right on time."

"Am I right on time? It looks like we might have an issue there."

"It is nothing to worry about, Maïa," Anouk said in her accented French, glancing up at her just for a second before turning back to her work. "We were getting some noise, so we decided to add another layer of insulation. It should only be a moment."

"All right then, good." Out of a lack of anything better to do as she waited, Hermione walked around the table until she had an angle where she could see inside the box. Not that there was really much to see. The interior surface was stitched across with strings of runes, defining enchantments to isolate the internal environment to prevent the sensitive enchantments of the antenna from being interfered with, to one side a modestly-sized PCR device, only a couple cells and a control module. Attached to the top of the computer with several silver wires was a somewhat oversized reservoir stone, the alchemically-created diamond appearing somewhat dull — it hadn't been carved to have the facets required to refract light enough to achieve the bright glitter people associated with diamonds, more blocky and plain, looking little different from dull quartz. This reservoir would be charged with the encryption, transforming the content conducted into the antenna to be broadcast into subspace.

Hermione couldn't actually make out the antenna itself, entirely hidden by layers of a fluffy, greenish substance, an alchemical material designed to absorb gravito-magnetic noise. The hidden antenna and the insulation around it formed a shapeless ball, suspended in the middle of the box and taking up a fair fraction of the internal space. The thing was covered in so many layers of fluff there really was very little to see. Not to say the antenna would be new to her, she'd been involved in the design and had handled this very model in earlier phases of construction. So she left Anouk and Aymen to their work, walked over to the computer instead. A few quick swipes and button pushes synced the computer to her phone — they'd be using the phone to pick up video and audio, and also she had the script for Beth's subspace address on there.

There had been some discussion about what form their test should take. The tame option would have been to target a subspace device somewhere on Earth, but that was rather lacklustre as a test — they could already call anywhere on the planet through their own network. The station in orbit might have also worked, but there were some...complicated politics involved. The Law were quite impressed that Earth had managed to defend themselves from the invaders, and were additionally fascinated with the magical technology they'd been developing. Some of the people in charge wanted to continue to impress their new allies, as part of their diplomatic strategy — coordinating tests that then very obviously failed as something went wrong with their experimental technology wouldn't help with the mystique they were attempting to cultivate. Of course, Earthlings were still entirely confined to their planet, since the omniglots had returned home, so there wasn't anyone easily available to call. Someone had floated the option of sending a rocket with a subspace device into space, but that wouldn't give them useful feedback on the quality of the transmission.

The only real practical option Hermione had been able to think of was Beth. Not only was she off-world, but she was far on the other end of the Law, thousands of light-years away — they could hardly ask for a better test. Hermione had spoken to her on a borrowed subspace device, which had been honestly surreal, simply knowing how far the transmission was being carried with delay of only a couple seconds. (The transmission itself was instantaneous, but there was a brief delay at every repeater along the way.) Beth was the only person any of them could think of who was in a convenient position to allow the strongest possible test of their system, while still allowing it to remain private, without needing to ask the Law for help and possibly losing face if it went wrong. There'd been a brief discussion with the Directors about it, just a couple days ago, but they'd signed off on the idea.

They should be making the call any minute now. Hopefully, if it works.

A minute or two after Hermione was finished on her end, Aymen retrieved the panel, carefully lined it up, while he held in place Anouk going around and twisting the fastenings back in place. They gave it a few gentle shoves, when they were certain it was secure Aymen reaching over to flick a switch on the near face — there was a barely audible click, and then a deep thrum, a prickly wave breaking over her skin as the powerful enchantment kicked on. She'd only felt the sudden impact on the environment as it began to draw power, once it'd settled she couldn't feel it at all. "Anouk, could you check for noise, please."

"Yes, one second." Anouk drew her wand out of a pocket hidden in the inside of her jacket, her lips twitching in a lengthy litany with little swirling motions of her wand, ending with a swish at the antenna. Hermione couldn't see the analysis charm at all, the illusion would be projected straight into Anouk's mind. There was a pause of a few seconds, Anouk's eyes flicking around the empty space surrounding the box. Then she nodded, dismissed the charm with a flick. "It looks good to me. At the least, it is subtle enough to not interfere with anything. I think we can try it."

"Let's get to it, then!" Jamie chirped with a sharp clap of his hands, grinning. "I've always been curious about Beth Potter, didn't think I'd ever get a chance to talk to her..."

Rolling her eyes, Noemi groaned. "She's a lesbian, James, and a thousand light-years away — I have a feeling your usual charms won't get you anywhere this time."

"You wound me, I didn't mean it like that. Just, you know." Jamie shrugged, gesturing vaguely at the display over the computer. "I'm curious, is all."

He might not be able to find the words to articulate it at the moment, but Hermione knew what he meant anyway: Beth wasn't famous only in magical Britain now. Especially so over the last few months, since first contact with the Law practically everyone Hermione had mentioned Beth to had already known who she was. She had to wonder if that had been part of Beth's motivation to leave the planet so quickly. "If you two are done flirting, we are ready to make the call now."

Noemi looked very annoyed with her. Which, maybe that was fair, actually — she was aware Noemi and Jamie had been involved for a brief time, two years or so ago, was it too soon for that kind of joke? Hermione was still so bad at this...

Thankfully the awkward moment was brushed off quickly, the four of them quick confirming they were ready to go. Hermione had already copied over Beth's address and encryption when she'd been setting up over here — at the centre of the illusory display floating over the keyboard was a featureless green circle, inside a plainly labeled window, underneath it a few blocks of raw coding script. Since this was just a prototype they were working with, for their own internal use, they hadn't bothered making the interface pretty, still very basic and functional, the edges harsh on the eyes without the softer gradients of mature UIs. Hermione reached forward to touch the circle — the tactile illusion feeling cool and solid and smooth against her fingers, like stainless steel — and paused for a moment to take a slow breath, nerves jangling, her heart thumping in her ears. And then she pushed harder, the circle flashing white as the interface picked up her intent, began to make the call.

A window popped up a little to the left, filling with text, detailing each step of the process. A long series of lines rapidly scrolled by as every script in the magnetic series was test-fired — going very quickly, there were over a hundred of them — ending with a confirmation they were all responding correctly. That was quickly followed with the start-up sequence, the magnetic series all tuned to the correct charge and intensity to form the proper field, imitating the coiled electromagnet used in the aliens' transmitters. There was a brief status check, before moving on to charge the reservoir simulating the encryption algorithm — a multi-staged process, the computer breaking apart the script she'd given it, which was then fed into several different smaller reservoirs, the bits going through a few transformations before being combined into a single image. The computer couldn't check the image had been composed correctly — that would require a correct image to compare against, which wasn't available in this case — but there was a confirmation that a image was present, which would have to be good enough. There was a series of outputs as the audio/visual pickups of her phone were piped into the computer, and from there to the radio, and from there to the module inside the antenna, a quick check that the channel was functioning correctly. And then, finally, the computer made the command to close the control circuit, putting the call through.

There was a faint lurch in the magical environment of the room, rather like the feeling of missing a step on the stairs, but subtle, hardly noticeable. It seemed like the call had been made, the programme had switched to a timer, a recording in progress — there were a couple hisses and claps from the other four, a smile twitching at Hermione's lips, her hair standing on end, hands fisting in her jumper, but she held it in, waited. One second went by, and another...five seconds...

"Shouldn't it have gone through straight away?" Aymen asked, when they passed the ten second mark.

"Not necessarily." It was possible Beth was in the middle of something, but even then it should probably go straight to messages. "Maybe something isn't working correctly. If we don't get anything soon, we should try—"

She jumped at the noise suddenly breaking through the room, a garbled, warbling, crackling mess...coming from her phone. It was also projecting some kind of illusion over the table, but it wasn't coming through correctly, smears of colour clashing with the computer display. What was—

"Video!" Jamie snapped. "I thought this was supposed to be an audio call, it's not formatted for video." He came up to the table next to her, Hermione stepping out of the way for him, as he swiped at the display, she nudged her phone a bit away so the illusions weren't overlapping. Swapped over to a different window, Jamie typed out something, reached for a cloth binder nearby, flipping through pages of programme cards held in sleeves, pulled one out and slipped it into the slot, some more typing, a couple taps at the display...

"It was supposed to be audio, I'm not certain what went wrong." The calls she'd made with Beth before had normally been audio, with the exception of one she'd done at home with a borrowed— "Oh, my phone is picking up audio and visual data, her device on the other end must have recognised that and reciprocated."

"At least that suggests it's working, right?" said Noemi.

"Possibly, yes..."

Finally, Jamie had the programme set up to interpret the subspace signal correctly, a downward press of his hand switching off the display, so they could better see the illusion projected by Hermione's phone. The image was somewhat distorted, the colours coming through sharp, reflections off of metal bright, but blurring toward grey fuzz at the edges, and the perspective was off, sort of like looking through a fisheye lens. Some difficulty with translating between their different display technologies, Hermione would assume — they'd been working on that, ever since first being handed example devices to play with, but there were still issues. The Law's cameras did record in three dimensions, to be used both by flat display screens and their holograms, but the process of reanalysing the holographic image into one that could be displayed as an illusion was still experimental.

(Luckily subspace transmissions were analog — this would have been much more difficult if the Law transmitted audio and video as computer data.)

It did seem that the call was working, but Hermione's enthusiasm was tempered by an obvious problem: the person in the image was not Beth. They were sitting at a desk somewhere, by the controls built into the surface Hermione could just make out some kind of computer terminal — though a very complex one, there was more there than should be necessary for a typing keyboard. The being was wearing the red jacket of the Law's military, but worn open, a blue shirt of some kind underneath, silver and green markings along the lapels, which Hermione assumed would mean something to people who knew about this sort of thing. And she did mean to say being, since the person definitely wasn't human: the face had the same general features in similar proportions, at least, but it was covered in a thin white fuzz, the hair growing longer and thicker past their face, taking a more light honey-brown tone, all over the top of their head and disappearing under their collar. At the sides of their head, rather further back than on a human, were a pair of oversized, pointed ears, looking almost cat-like, furred on one side but showing the deep reddish tone of their skin on the inside. Their hands were folded on the desk in front of them, the brownish fur reaching halfway down their hands before transitioning to the soft white tone of their face, the fingers overlong and delicate — capped with claws, reminding Hermione of house elves.

...She'd seen this species before. Beth had brought pictures back from the omniglot trip, and there'd been a few pictures of beings who looked like this — one with pure snowy white fur had turned up multiple times, she'd been in charge of the medical team looking after the omniglots. She recalled Beth explaining that this species was an example of extreme sexual dimorphism — Beth hadn't used the technical term, but that's what she'd meant — and only the females had fur, the males completely hairless, red-skinned with long horns extending from their foreheads. If Hermione was remembering correctly, that would mean the being at the desk was a woman, but she couldn't remember literally anything else about them, even what they were called.

She had taken notes, but she didn't have them with her — she hadn't thought she would need them.

The alien woman nodded, and spoke, showing pointed teeth, her voice low and smooth and rich...and complete nonsense. Of course, she wouldn't be speaking French, would she?

"Ah...I'm sorry, I didn't understand that at all." Hermione wondered if she should simply hang up — the antenna did work, but something must have gone wrong with the encoding of the address and the encryption. But, on the other hand, the whole point was the test the thing, and they had someone there on the other end who could tell them how well it was working...or she would be able to, if they could communicate...

The alien held up one clawed finger, tapped at the controls arrayed in front of her. She said something in whatever language that was — Minnisiät, presumably — then apparently realised they wouldn't know what she was saying. Looking back up at Hermione through the camera, she said something slow, annunciating clearly — and she made a gesture, one hand coming up to her mouth and then moving out in little swirling motions. Then she nodded at Hermione.

"I think she wants us to talk," Aymen said. "The team who left helped to programme their language algorithms, right? Maybe they have some real-time translation system, we need to give it enough information to identify the language we're using."

"Yes, that does make sense. French only, everyone — let's not confuse their system. Though I do wonder if it'll work without a compatible device on our end."

"I suppose we'll have to see what it looks like when she gets it going." Noemi came up next to Hermione, eyeing the alien woman in the illusion — she'd set it to pick up her surroundings and the illusion to be visible to the others, since they'd all wanted to say hello to Beth while they were at it. It must be working, because the woman's eyes turned to Hermione's left, nodding in Noemi's general direction...though the angle seemed off to her, probably due to the image data not being translated quite correctly. Noemi gave her a wave back, before asking, "Did we get a wrong number? I mean, I assume you didn't get Potter's information wrong, but perhaps the signal isn't getting through correctly."

"I think it'd be more likely for the call to fail to go through at all than to get the wrong address," Jamie said, sounding a little confused. "It's not as simple as getting a wrong number, subspace addresses and encryptions are too complicated."

"I suppose we could ask her." Hermione noticed the woman straighten, tapping at more buttons at her computer and nodding to herself. "Can you understand us now?"

Nodding up at Hermione again, the woman spoke. A second or two later, black text edged in white began appearing superimposed over the image, somewhat twisted by the distortion of the image, but still legible: Yes, I understand you. My system doesn't recognise the comm you're using, so I set it to display a text translation over the image. Are you seeing it?

"Yes, we're seeing it, that's good. Good. Ah, I apologise for calling you out of the blue, you're not who we intended to reach." Belatedly, she wondered if the Law's translation algorithms were up to dealing with idioms.

The woman frowned a little, perhaps at a quirky translation. Her lips twisting a little, head tilted at an angle, she spoke again, the text appearing as she went. Let's see if we can figure that out, shall we? Who were you attempting to call?

"Elizabeth Potter. She's an officer candidate at the academy on...ah, Koffar, I think it was called."

Turning to type at her computer, the woman babbled in more nonsense, the subtitle scrolling into place. That would be Komfar, there's no reason you should be prevented from reaching someone there. Could you send me the address you called?

Hermione glanced over at Jamie, who gave her a helpless shrug. "I don't think we'd be able to do that. This isn't— I'm sorry, my name is Hermione Granger, I'm a principle researcher with the International Commission for Co-operative Development, of Earth. Ah, Dimitra, that is. This is a prototype subspace antenna of our own design, we intended to call Elizabeth Potter as a test — we don't know anyone else with a subspace address to call, you see." That wasn't entirely true, of course, but there was no reason to explain the logic of the choice that thoroughly. "Our computer systems aren't compatible, so we can't transmit that sort of data."

The woman appeared somewhat dumbfounded, leaning back in her chair a bit, blinking at Hermione. It took her a moment to find her voice. I see. That would explain the formatting issues, I suppose. If you speak her name for me I should be able to— The text translation was somewhat behind the spoken words, but Hermione guessed that funny sharp chirp the woman had made was where she'd suddenly cut off and changed subjects. Dimitra! I know that name — you're the world of those sorcerers the Fleet found not so long ago! You've invented a magical method to transmit through subspace? Her eyes were wide, almost seeming to sparkle in the light, her lips sort of puffing out a little, in an expression Hermione decided to read as a grin.

"Ah, yes, that's the idea. We thought it'd be more convenient than simply adopting your technology, since we have no domestic production capacity. Did you want me to say Beth's full name?"

Of course, I apologise. The magic you have there is simply fascinating. Go now. By the time the translation caught up, she was holding up a single clawed finger, waiting.

"Elizabeth Hazel Augusta Potter..." Full name? "...Princess of Hiraeffermydd and Strathusk."

The woman's head bobbed in a nod. I have it, give me one moment. She poked around for a bit, eyes darting around as she looked over something on some kind of display Hermione couldn't see from here, fingers tapping away at buttons. Finally she spoke again, the text catching up after a couple seconds. Yes, I see what happened now. Sergeant Potter is away from Komfar on a deep-space training exercise — the vessel she is aboard is currently on control green.

"I'm sorry, what does that mean?"

Control green? Data security advisory, on military vessels incoming and outgoing data may be limited at the discretion of the commanding officer. At control green, private messages sent and received by the crew are not edited for secrecy in any way, but real-time transmissions are blocked. To comply with the advisory, your call was forwarded to a conveniently-placed relay station — and to me, the woman finished with another alien smile, voice light and bouncy, almost musical.

"...Right, that makes sense. I apologise, Beth didn't warn me she would be out of contact."

No apology necessary, these things happen. You can't make a real-time call, but you may leave a recorded message, if you like? Sergeant Potter will receive it the next time she checks her messages.

She would say that wasn't necessary — she could call Beth later, at a more convenient time — but the whole point was to evaluate the success of their prototype. If nothing else, Beth would be able to tell them how clearly the image was coming through. "That would be perfect, thank you."

Of course. Give me one second to set that up. It really didn't take very long, just a couple button pushes, the translation had hardly even caught up before the woman was looking up at the camera again. The recording will begin once you see the Fleet's colours, simply end the call whenever you're done. Did you need anything else?

"I don't think so. Thank you for being patient with us."

It was no trouble at all! Good luck with your research, Dimitrans. Abruptly, the video winked out, replaced with a plain, static image. It was familiar, a black ring decorated with nine white six-pointed stars, surrounding a red circle, with a design on it in white — except, instead of the usual white hand held with fingers outstretched, there were three little blocky shapes with wide white streaks extending behind them slashing across the red. Ships in flight, maybe?

Realising this must be what the woman had meant by the Fleet's colours, Hermione jumped. "Oh! I'm sorry, I guess that means we're on. Um..." She glanced at the other four researchers in the room, suddenly feeling self-conscious. "Hello, Beth. We finished the subspace antenna I told you about, and we tried to call you as a test, but it turns out you're on a training exercise. You didn't tell me you were going anywhere! Are you in space? The woman who set us up to record this said your vessel is restricting communication from the outside, so. Ooohh, I can't wait until we get more flights going on, as soon as I find a good excuse to go to space I'm taking it. I'm so jealous of how much literal space travel you've done...but you know that already.

"Ah, we'll want you to tell us how the transmission looks, if the audio and the visuals are coming through okay — or just bring me back the recording, I suppose. But, ah, before we talk about that, there are a few people here with me who wanted to say hello..."

Standing back as the other researchers introduced themselves to Beth, Hermione could feel herself grinning. She always did like it when a project came together. There would still be work to do, of course, to refine the process and better communicate with the Law's systems, but they would get there. The big first step had been made, they were basically all technical problems from this point.

Now, if only they could figure out how the hell to get enchantments to work in space, then they'd really be making progress...

Chapter Text

69:5:3 (5th September 2001)
— Zero Day plus 06.00.03

Finally, the steady blaring of the alert ceased. There were still red lights on the display screens around flashing on and off, but at least Beth's ears weren't being assaulted anymore. It wasn't only the alarm that grew quiet, voices that had been raised to speak over the noise hushed, most of the troop falling silent, eyes on the display showing a diagramme of the space battle.

As Beth stood watching, some of the coloured wedges on the screen began to flash, indicating weapons were being fired — and so her first battle with the Law of Five had begun.

Her troop were standing in the somewhat cramped changing-slash-ready room attached to the flight deck of a kolosam-hal-amika-class transport, where they would be out of the way unless and until they were needed for a landing. By the time Beth had gotten here, the large display screen on one wall had already been set to the tactical feed, showing a simplified image of the approaching planet, the pirate fleet in orbit swinging around to meet them, more ships flowing up from the surface. It seemed this was an operation of significant size, though she didn't really know the details — their group had been pulled from their patrol at the border to help with the raid, so it wasn't something Beth had had opportunity to study ahead of time.

Her understanding was that this was the headquarters of one of the major pirate gangs operating along the frontier between them and the Law of Bastion. This region of space was one of the thoroughfares through which the West and the East met, a small trickle of trade having gone back and forth for some generations now, at the very edge of space known by the Republic Beyond the Rift. Before the scab invasion, this had been rather outside of the Law's influence, which had made them vulnerable...and then the Law of Bastion had effectively crumbled during the war. The actual scab presence these days was minimal, but the reach of institutions was still weak, and so various pirate gangs have managed to insinuate themselves, preying on nearby sectors and picking at the small volume of traffic coming through. They hadn't been a priority for some years, since there were still wakali and unreformed scabs around, and there wasn't that much coming through this region of space anyway — due to the Rift, the trade coming through had always been minimal — but both their Law and the Law of Bastion were finally getting around to trying to root them out.

That could be somewhat difficult, however. Space, as it turned out, was kind of fucking big, and there were endless places to hide. Tracking down where the hell a particular group of pirates was operating out of could be almost impossible at the best of times. They couldn't just track along the last direction they were seen to be flying — hyperspace travel only worked on straight lines, so if they weren't complete fucking idiots they'd take a short hop out-system in a totally random direction before even starting toward their home base. By comparing different incidents over a period of time, they could get a general idea of where in space they might be located, but that could often end up being a region hundreds of light-years wide, which was basically useless. If they got very lucky and stumbled across their base by accident — which, given how fucking huge space was, the chances of that were miniscule — they would just tip the pirates off, by the time they could bring in enough forces to deal with them they could easily have packed their shite up and moved somewhere else.

Anti-piracy operations often ended up looking like an absolutely enormous, violent game of whack-a-mole, it was a fucking pain.

Her understanding was that there were a whole bunch of intelligence operations going on, trying to hack into their communications and infiltrate the various groups, she had no fucking clue — Beth just blew things up, spy shite was not her game. The fleet group her troop was attached to had been pulled from their duties on urgent orders, their superiors rushing to piece together enough guns to take out this particular gang before they could catch wind they were in trouble and scatter. She'd half-expected this to only be a space battle, which wouldn't really involve her, but it turned out these particular pirates were camping in a habitable system, so it was assumed they had some kind of installation on the ground, which would also have to be dealt with.

Apparently, the intelligence people had reason to believe these bastards might be taking captives to be sold as slaves, or just keeping them for themselves — so they couldn't just burn the place from orbit, but actually had to take it. Because of fucking course.

The general scope of the plan was for Beth's troop to launch as soon as the carrier had descended to a maneuverable altitude, and zip ahead to clear the LZ for the infantry coming up behind them. Take out any aircraft, identify and neutralise defensive weapons emplacements, maybe take shots of opportunity at any hostiles on the ground they managed to spot while they were at it. Basic shite, not so different from things Beth had done fighting on Earth before — the major difference was the context it was happening in, and the equipment she'd be using to do it.

Also, she was an officer now (if a very junior one), so she was kind of in charge, which was bloody weird, but still, not so different.

But, of course, they could only get to that part once the space battle was taken care of — their infantry transport wasn't equipped to fight down to the surface itself, and their speeder bikes, while very cool, didn't work in open space. So, Beth just got to...stand here, with the rest of their people. Waiting.

She kind of hated standing around not doing anything while there was a battle going on. But there wasn't anything she could do about the space battle, that wasn't her job — her job would come later. She tried to remind herself of that, but she was still left anxious and jumpy, watching the display, her boot tapping against the floor and her fingernails clicking against the armour panels over her hips. It was clear she wasn't the only one uncomfortable with it either, the nineteen other men and women of various species packed into the little room nervously watching the display, silent save for the occasional clack of a boot against the floor or hiss of a whisper.

The floor under Beth's feet shivered, she grit her teeth — according to the tactical diagramme, a number out of a brace of missiles had managed to get past the fighter screen and the MRBD guns protecting the Qurakšal to expend themselves against their shields. As they'd approached the planet, their fleet had angled in to slash across the defenders, but it'd been an obvious maneuver, so the pirates had seen it coming, firing missiles into their flightpath and accelerating to come in behind them, where they would at least temporarily have a firing angle while the Law's ships wouldn't. There'd been time for the vice-admiral leading the battle — their Commodore Arnisaö hadn't been given command of the combined force, Beth hadn't even met the new bloke — to respond to the maneuver, but Beth assumed he didn't consider the pirates enough of a threat to bother being clever about it. Granted, she didn't disagree, they definitely had a significant firepower advantage. Huge fucking fusion missiles exploding against their shields just made her nervous, okay...

The pirates didn't get a clear shot at their rear, the little triangles marking their fleet immediately spinning around to point their noses back toward the pirates. (Technically turning before they'd passed the pirates' position, because the speeds spaceships travelled at and inertia.) Not facing straight at them, though, taking angles and spreading out — that was an yśath-bloom, Beth recognised the trick from the academy. The gunships and assault fighters that had chased after the fleet were caught flat-footed as the capital ships suddenly started dropping speed and swinging out at an angle, immediately set upon by their own small craft, a furball developing at the centre of the formation as they spread out in a cone...angled to allow them to fire on the pirate fleet from multiple directions at once, the pirates' own momentum bringing them further into the trap.

They scrambled to maneuver, but the pirates were hardly professionals, disorganised, some ships breaking in one direction and some in another, a couple seemingly deciding to run the gauntlet. Those brave bastards were quickly torn apart under coordinated fire from all sides — any ship only had so much energy to put into shields at once, forcing them to defend from multiple angles overwhelmed them more quickly — red triangles marking the enemy fleet beginning to wink out. As the surviving pirates managed to burn off their forward momentum and turn out of the trap, the petals of the flower broke apart, groups of ships moving to pursue this or that element of the pirate fleet in a smooth graceful dance, red triangles winking out one after another...

Okay, she took back the comment about the Vice-Admiral deciding not to be clever — that had actually worked pretty well. It'd been a literally textbook trick, of course, but Beth had temporarily forgotten that bloody pirates wouldn't have read the textbook.

All told, the space battle took nearly an hour. The pirates had already been effectively doomed with those initial manoeuvres, but playing out the events from there still took time — space was big, and the pace of a naval battle could be deceptively slow. When there were only a couple flickering red triangles remaining, the fight between the small craft already ended some minutes ago, there was a loud ping from Beth's comm, she picked up her pad from where she'd left it on a nearby table. The space battle wasn't quite over, but it looked like they'd finished scans of the planet below, the planning of the ground portion already in progress.

Beth had been sent an image of the installation on the surface, a smallish complex of buildings hugging a narrow river a short distance from a large body of water. (Lake or ocean, it was impossible to tell from just this.) Someone had labelled what they thought were defensive batteries, something that seemed to be a command centre, these structures highlighted in bright flashing green and yellow were likely to be residences for support staff and/or captives and were not to be fired upon. There was something funny about the look of some of these buildings, she thought, frowning, a tap of a finger on one brought up a box with some more detailed— Ah, they weren't buildings, they were freighters the pirates were using as semi-permanent structures, that made sense...

With squiggles of her finger, Beth made a few quick annotations of her own, before sending copies of the file to all of her people. Her voice raised a little above the chatter that had started up as the battle proceeded, "Pictures came in, I've just sent you the map. Flights one and two are red section, flights three and four are blue section; Sergeant Loqšamus is Blue Lead. Primary targets are marked, note the green zone, keep an eye out for aircraft and ground forces. Some of these structures are ships, and might still be space-capable — call out if anyone tries to do a runner. Questions?"

There was a brief silence, before Khrimmak raised a hand. "Yeah, I got one. The hell is do a runner?"

Beth rolled her eyes at the few snickers in the room, but didn't respond to the teasing beyond that. Sometimes she decided to literally translate an Earth idiom into Minnisiät, and they didn't always work — it'd only taken a couple days together for the troop to start picking at a few of each other's little linguistic quirks, including hers. She should probably care about the enlisted soldiers under her openly mocking her to her face, but honestly, she'd rather have a little playful disrespect above people being intimidated by the magical abilities they were still mostly unfamiliar with. If letting them get away with the former could help prevent the latter, well, she liked that trade. "Yeah, yeah. The atmosphere is breathable, but keep your damn buckets on anyway, I don't need any of you idiots taking a hit to the head. I can fix a few scrapes, but I can't pack your brains back in your skulls for you if you lose them."

There was a bit of chatter then, about people losing their brains, some teasing back and forth — nerves, for the most part, people had their own ways of dealing with that. A few people came up with more specific questions for Beth, which she couldn't do much about, since it wasn't like she had additional information for them anyway. This whole thing had been slapped together very quickly, so. They were new people, for a couple of them this was literally their first fight — their first in this role, at least, some had served as normal infantry before this — just stick close to your flights and don't run into anything, you'll be fine.

After a couple minutes, the feeds on the displays winked out, reverting to stand-by screens, and a moment later the floor shuddered under the feet. Their carrier must have detached from the Qurakšal — the data on the displays must have been coming through the hardwire network, severed as they decoupled. Before the notice could even come in over her comm, she told everyone to finish getting suited up, and move on to their bikes. They had time, it'd take some minutes until they got to a manoeuvrable altitude, but there was no point in getting caught with their pants down. There were two doors leading out onto the flight deck, but it was still a little bit of a jumble getting through. Ten people were a lot to get through each door, especially since the bulk of their armoured flightsuits prevented any more than one person from going through at a time, and the room was somewhat cramped, Beth heard multiple noisy clatters of armour against armour as people bumped into each other. She didn't bother trying to move for the press, instead hanging back to pull her gloves on.

It wasn't too bad, thankfully — this was their first fight since the troop had been put together, but they had practised launching a few times. Once the way to her door was clear, she tucked her pad into her pack, scooped up her helmet, and moved to follow. The flight deck wasn't a free open space, like a landing bay, instead she stepped into a narrow hallway, the walls plain dark metal, five doors hanging open to both sides with little identifying plates next to the frames. She stepped through the first door on the right, finding a narrow cylindrical room, taller than it was wide, the walls all around dense with maintenance equipment and replacement parts, only some of which Beth recognised. (She'd been taught the basics, but she obviously hadn't specialised in mechanic shite.) A kulnašalh speeder bike was hovering at the centre of the room, heel near the floor and nose pointed straight up, a good four and a half metres long from end to end — painted in the black and red and white of the Law, long and narrow, sleek and deadly-looking.

Of course, the deadly-looking quality probably had something to do with the big damn laser-gun fixed to the undercarriage, the entire system from emitter to the focussing array at the tip of the barrel a tad over two metres long. She also just thought it looked fast, all sharp-angled and zoomy. Which she realised was a silly, almost childish thing to think, there were reasons she kept some of her thoughts to herself.

They did have mechanics here, but obviously they didn't have one for each bike, so nobody was in the launch tube when she got here. A computer terminal on a swinging arm was sitting waiting when she arrived, with a report from whoever had checked over the thing — no serious problems noted, though she couldn't help a little huff at the reminder to unplug the power cable. She realised tech people were the type to assume everyone else was stupid, but come on. Shoving the terminal well clear of the launch circle, she slung her pack into its proper place, quick synced her comm with her flight suit's integrated systems before slipping her helmet over her head.

She didn't like wearing this bloody thing — hell, she didn't like wearing the suit at all, if she was being honest. The armoured panels made her feel bulky and clumsy, and she knew the helmet didn't actually fuck with her peripheral vision — improved her visual range, in fact, thanks to the internal displays — but it felt like it did, close and cramped, her own breath rasping around her ears. And she had to pull off a glove before she could draw her wand, adding an unnecessary delay of a couple seconds which could be deadly when she really needed it. Unfortunately, she'd been told that using it wasn't negotiable. If for no other reason, the suit was air-tight, and would keep her warm and breathing for several hours even in hard vacuum — the planet they were landing on this time was habitable, but that wouldn't always be the case.

At least the officers at the academy had been willing to compromise, setting her up with a somewhat lighter version than was standard. There was some armour, especially to protect critical organs, but her suit showed far more of the glittering black mesh material of the space-rated flight suit underneath than the others in her troop. They didn't want her to get instantly killed by a single lucky shot, but at the same time they understood that Beth's unique abilities were best utilised if she were lighter and more flexible — also, the dense material of the ablative armour interfered with casting magic, so the less there was around her the easier time she had of casting wandless magic. It still wasn't ideal, especially the helmet and glove situation, but she'd decided it was an acceptable compromise.

Until such time people back home could design an effective magical equivalent, anyway. She didn't see why they shouldn't be able to enchant clothing that would work as armour against blasterfire, but would also keep someone alive in space? As soon as they managed to solve that enchantments refuse to work in space problem, anyway. But then, maybe there was a reason that was difficult that wasn't immediately obvious to Beth, she wasn't an expert. She could tolerate the awkward fucking alien armour until then, she guessed.

Once she was sealed up, Beth hunched down so she could disconnect the power cable latched into place low at the back of the frame, snapped the cover back into place. (The cable she just awkwardly tossed over her shoulder, as long as it wasn't in the way it didn't matter where that ended up.) She hopped into the launch circle, a wave of tingles sweeping over her skin and her stomach swooping as her body abruptly went weightless. Her momentum brought her drifting against the bike, she looped her arm over the back of the seat as she bumped into it — the impact sent the bike swaying, but it was immediately shoved back into line, a thrum of repulsors reverberating in her ears, magic prickling on the air detectable through the flight suit. A couple gentle pushes and pulls tugged her floating up the side of the bike, and then down into the seat. Since there wasn't any gravity inside the launch circle, she wasn't so much sitting on the bike as holding herself against it, gripping with her thighs and hooking her ankles, but a couple button presses activated the microgravity generator built into the seat, relaxing her grip as she eased into place.

It felt bloody weird to be able to feel the pull of gravity from her hips down to her feet, and nowhere else, but after several times riding speeder bikes in low-gravity environments she was more or less used to it. The Law's technology was so odd sometimes.

She had a few things she had to do before launch, the button presses more or less automatic by this point — syncing the bike's computer with her suit and her comm, linking into the network between the rest of her troop, going over a quick systems check (which one of the mechanics would have already done before her, but better to double-check than to miss a problem), blah blah, practically muscle memory by this point. The bike had a relatively small display screen, but she'd already set up her things to put up additional information on the internal displays built into the helmet: right now it was showing her the status of the other nineteen members of her troop, as well as the feed from one of the carrier's external cameras, at the moment washed out with the bright orange and white fire of reentry. All nineteen bikes were showing green, and Beth had been among the last to reach the flight deck, so most of them already had their uplinks live too.

A quick flick of her eyes to broadcast on the troop's channel, Beth said, "Red Lead, comm check, call by flights."

"Red Two, clear."

"Red Three, I have a little flutter, but the techs say I should be good to go."

"Red Four, clear..."

Beth listened as they counted off, making occasional notes of any issues that were brought up. By "a little flutter," she assumed Yanuhosaj meant he had a minor issue with thrust variance, which shouldn't be a big problem — it might be an indicator of a developing fault in the bloody rocket engine they were all sitting on top of, which someone should take a look at eventually. If the mechanic who'd noticed it had said the problem wasn't serious enough to prevent Yanuhosaj from flying, they just had to trust them. There were a couple other little things, the most serious of which was a total failure of Kixt'akn's microgravity system. Well, not a total failure, but whatever the fault was had been obstructive enough that her mechanic had simply disabled the system for the time being. There was no reason that Kixt'akn couldn't fly without microgravity, but there was a minor risk of her being shaken loose during launch. Beth switched over to a private channel with Loqšamus to remind him to double-check that she'd launched safely...and then called Kixt'akn to remind her not to fly too crazy, since her bike wouldn't be doing shite to help her stay on. But that was it, she was pretty sure they were good to go.

By this point, the feed piped in from the carrier had cleared of fire, showing a grim, greyish planet, the rocky ground showing patches of colourful...she didn't know, lichens or some shite. Just because the place was technically habitable didn't necessarily mean it was pleasant. She switched over channels, reported, "Spears are clear."

"Copy that, Lieutenant," came the voice of Daristen after the briefest pause. "Estimate three minutes to launch. The Qurakšal has identified a missile battery, we'll need to stay under the horizon until it's been eliminated. The target's been marked."

Beth grimaced — their bikes were too small for that kind of weapon to target properly, but it still meant they'd be on their own for longer before the main force arrived. "Yes, Captain, understood."

In the couple minutes they had, Beth quickly went over the updated map of the site, thinking through the best use of her available resources. She'd want to get rid of the missile battery, here, as soon as possible — but she'd want to do so without accidentally setting off the warheads, which could be a fucking pain. It was also toward the middle of the complex, behind the guns around the edges, which made sense but was also just bloody inconvenient for her. In order to avoid potentially devastating secondary explosions, it'd be safest to deal with the missile battery herself — putting a piercing curse through the firing controls would be ideal, and she also had the quickest reflexes, more likely to be able to deal with any surprises that came up — she'd assigned her section to come around in this direction, she'd fly with them to this point, before cutting in through here, straight up to the battery here. Even pausing to remove her glove so she could use her wand, there still probably wouldn't be enough time for the defenders to react, it should be fine. Once the threat of the big damn fusion missiles was eliminated, the carrier would be free to approach with the ground troops, her people would have maybe five minutes until backup arrived — if the defenders had enough tricks up their sleeves, they might be forced to retreat, come back around in another run as a distraction moments before the rest arrived...

Beth barely had time to relay her revised orders before it was time to launch. A hard heavy thrum reverberated through her as the tube hardened, all the lights on the flight deck abruptly winking out, save a few indicators strobing a bright red. The door directly ahead of her irised open, showing the smooth surface of the rest of the tube, running along the length of the carrier before opening at the end of the hull, a small circle ahead glowing an almost sickly greyish-yellowish blue, which she assumed was just what the sky looked like here. A window suddenly appeared on the display panel built into her bike, showing only a big number five, Beth leaned forward as it ticked over to four, settling her feet in place and gripping the handles, breath held in anticipation, not even looking at the countdown, her eyes ahead.

There was a hard jolt, the flight deck abruptly vanished, nothing but the smooth metal of the launch tube close on all sides, swiftly dissolving into a blur as the high-powered repulsors built into the walls accelerated the bike, the gravity-manipulation magic (she still swore it was magic) intense and hot and crackling around her, her stomach swooping back and her heart dancing in her throat as the circle ahead rapidly grew, faster and faster and faster—

She broke into open air, leaving the tube behind in a flash, once she was clear of the carrier kicking the thruster on to jump forward even faster, the wind making a low droning whistle inside the confined space of her helmet, the force dragging at her skin. She was a few dozen metres above the craggy, rocky ground, coloured in splotches by growths of something, looking like big blobs of paint splattered at random, zipping by beneath her too quickly to easily pick out features. It took a few seconds for the thruster to rev up, air friction bleeding off the speed from the launch until it caught up, falling in a ballistic arc with the nose turning toward the hard stone below — until she fell low enough for the bike's repulsors to reach the surface of the planet, her descent levelling off hard enough to feel the burn in her arms (no press of her weight against the seat, the bike's microgravity cancelling it), and she tore off at full speed, the other four members of her flight following close behind her, a high buzz carrying through her head to toe from the the burn of the thruster, the ground whipping by below and the air groaning...

Beth felt herself grinning, her skin tingling — it'd taken a couple tries to get used to it, but launching from the air was a hell of a rush.

Her flight had all launched without incident, the second flight following a few seconds after they were clear, and then the third, and then the fourth...good, Kixt'akn made it through the launch without being shaken loose, they were all flying. They burned off at top speed, her helmet's displays pointing the way with a big translucent blue arrow, the carrier falling away behind them — it could actually fly faster than the bikes, but it would be slowing down to stay below the horizon so that missile battery didn't shoot them out of the sky. After a minute or two of flying, the ground dipped beneath them, a shallow valley around the river, the water a funny muddy colour from some kind of silt suspended in it. There were what almost looked like plants closer to the water, but the structures were simple and bulbous, maybe closer to fungi? She didn't know, alien life was bloody weird sometimes. They turned to follow the river, keeping low to make themselves harder to spot, the rippling surface of the water zipping by barely inches beneath her bike.

It turned out the funny tinge to the sky was due to approaching evening...or maybe that was sun-rise? She actually wasn't certain which way was north. The greyish-blue backdrop was blushing yellowish and pinkish toward that side, the sun low in the sky, the thin, sad looking clouds overhead burning orange and red...

As fast as they were moving, even with the carrier keeping back safe, it didn't take them long at all to reach the pirate base. They started slowing when they were still a couple kilometres away — at that speed, it would have been difficult for them to hit anything — hard enough for her to feel the burn in her arms again as she pushed to stop her head from slamming into the crossbar. Beth quick reminded her section that she was breaking off partway through their first run to hit the missile battery, don't wait for her—

—and then she could already make out the shapes of the complex ahead, low and clinging to both banks of the river. Her helmet traced over her section's targets in blue, Beth swayed around over the water to aim at the nearer one. As the crosshairs settled over it, the rangefinder popped up, numbers started quickly ticking down as the distance between them was rapidly bled away. The big damn lasergun on this thing was only effective within about a half a kilometre when in atmosphere, only held 'full' power within about two hundred metres — one of the disadvantages of energy weapons was that the packet was susceptible to air friction, eventually tearing the superheated plasma apart to just poof into nothing. She'd magnified her view without really thinking about it, could see the little figures of people running around, the gun turret she was aiming at rising a bit off the ground, starting to spin around toward them.

That was a very ugly-looking thing — it looked like they'd just took a set of guns off of a junked fighter and slapped them on top of an industrial lift of some kind, haphazard work here. But it wasn't like pirates would have been able to just buy proper defensive artillery or anything — most governments had those kinds of systems under strict control — so she guessed she should be impressed they'd managed to come up with anything at all. Red streaks of laserfire stitched across the sky from the pirate base ahead, Beth dipping and slipping a bit to the side without thinking, but the shots had been wild, nowhere near the approaching bikes—

She fired with a touch of her thumb as the range dipped under five hundred metres, all but automatically, the entire bike thrumming from the force of the big damn gun, the white-orange bolt jolting ahead. Aiming by hand, she didn't hit the target quite perfectly at this distance, but she'd still grazed it, the metal frame shielding the operator glowing in a streak from the heat, in the magnified view she could see the man cringing away, little rivulets of melted metal dripping down. She adjusted her aim slightly, several others firing at more or less the same time, and the platform was ripped into pieces, she banked around, quickly coming into line with the second defensive platform — looking just as haphazard as the first, fancy operation they had here — this one got off a couple shots but they went wide, panicky small-arms fire from the ground coming from multiple sources but nowhere near hitting her — it was obscenely difficult to hit a target moving at this kind of speed, even with how fast blaster bolts traveled — overpowered shots streaked past Beth just as she fired, zeroing in on the platform, and this one was blasted apart too, metal melted and tossed away to rain down to the ground, glowing like yellow-orange stars—

Beth reversed hard, grimacing at the sudden sense of weight, wrenching her speed down to something manageable as she leaned over to the right, the bike rolling with her, and she dipped into the narrow channel between two of the structures — the roll had the bike's repulsors catching the building to one side, the anti-gravity cushion preventing her momentum from bringing her slamming into it — and she levelled off to zip along the unpaved 'street', jolted to the right to take a turn when she reached an intersection — their blocks weren't even enough to just fly straight through — rolling over to the left to take a hard turn at the next, automatic small-arms fire peppering the air around her but mostly missing, a couple shots fizzling against the armoured side of the bike to no significant effect, there was a group of people ahead, whipping around to face her, a single shot tore multiple figures apart, bursting in puffs of steam as their blood flash-boiled, and then she'd already zipped past before the rest could react—

Belatedly, she grimaced — she hoped those hadn't been captives, she hadn't had long enough to get a good look, firing on instinct...

Another hard turn the opposite direction and she reached a small clearing at the centre of the complex, near the river, the missile battery ahead. This was also rather slap-dash, but they'd taken more effort with it, the area dug out and filled with concrete, the launchers set into the ground, only the last metre or so of the tubes sticking out. There was a little hut made out of corrugated metal panels which presumably housed the control systems — Beth arced a couple metres up into the air so she could get a clear shot over the tubes, blew the whole little hut apart with a quick pair of shots. She spun around, the back of the bike fish-tailing around in a long turn to bleed off speed, Beth taking her hands off the controls so she could rip off her right glove, drawing her wand with a flick of her wrist.

As she came to a stop, a nearby man in a colourful mix of mismatched armour was raising a rifle to aim at her — he was blown to pieces by a blasting curse before he knew what hit him. A few other pirates around were killed with a quick flurry of curses, before Beth turned back to the missile battery. The little hut was a glowing melted wreck, and it looked like there had been computer equipment in there...maybe, it was kind of hard to tell in its current state. This the thing was probably out of commission already, but just to be safe she severed the lines between the hut and the launchers with a vanishing curse, and hey, let's just transfigure the tubes closed, theoretically the launch systems should detect there was an obstruction and refuse to fire, just in case there was a backup...

Her troop's comm channel had been playing in her ear, not paying full attention, but she stiffened, her breath freezing in her lungs, as Khrimmak reported that he'd lost Blue Four — the status display she still had in the corner of her vision confirmed the same thing. R̆tąqʂ was gone.

Beth grit her teeth, but forced herself to breathe, opened the channel back to Daristen. "Prime threat neutralised, clear to approach." She didn't wait for a response, turned and zipped around to rejoin her flight, flying one-handed with her wand held close to her chest.

There were pirates scattered through the little informal town, firing wildly up at the sky, hardly even seeming to try to hit anything — a couple bolts fizzled against the underside of her bike as she zipped by overhead, but they didn't do any actual damage, small-arms fire too weak to penetrate the armor. All of the defensive platforms were down, smoking pillars of lopsided metal, still glowing from the heat in places, as she got her bearings she saw one section — the Blues, her helmet labeled them — sweep across one edge of the town at speed, high-powered bolts tearing into the ground and flinging up globs of molten stone, some secondary explosions as they found equipment of some kind, Beth noticed a few figures of defenders disappear as their bodies were atomised—

The Reds were coming in for their own run, a trio of airspeeders lifting off of the ground to meet them — somewhat uncoordinated, out of sync — they were rather bigger than their bikes, two- or four-seat things with some modest room to carry cargo. They'd also been modified, all three of them slung with multiple guns, making them look rather lopsided, Beth could actually see an oversized powerbank bolted onto the side of one, ridiculous. (You couldn't pay her to get in that deathtrap.) Two of them wheeled around to meet the incoming Reds, the third aiming for Beth instead. Swinging around, bringing her wand hand to hover over the repulsor controls, she zeroed in on the two heading for her people, her first shot went wide, the bolt zipping uselessly off toward nothing, but the second hit, a glowing hole torn into the surface, the speeder lurched—

Before she could finish it off, the approaching speeder lined up on her, she slammed down on the repulsor power control, she was flung straight upward, her head bowing from the acceleration, gritting her teeth — bolts burned through where she'd been a second ago, missing her by metres. The speeder wavered for a second, caught be surprise, before sharply banking over to the side, swinging away and putting its narrow side to her, assuming she meant to tip down and fire on it from above, the turn making it harder to hit. Unfortunately for them, she had more than just the forward-facing gun — raising her wand, she rolled to the side, starting to drop as the repulsors lost contact with the ground, as the speeder passed below and a few metres to the right she slashed her wand through the air, casting Sirius's vanishing curse. She knew the curse had landed, but she didn't bother slowing down to watch, finishing her roll and turning to zip off after the other two airspeeders.

She'd oriented back around in time to watch them — she'd damaged one, but it was still flying — meet the nine bikes of Red section, but too slowly to help. Her people were keeping low, so shots that missed might hit something on the ground, trying to make the pirates hesitate, but they didn't bother, the air lighting up with dozens of overpowered bolts fired within seconds. Some were aimed at targets on the ground, some kind of ground vehicle going up, a pack of pirates trying to shoot up at the sky burned away, others sizzling against the sides or roofs of buildings, those mostly the airspeeders' own shots going wide, others were aimed directly at the airspeeders, both vehicles pierced by multiple shots, thin armour set to glow before immediately failing, one of them ripped apart by a secondary explosion but the other just fracturing into multiple pieces, spinning down to the ground—

Beth saw the streak of fire as one of the bikes went up, arcing downward before it struck the side of the one of the parked spacecraft, an air-shivering explosion sending burning debris flipping away in all directions...Red Nine, that had been Aśimu, god fucking dammit...

Gritting her teeth, fury burning away tight in her chest, she swung around to join the rest of the section, continuing on past the edge of the town before swinging around to start another run...

With the pirates' big guns and airspeeders taken out, there wasn't much left the bastards could actually do to them. Practically shooting fish in a barrel at this point — people on the ground would take wild shots at them with blaster rifles, trying to dive for cover as they came in for another run, their bikes' guns burning craters into the unpaved streets, any idiot foolish enough to get caught out of cover vaporised in a blink. There were probably still plenty of them holed up inside the spaceships or the...were those shipping containers they'd converted into buildings? Whatever, their bikes' guns didn't have the power to penetrate the spaceships' armour, and they were supposed to avoid those buildings in case they had captives, the footies could deal with them. The only even mild threat from the people on the ground were some rocket launchers they'd dug out from somewhere — hitting a moving target could be bloody well impossible, but they were homing rockets, manoeuvering around to pursue them. Fortunately, the automated piloting programmes were dumb as shite, so it was relatively easy to evade them until they could be baited into slamming against the side of a spaceship or something, Beth had jumped in to get rid of two of them with spellwork.

Of course, firing the rockets was as good as advertising their position with big glowing signs, so they'd only managed to get off five or six shots before Beth's people blew them all the fuck up.

Their sensors picked up that some of the grounded spaceships' engines were spooling up — probably hadn't tried to take off before because they didn't like their chances against the fleet in orbit, but maybe they thought they could run for the other side of the planet and jet up to hyperspace — but there wasn't a whole lot they could do about that, they simply didn't have the firepower. They did try to disable the ones that seemed to be further along in the start-up process, melting off communications equipment, or sensors, sensors were good, couldn't jump to hyperspace without those. For obvious reasons, those needed to be outside whatever quality armour these things might have, so they were more or less completely undefended — the only problem was actually finding the things, since they'd be in different spots on different models, and wouldn't always look similar. Khrimmak had the clever idea of damaging their radiators — spaceships had a lot of problem bleeding off enough heat, since outer space wasn't exactly very dense so couldn't absorb it very fast — which probably wouldn't make a big difference, because most ships would have heat exchangers which would pump as much energy as they could back into the engines, but it wasn't the worst idea. A few of the ships they actually managed to burn through the viewscreens in the cockpits (and probably incinerating the pirates in there while they were at it), apparently some of these ships weren't armoured very well...

After some minutes floating around and taking whatever targets they could find, Beth got an update from Daristen — she turned around to see the big hulking shape of the carrier approaching the town, only a minute or two away. She glanced around that half of the smoking, half-ruined pirate base, opened her mouth to—

"We're losing this one!"

"Red Six, can you pursue?" Loqšamus asked, kharson voice still smooth and calm.

"Negative, it's going above op range, the armour on the underside's too thick."

"I got it." Bringing her bike to a sudden stop, Beth wheeled around, looking up at the sky to spot the ship. Luckily, it was a slow bastard, a big blocky-looking freighter of some kind, but their bikes could only operate properly within a couple dozen metres of the ground, the pirate freighter swiftly pulling up above that height. She hopped up to plant her feet on the seat of her bike, and then apparated up to the freighter.

She slammed against the hard metal hull, adhering herself to the surface with a wandless sticking charm. The ship vibrating against her, reverberating through her head to toe, she couldn't just blow the thing, might drop debris right on the captives (or accidentally get one of her people caught up in it), she arched her neck to glance around— "Blues, while I'm up here, help clear the L.Z." —there was the cockpit! She cancelled the sticking charm, immediately started sliding along the hull, but she apparated right away, a second wandless sticking charm planting her hand and knees against the transparent surface of the viewscreen.

There were three figures inside — a pilot, a copilot, another standing looming behind them — all three jumping at her sudden appearance, the ship lurching under her as someone bumped something. Smirking, Beth gave them a little sarcastic salute with her wand — and then she cast a Lance of Modestus, the two-stage piercing curse transmitting through the viewscreen and punching through the pilot's chest, spraying blueish (?) blood everywhere. He nudged something in his dying throes, the ship tilting into a spin, Beth killed the copilot with a second curse...

Fuck it, they might have another person who could fly in there — Beth transfigured a sizeable arc of the viewscreen into water, opening the cockpit to the air. (They couldn't get into hyperspace if they couldn't safely seal the cockpit.) She broke her sticking charm again, the spin of the ship quickly had her sliding away, and then she was falling through the air, the world spinning dizzily around her, she disapparated—

—and appeared standing on top of her bike, right where she'd left it — she teetered for a moment, not having quite perfectly cancelled her momentum, once she had her balance again dropped down into her seat. "They aren't going anywhere."

"They might crash right into the green zone."

Beth frowned, glancing back up at the ship. It was wavering seemingly randomly, spinning in a little spiral...

...Fuck. She should have thought of that, slipped her mind...

"I hate you, Sergeant. Keep an eye on things out here, I'll land the damn thing."

"Copy, Red Lead." His voice was almost as calm and flat as always, not quite managing to hide a curl of amusement.

Beth hopped back up onto the seat of her bike, and apparated up to the bloody ship again. This time she appeared inside the cockpit — she had seen it before, but her landing was a little sloppy, her momentum bringing her slamming against the side, there was a cracking and snapping as something broke against her armour. That third bloke had dragged one of the bodies out of the pilot's chair but he hadn't sat down yet, he whipped around at her sudden appearance, hand scrambling for the holster at his waist, she lunged at him, her shoulder crunching into his chest — she thought the hard edge of the armoured panel must have broken a rib or something — he tipped back into the copilot's chair, the room tilting dizzily around her, her feet scrabbling for purchase, he tried to shove her away, reaching for his blaster again, she grabbed at his wrist, even as she fell down and to the side, pulling him off balance, tipping over her to flop awkwardly down to the floor—

A blasting curse splattered blood and bone and brains across the floor and partway up the wall before he could get his bearings.

Pushing herself up to her feet, teetering for a step at the fucking spinning, fuck — hadn't these idiots gotten their internal gravity up? — she stumbled over to stand between the chairs, gazing down at the controls. Son of a bitch, why did every bloody ship have to arrange their controls differently, ah...there was the fucking repulsor system, honestly...

Beth had just managed to stop the bloody spinning when she heard the scream of a blaster going off at close range — there was a hard kick against her upper back, nearly slamming her face-first against the controls before she caught herself, a subtle sense of heat bleeding through the suit. She whirled around, there was a being standing in the doorway (unfamiliar species), she drew her wand but they were faster, she tried to jump out of the way, another high shriek as he fired a second time, the impact hitting somewhere low against her stomach, tipping back against the pilot's seat, and this time it was hot, a bright white curse leaving her wand an instant later, tearing into the being's torso, his body was ripped apart, toppling down to the floor in three pieces, a puddle of blood swiftly beginning to spread...

She'd fallen to sit on the floor without really noticing, back leaning against the pilot's chair, her free hand pressed against the searingly hot ache in her middle. Gritting her teeth, she looked down — there was a burn mark in one of the armour panels around her hips, the texture of the weird ceramic-metal stuff turned into funny asymmetrical whorls, melted and quickly re-solidified. The armour had caught most of the shot, but some of it had gotten around, scorching through the flightsuit underneath, the fabric discoloured and fraying, and fuck, that hurt...

A couple healing and numbing charms took the edge off, but she'd definitely be in medical later. Pushing through the pain, forcing her seizing muscles to cooperate, Beth staggered back up to her feet, her heart pounding in her ears and adrenaline sharp on her tongue. It took a couple blinks to make her eyes focus, she gripped the repulsor controls with shaky hands, continued to bring the ship in for a landing.

Her head swimming a little from the blaster burn — fuck, how long had it been since she'd been shot? probably not since the war in Indochina... — she wasn't doing a great job of holding the thing steady, but she didn't really need to. She just had to get it away from the complex, ponderously swinging out over the blotchy colourful stone. In this condition, in an unfamiliar ship, she kind of doubted she could make it a pretty landing, but fuck it, once she was in the clear she just tipped it down toward the ground, as long as she didn't come down too hard it shouldn't—

There was a sudden storm of swearing over her troop's channel, her breath catching in her throat. "Clear the channel! What happened?"

"We lost Blue Nine," Loqšamus hissed.

Kixt'akn — was that three now, they—

The ship slammed down into the ground, there was a harsh screaming and screeching of metal as it slid, Beth hitching up against the control surfaces, flung forward, her helmet bounced off of something in the cockpit hard enough she heard it snap. A second later she was laying on the floor (noticeably tilted under her), clutching at the blaster burn on her stomach, fuck fuck fuck...

"Red Lead? Please respond, Lieutenant."

"I'm here, Sergeant," she gasped, audibly breathless even to her own ears. "Got my arse shot like an idiot, strained something grounding this bloody thing..."

There was a brief pause, before Loqšamus said, "The footies have reached the city, I can ask the Captain to have a medic sent your way."

"Don't bother, I can get back to my bike." They would have to clear this ship anyway, but it was the principle of the matter. Grabbing onto the back of the copilot's seat, her knees shaking, Beth dragged herself back up onto her feet, gritting her teeth against the sharp, tearing pain in her middle. Definitely pulled something, but the burning didn't hurt so badly — maybe ripped open something she'd sealed up with her basic healing work? At this point, poking at it herself might just make it worse, but it didn't feel like she was badly bleeding or anything, it could wait until she could get back to the carrier.

Beth realised I've had worse was a pretty low bar at this point, but she didn't have a reputation in the Law yet. Had to fix that.

Once she was more or less steady, she apparated back to her bike, still floating where she'd left it — this time she almost toppled over the side, but she managed to catch herself and sink down into her seat, letting out a long shaky breath. While she'd been busy stopping that ship from running away, the carrier had landed at the edge of the pirate town. She could make out teams of infantrymen pouring through the alleys, storming into this building or that grounded spaceship, armour in the black and red of the Law, she spotted at least one team in special forces white instead. Both sections of her troop were lazily circling over the area, keeping an eye on things from the air, but at this point their job was basically done. Gently, trying not to stress her injury too much, Beth angled toward the Reds and started moving up to join them.

"Spear Lead, Blue Six."

"Go, Corporal."

"I saw Blue Nine go down. She might be alive."

Beth waited a second for Loqšamus to either explain or tell Ilnekkur to shut up, before belatedly realising Ilnekkur was speaking to her on a direct channel. "I'm going to be very annoyed if you're just playing ghost with me."

"Understood, Lieutenant."

There was some noise of fighting under her, she leaned over to see soldiers standing behind cover around a door, blasterfire spilling out into the 'street' — the bad guys were inside the building, though, so there wasn't shite Beth could do about that. "Explain, then."

"She was hit with small-arms fire, and her micrograv isn't working, so she was knocked clear from her bike. It went up, but I think it crashed without her."

...Oh. Right, that meant she could be alive, then. Probably pummelled pretty badly, thanks to falling off her bike at speed, but alive. Unexpected benefit to her microgravity systems being out then, Beth guessed...though if they were working she might not have crashed in the first place, whatever. "Did you see where she landed?"

"No sir, we were clearing the L.Z. for the footies, I didn't have time to look."

"Okay, I'll try a tracking spell, we'll see if I find anything." Ilnekkur was repeating tracking spell to himself, bemused, but she switched over to the troop's channel instead of sticking around to answer questions. Turning away from her section, she said, "Blue Six thinks there's a chance Blue Nine was blown clear before her bike went down, I'm going to try to find her. Call me if anything exciting happens, Sergeant."

"Yes, Lieutenant," Loqšamus grumbled, sounding rather annoyed. Not at her, necessarily, she didn't think — she had the sudden feeling that Ilnekkur had brought up the possibility to Loqšamus already, and gotten shut down. Probably why Ilnekkur had decided to tell her in a private channel, come to think of it.

Beth use of "tracking charm" talking to Ilnekkur had been a bit imprecise — most tracking charms worked through sympathetic magic, and required a bit of the person or thing being tracked to use as a focus. Obviously she didn't have one of Kixt'akn's feathers or whatever on her, so that wasn't a possibility. She could cast a messenger charm, though. The little blob of green light appeared right away — which didn't necessarily mean anything, it should carry a message to a corpse the same as a living person — when it zipped off Beth turned to chase after it. It got out ahead of her pretty quickly, disappearing from sight, so she cast the charm a second time, and then a third when she lost it again.

Her fifth messenger charm she managed to follow until it suddenly came to a stop, bobbing in the air over an angular black and red figure on the bank of the river for a few seconds before it disappeared. Beth lowered her bike down until the underside was only inches above the stone, a couple metres away from Kixt'akn, and hopped over the side of the bike down to the ground — and winced at the sudden flare of pounding pain in her side, fuck, stupid thing. Once it died down a bit, she lurched into motion, shuffling over toward the still, misshapen armoured form of Kixt'akn's body.

The stone surface of the planet was mostly flat, scoured smooth by wind and water, and in this particular section largely clear of the colourful patches of whatever the fuck those things were, lichens or fungi of some kind — there were black scorch marks on the stone here and there, she assumed the pirates had burned them away. Maybe some of them were poisonous, or the pirates just suspected them of being poisonous and were playing it safe. The bank of the river wasn't perfectly even, blocks of it raised or lowered and digging into each other, crumbling at the edges, set apart in some tectonic activity back millions of years ago, a narrow band right on the water milled down into dull greyish-black sand. The water itself was oddly opaque, tinged blackish-green, leaving an oily greenish residue on the sand and in streaks up on the stone where it'd spilled over the bank — some kind of microbial life, maybe?

Kixt'akn was settled on one of the raised blocks, legs dangling off the edge, long and narrow and double-jointed...and bent at angles Beth thought was unnatural even for her species, broken in the rough landing. There were countless alien species out there, Beth was familiar with a fair number by now but there would always be more — Kixt'akn was one that she wasn't familiar with, and one of the more inhuman-looking ones at that. There were species out there that looked completely alien, like nothing that was even recognisable, but Kixt'akn wasn't that far out there, just looked very bird-like. Her people couldn't actually fly, though. They had six limbs, legs and functional arms and a pair of wings, and while Kixt'akn could move her wings, used them all the time to make gestures and stuff, they were largely vestigial, too small and weak for the size of the rest of her body, she couldn't actually use them to fly.

Honestly, with how super-colourful they were, feathers long and delicate and glittering, Beth had a feeling they were, like... She didn't know the term for it. Sexual display, maybe? like peacocks? She'd never seen a man of Kixt'akn's species, as far as she knew, if she had the comparison between the two might make that more obvious...

(Sex differences in sapient species tended to be rather minimal, humans actually toward the more extreme end, but it was a thought.)

Beth was kind of distracting herself with nerdy Hermione thoughts, because Kixt'akn really didn't look like she was in good shape...though she was also starting to come off the adrenaline from being fucking shot, feeling heavy and tired and shaky, that probably didn't help. Kixt'akn looked pretty odd in the armour to begin with, since her legs and arms were built differently, and her wings folded against her back gave her torso a weird bulky profile, and her head was a different shape. The bend of the neck didn't help, but the beak was kind of hard to miss. (Like she'd said, bird-like.) She'd been kind of battered out of her even already odd shape, and there were little black and red shards scattered around...their armour was built to resist blaster bolts, susceptible to shatter from blunt force...

Standing a metre away from the twisted mess, Beth sucked a breath in through her teeth — and she cast a basic healer's analysis charm. The breath immediately left her in a single gust, teetering on her heels for a second, light-headed. The illusions the charms produced were kind of nonsense, the magic tripped up by Kixt'akn's alien physiology, but that it worked at all meant she was alive.

She was alive. They'd still lost R̆tąqʂ and Aśimu, but at least Kixt'akn was still here.

Beth stumbled closer, tipped over to hitch against the stone at Kixt'akn's side. Her head spinning, she let her eyes close for a moment, took a few breaths. Then, careful not to move her, she transfigured a bit of Kixt'akn's armour out of the way, revealing the soft downy feathers of her torso, white and blue and brownish-orange. A careful cutting charm opened up a shallow cut, Beth dabbed her fingers in Kixt'akn's blood (red, like human) — she started drawing a rune on the stone, tracing over the strokes multiple times to make sure they'd stick, going back again and again to gather up more blood. Once it looked good, Beth sealed the cut back up, started carving runes into the stone in a circle around the one drawn in blood. Generally, carving runes with magic like this wasn't preferred, it worked best when done by hand, but she didn't need it to last very long.

The runes finished, Beth actually cast the spell by spilling a few drops of her own blood over the rune drawn in Kixt'akn's — she felt the draw on her for a couple seconds, making her feel even more heavy and exhausted. She rolled over to lay on her back, staring up at the thin blue sky overhead, breathing slow and thick.

Once she'd caught her breath, she switched over to Daristen's channel. "Captain, I've got two injured, one critically. Requesting a medic be sent to my position, once you can spare any."

There was a brief pause, then Daristen said, "Copy that, Lieutenant. The fight to secure the installation is proceeding slowly, but casualties are low so far — we can spare an evac team. Estimate...seven minutes, to reach your position."

"Understood." She switched back to her troop's channel. "Blue Lead, report."

"Nothing new yet, Lieutenant," Loqšamus said. "The pirates have retreated under cover or into the green zone, where we can't reach them. The footies are clearing them out building by building. We're just watching them clean up at this point."

Even though nobody could see her, she just nodded — their part of the battle was done, then. Rationally speaking, only losing two of their people actually wasn't that bad, considering the forces the pirates had had here, by themselves (that fucking missile battery), but she still had to swallow down the burn at the back of her throat. Once she thought her voice would be more or less steady, she said, "All right, keep an eye on things, just in case. Kixt'akn survived the crash, but she's pretty banged up. I got myself shot like an idiot, so, I'm just going to sit here keeping up a spell to make sure we don't lose Kixt'akn before the medics can get to her."

Loqšamus's response was partly buried by several of her people's reaction to the idea that she could, just, keep someone alive with magic. They all knew she was a mage, obviously, but their troop hadn't been together very long, and they hadn't had many chance for her to demonstrate — she'd shown them a few little things, sure, but there limits to what she could do on board the Qurakšal without potentially breaking something. Doing big magic on a bloody spaceship, in space, wasn't exactly the smartest idea in the world. So, her people still had a very limited understanding of what she was capable of, and keeping dying people alive would come off like straight up miracle shite, like might be in some of the more out there stories about old legendary Monatšeri sorcerers or whatever. Not like this was even normal by Earth standards, honestly.

She knew Sirius would yell at her if he found out she'd done this. Not over doing this kind of blood magic at all, she meant — he'd been the one to teach it to her in the first place — but over doing it for someone she barely knew, and someone of an entirely alien species at that. Blood magic could be finicky, there were all kinds of things that could have gone wrong — if their souls were incompatible it could... Well, she didn't know, honestly. She didn't think it would have killed either of them, but there definitely could be some weird soul-poisoning effects. She hadn't thought about it that hard.

She'd already lost two of her people, and she'd known she could make sure they wouldn't lose a third — that was all, A to B, no more complicated than that. She realised that was kind of mad but, well, she was long accustomed to the idea that she was kind of mad, so.

Anyway, how much longer until the medics got here? This ritual leveraged her own life to keep Kixt'akn going, and she was feeling kind of dizzy...

Chapter Text

12th September 2001 (69:5:10)
— Zero Day plus 06.00.10

Their experimental spacecraft didn't work.

All of the separate systems they'd developed functioned as designed — they'd even managed to get it all to work reasonably well in concert, which Hermione had learned by this point could be bloody difficult to accomplish. Their test flights in atmosphere had gone perfectly smoothly, with only minor technical hiccoughs, there'd been a brief delay in the project's timetable as its communications system was outfitted with their functional (if still experimental) subspace PCRT radio. After all, if the craft did successfully leave the Earth's biosphere, they would no longer be able to communicate with it using baseline PCRT tech, so adding subspace capabilities had been an obvious step to take. A couple weeks of tests, some minor adjustments, and they were finally prepared for its maiden voyage into space.

And it didn't work. They had managed to reach low orbit, yes, but there was an elevation past which the enchantments began to lose power, more and more quickly the higher it flew, until finally the enchantments failed completely — they'd lost contact with the craft as communications went, coming back in over an hour later as it reentered the atmosphere. The craft had survived, communications coming back in with plenty of time to regain control, having sustained only minimal damage due to its somewhat oblique reentry.

But it hardly mattered that they'd saved the craft, because it didn't work. All the alterations to their enchantment schemes, arrays designed to draw in power (analogous to solar panels, but for magic), all of it had failed.

The doomed flight had been a month ago now, and Hermione was sitting in a conference room at the Commission's offices. The room was packed, filled with a smattering of directors and principle researchers, and noisy, several different conversations going on simultaneously as they reviewed their options.

Hermione didn't see how they had any. Enchantments didn't work in space. They simply didn't have the power.

They'd done countless tests now, not only with their failed spacecraft. There were the super-brooms some people had been playing around with — the same project Beth had had so much fun volunteering as a test pilot for — various rockets with experimental equipment they'd sent up, a few people had even floated up balloons loaded with sensors and banks of reservoir stones, intended to measure the density of ambient magic and the power consumption of enchantments at different altitudes. The results of all their tests and their experiments were very, very straightforward, if undesirable. The proper functioning of enchantments required ambient magic; the density of ambient magic begin to decline a kilometre or so above ground level, dropping below detectable levels near the tropopause; therefore, it was impossible for enchantments to operate outside the atmosphere.

Enchantments could function at higher altitudes for a short time, exactly how long depending on various factors. Objects did become saturated with some amount of magical energy simply due to existing within the ambient environment — in the absence of ambient magic, an enchantment would draw on that energy attached to the object itself, until such time that it was exhausted. That time could be extended by intentionally saturating the materials, or through the use of banks of charged reservoir stones. However, the density of that magic was relatively minimal, and would be exhausted quickly.

Impractically quickly — it had been suggested that they might be able to achieve space travel by simply using reservoir banks as a power source, but those balloon tests had given them some very stark maths to work with. Reservoir stones simply couldn't be charged with enough magic to power any enchantments of significant complexity for any useful length of time. Even if they had mages on board who continually recharged the reservoirs, over and over and over, no matter how quickly, the energy produced in the process was simply too sparse to be efficiently utilised by standard enchanting techniques. Even packing an enormous volume of reservoirs into expanded space, that could extend the viable functional life, yes, but still hardly enough in their best models to even reach the enormous space station now hovering over their world — and there were diminishing returns, the enchantments necessary to maintain the expanded space drawing more and more power...

Though it was curious that their experimental spacecraft had reentered the atmosphere intact. The computer systems did contain expanded space, but those pockets hadn't collapsed in that time. As odd as that seemed at first glance, it did make sense once examined — those enchantments were essentially transfiguring space, a spell which would remain in effect after it ceased actively being 'cast' by the enchantment. Not forever, they would fail eventually, but they'd lasted long enough for the craft to return to an altitude at which the enchantments resumed operation. They'd tested the concept by sending a module containing a large volume of expanded space on a rocket up into high orbit — they'd observed the module for nearly three hours before it'd been violently ripped into pieces as the true dimensions contained within the pocket were enforced.

Interestingly, the other magical properties of the spacecraft had continued to function as well: enchantments would fail in space, but alchemy didn't. This, of course, also made sense, since alchemy permanently altered the innate characteristics of an object. Alchemical properties were preserved in space for the same reason that people could cast spells in space — something that had been confirmed, by the omniglots who'd left their solar system, visitors to the station, various tests done on high-altitude balloons or aircraft, that'd been thoroughly documented by this point. Alchemised objects did not require ambient magic to express their properties, and neither did living mages.

Enchantment was far more versatile than alchemy, however — they could not replace the use of enchantment with alchemy, that simply wasn't feasible, even on a theoretical level. And so the dilemma remained.

Hermione had the nasty feeling that this problem wasn't solvable. A fact of the universe, something which simply couldn't be circumvented.

But then, until a few years ago, she would have said the same thing about the speed of light.

Given the developments which had been made over the last six years — and the revelation that there were spacefaring alien civilisations out there, whose technology spat in the face of their best understanding of the natural world — Hermione was reluctant to firmly declare that the problem was impossible to solve. Perhaps they would come up with a solution, in time...she just couldn't imagine what such a thing could possibly be. It would require replacing enchantment as they knew it with an entirely new field, something which didn't rely on the presence of ambient magic. That was not something they would be able to accomplish in any reasonable timeframe — as impressive as their recent technological achievements appeared, they were not based in any new theory, but applying that which was already known. Without some kind of major new development, they were simply not going to be able to get enchanting to function in space.

Unfortunately, that conclusion was unacceptable to the political leadership. As part of the arrangement they'd come to with Inapu-Itarisan, they would be offered whatever developmental assistance was necessary to bring them up to the standards of the rest of spacefaring society. Or to what was considered an acceptable minimum, at the very least — there were still inequalities, but a certain living standard was guaranteed. That was not a right Earth was uniquely granted, but something which all of the member peoples of Inapu-Itarisan had a right to. To what degree that standard had been accomplished, well, from what Hermione could tell that varied. Space was very very large, and the population pushed well into the dozens of trillions...and no small number of those peoples were from societies that had recently gone through some massive trauma, beset by xenocidal alien invasions the same as that which had attacked Earth, or imperialist domination, or mass enslavement — a horrifying fraction of their population had parents or grandparents who had been slaves, or had even once been enslaved themselves...

The point being, the productive forces of Inapu-Itarisan were thoroughly occupied with necessary development efforts, the volume of work involved meaning that the standard of living all citizens were guaranteed under the law was not always met. They did attempt to focus their efforts where they were most needed, targeting material relief to populations which could not feed or equip themselves, providing the basics of space travel to civilisations which could not yet reach the stars on their own. Any aid which came to Earth was aid that was not being sent somewhere else.

Granted, what assistance Earth might require would seem trivial to a civilisation at the scale of Inapu-Itarisan — to a people of dozens of trillions, it was no great burden to reach out a helping hand to a humble few billion. The horrid famine that had been ravaging the world ever since the initial invasion had been ended in a matter of months, and given how many mouths Inapu-Itarlisan already had to feed, Hermione honestly doubted they'd even noticed the expense. Or, perhaps they had, if not when it came to the food itself. As monstrously complicated as they were, spacecraft were expensive, to build and to operate, at least of the sort which were necessary to move such a large volume of supplies — and Earth was at the edge of explored space, beyond safe trade lanes, so these shipments had needed to be escorted by military craft. Those resources, Hermione was uncertain how many were available, and how severe of an investment keeping Earth fed truly was.

The material assistance was a relatively minor matter — their best projections suggested they should be able to feed themselves, and produce a significant surplus, within the next couple of years — but the investments made in infrastructure and security were another matter. Their planet-side infrastructure, the provisioning of electricity and water, communications and healthcare and education, they had that more or less well in hand, or would in the not-to-distant future. They were still using their own techniques, yes, but their enchanted systems worked well enough that Hermione saw little reason to replace them, and in some cases were inarguably superior to what Inapu-Itarisan had available — their water infrastructure especially. (It was difficult to improve upon effectively creating pure water out of thin air.) Much of their own technology didn't even require electricity in most cases, and what power they did still need was essentially free, generated with enchantments which required absolutely no fuel of any kind. As their ability to interpret data between their systems improved, there was little reason to adapt their communications or computer technology either.

Things got more complicated when one looked away from Earth. Compared to the raw power and industrial capacity of spacefaring civilisations, they were simply not equipped to protect themselves. They'd fared quite well against the invaders they'd first faced, but if the force attacking them had even been somewhat larger, they would have been in very serious trouble. And they'd been fortunate in that the aliens had wanted to claim their biosphere more or less intact — Inapu-Itarisan's knowledge of the people they called the jusannu had proven correct Beth's early theory that they'd wanted a functional living world and as many slaves to work their plantations as possible, which had limited their tactics somewhat. If they were met with a larger invasion, using more destructive tactics...

The enormous space station hovering over their world was a reminder of their vulnerability in more ways than one. It was a clear sign that they were thought to be unable to defend themselves, yes, that Inapu-Itarisan had thought it necessary to provide such a thing...but it was also a clear demonstration of how outmatched they truly were. That space station was equipped with fusion bombs of absolutely cataclysmic magnitude — hundreds of them. Some quick calculations had demonstrated that, if they wished, that single station could reduce the entire surface of the planet to molten glass.

Earth was not entirely defenseless, of course, but failing to intercept even a handful of warheads of such destructive power would be devastating. And that single station had hundreds, but such installations were so commonplace that Inapu-Itarisan had had one already available, which they'd been able to move all the way to Earth on short notice. How many hundreds more might they have? What other weaponry might be found in their navy, military vessels counted in the thousands?

On a galactic scale, Inapu-Itarisan was relatively small — the so-called Republic Beyond the Veil was larger, by perhaps as much as an order of magnitude. And who knew what other threats there might be out there? Pirates and slavers, there were still roving bands of jusannu wondering about... The galaxy was a dangerous place, it turned out, no, that Inapu-Itarisan meant to invest so much to secure this region of space was understandable.

The station over Earth was not the only one of its kind in the region. There was a single 'highway' (so to speak) connecting Earth to the rest of Inapu-Itarisan, each of the stopovers along the way seeded with a subspace relay, each of which must be protected. Many of these relays only had automated defences, which had a much smaller logistical footprint than the station here, but there were a couple similar installations already in 'their' space. And 'their' space was currently being mapped as well — the region of space which had been outlined as Earth's sphere of influence was largely unexplored, so Inapu-Itarisan's navy had begun to do so in their stead. It simply couldn't wait until Earth was equipped to do so, since there could be more jusannu out there, or pirates, or who knew what else, at the very least they had to make sure it was safe to leave them to their own devices.

Hermione had heard that two additional habitable planets had already been identified within 'their' space — well, planets, one was a moon in orbit around a gas giant, but regardless. Both already featured their own biospheres, but it seemed the culture around such things was rather more liberal than she might have expected. (Galactic society had no such thing as a Prime Directive, it turned out.) Earth had the right to exploit the resources within 'their' space however they wished, including those of these habitable worlds, including the biological resources of the life that already existed there, they could colonise them freely. Unless and until they discovered sapient life on any of them — those beings would have the same rights under the laws of Inapu-Itarisan as any others, which could deeply complicate matters. Perhaps the nascent "Dimitran" government would be reformed to include both societies, perhaps they would be broken up to create two separate states, it would depend.

Unfortunately, it seemed Inapu-Itarisan was quite progressive on this particular matter by galactic standards: there were countless stories throughout history of more advanced civilisations colonising inhabited worlds and enslaving the indigenous people there, or even outright exterminating them. Hermione supposed she shouldn't be surprised, but it'd still been somewhat depressing to learn.

Given recent history, their disastrous war with the first aliens they'd encountered, the overwhelming majority of the world's political leadership considered being dependent on Inapu-Itarisan for their own security to be completely unacceptable. That would always have been unavoidable at least temporarily — it would take time to develop their technology to meet the new challenges involved, and they simply didn't have the industrial capacity of a society on the scale of Inapu-Itarisan — but it was considered essential that they develop their own alternatives, as quickly as possible. There were some suspicions in certain quarters as to Inapu-Itarisan's good intentions, yes, but more than anything they were wary of becoming dependent on the great power, to lose control of their own industry and their own defence, to become nothing but a minor frontier outpost of a society on a scale they could hardly even comprehend.

Hermione understood that motivation, she truly did — she simply didn't know how much they could do about it. If they couldn't get enchantment to work in space, they would be forced ot resort to adapting Inapu-Itarisan industry. They did not have the capability to produce that technology, so they would be — for better or for worse, for the foreseeable future — entirely dependent on imports, or production outsourced to Earth. Their membership in Inapu-Itarisan would guarantee them favourable terms, that was true, but they would have little control of such industry while capacity was built up over time, as their people received the necessary training, as the existing infrastructure here on Earth was retooled to support the needs of their technology. It would be a slow process, one which might be executed for their benefit and at their behest, yes, but one which would be entirely dependent on support from outside.

Perhaps even worse for their pride, under this model it would be ages before they'd be able to contribute much of anything back to galactic society. They might be guaranteed this assistance under the laws of Inapu-Itarisan, but the political leadership bristled at being reduced to a charity case, possibly for decades.

No, they wanted a faster solution. They wanted the Commission to adapt their own unique magical technology to match that of the rest of the galaxy, to reverse-engineer whatever they could and twist it to their own methods — and find some field in which we could surpass what was known to the rest of the galaxy, to provide something to Inapu-Itarisan which they could not produce themselves. To stake a place for themselves in spacefaring society that couldn't just be put down to an accident of birth.

Unfortunately, it looked like this was one mandate the Commission wouldn't be able to fulfill. Enchantments simply didn't work in space — they would not be able to take over their own security, at least not any time soon, not until they could build up advanced industrial capacity. Perhaps there was something they'd be able to manufacture that their new neighbours would want, but they would remain dependent in many ways. Hermione didn't see a way around that.

This meeting had gone on for hours at this point, and didn't seem to be winding down any time soon. They'd started with reports from a list of people on the progress being made in a variety of projects meant to analyse and/or circumvent their dilemma — none of them had had any promising results, which Hermione had already known, having looked over most of them in her own time. There'd been a question if anyone had any other ideas, which had been jumped on by three or four different people, each of them getting agreement or critique (mostly the latter) from three or four other people, and Sydykov very quickly lost control of the room, as they split apart into a half dozen bickering groups going over one point or another.

Hermione was certain that the idea of powering enchantments with charged reservoirs was a dead-end. Not only could reservoirs not truly hold that much energy — they were effective for storing information, but the volume of magic in an image was negligible — but enchantments couldn't even use that energy efficiently. Much of it ended up being lost regardless, dispersing as the magic-dense environment of the object equalised with the magic-poor environment of outer space. Perhaps if some substance could be alchemised to produce magical energy at a rate quicker than it was lost, enough to support a system of enchantments, then that might be useful, but their alchemists were extremely sceptical of the feasibility of the strategy at scale. Such a technique could maybe be used to saturate a small system, like a rocket or a drone of some kind, but nothing large enough to carry crew, certainly.

One discussion she overheard involved trapping ambient magic within the vessel somehow. A curiosity of the phenomenon of ambient magic was that it didn't seem to be exhausted by active enchantments — enchantments did drawn on ambient magic to some degree, a portion of the available energy being taken into the object, but this energy didn't seem to be expended by the operation of the enchantment. There were theories as to where the energy used by enchantments came from, but nobody truly knew for certain. (Hermione personally favoured the idea that the magic produced by enchantment was analogous to that produced by mages, was channelled from the same source, but nobody was certain what that was either. Everything and nothing, capital-M Magic, the universe, whatever.) The implication when it came to their problem here, was that they didn't necessarily need to power their enchantments, but prevent the ambient energy they accumulated while on Earth from dissipating once it was in space — nature did abhor a vacuum, after all. If they could find some means by which to hold the internal environment against the tendency of the ambient environment to equalise, that should solve the problem. Analogous to how the walls of a spacecraft held in the air, in a way.

Unfortunately, there didn't some to be a solution to that problem either. The immediate issue Hermione had noted was that they couldn't simply wall magic in, the way they could air: the ambient energy would saturate any materials within reach, which would ultimately bring it into contact with the vacuum, allowing it to escape. Some materials might slow the loss of energy into space, but nothing could stop it. The idea that they might isolate the internal environment with wards had seemed interesting at first...but there were multiple issues with it. For one thing, the current field of wardcrafting assumed there would be ambient magic on both sides of the barrier, and drew that energy in to firm up the wardline — without that pressure on both sides, it was very likely the structure would collapse outward. There was also the problem that, yes, the wards might prevent the internal environment from dissipating into space, but there was nothing stopping the magic contained within the wards from dissipating...magic which was drawn from the ambient environment. The enforced structure of the wardline might slow the process down — assuming they could prevent it from immediately collapsing, of course — but all they would be doing was interposing an intermediate step between the internal environment and the vacuum. That was not solving the problem.

Perhaps, if they didn't use a ward, but developed an enchantment that would project a paling — a ward functioned by manipulating ambient magic, but a paling was generated from the same mysterious source as cast spells, which they already knew functioned in space just fine. One of the little groups around the table were discussing how they might design a test of the concept, Hermione had made a note to check up on that later.

All of the conversations around the table generally centred around ideas to produce enough magic to match that lost to space and keep the enchantments powered, or to contain the internal environment. A litany of different possible solutions were passed around, at times just vague statements and brainstorming general directions to look, but from what Hermione could tell the various conversations all seemed to be going in circles. The former strategy seemed to be outright impossible, just at a glance, and the latter had too many issues in its implementation — the idea of using a paling was the most promising she'd heard this whole time, and she wasn't optimistic. They'd been here long enough that they'd blown right through afternoon tea, service staff bringing in dinner, the remains of sandwiches and pastries strewn about the table, all gone cold by now, as they talked on and on and on...

Hermione didn't want to give up, but she couldn't help feeling like they weren't going to get anywhere. It seemed the Commission had finally been presented with a problem they simply couldn't solve.

And then, in the space of a couple minutes, the galaxy was forever changed.

By this point, she'd long ceased taking any active part in the conversation, losing hope of getting anywhere tonight — and she was hardly the only one, several people here and there had pulled back, listening silently or in their own smaller discussions. Hermione had spent a portion of the meeting eavesdropping on a pair near her, because at this particular meeting she'd managed to get herself sat next to someone of some importance. The woman looked more or less unremarkable — East Asian features, long black hair held in a looping plait, tanned bronze-ish skin, dressed in old-fashioned but relatively plain Chinese-style robes — Hermione would hardly give her a second glance...if she didn't know the woman was one of the immortal sorcerers of Langdiechi Palace, the city atop the legendary hidden mountains of Kunlun, which was ruled by the actual Queen Mother of the West.

Because it turned out, yes, the Queen Mother of the West, or at least an absurdly ancient immortal known by the name, actually existed. Hermione had read all the way back at Hogwarts that Chinese mages spoke as though she existed, occasionally referencing the Queen Mother herself or one of the ageless scholars associated with her advising one government or researcher or another, on the very rare occasion inviting someone to come study at her library, or stay in the ancient, literally mythical city. But, as poetical and dubious as the references had seemed, at the time she'd assumed they were only legends — she hadn't learned until after the alien invasion that, like the Morrigan in Ireland, the Queen Mother was real. Like the Morrigan, it was believed that she was a metamorph so old she was literally prehistoric. Nobody was entirely certain how old she was — again, like the Morrigan — but she'd been so old and powerful by the time writing had been invented that she'd been revered as some manner of deity for generations already...and in her own writings, she claimed to date from a time before agriculture. So, yeah, old.

The Queen Mother was far more academically-minded than the Morrigan — she was known to be something of a patron of scholars, her library dating back millennia, promising minds occasionally invited to study there. It was commonly said that her city was populated entirely by immortals, which wasn't quite true, but there certainly were more than probably anywhere else on Earth. Many of them were the Queen Mother's descendants — metamorphy was heritable, the trait didn't express in every child of a metamorph, but live for thousands of years and Hermione could imagine accumulating quite a number of immortal progeny — but some had apparently been gifted immortality throughout history...somehow? Hermione wasn't certain how that worked. She'd asked a Chinese mage once, and he'd just said the bloody peaches that grew on the mountain made you immortal, which she was pretty sure was actually supposed to be a metaphor of some kind, because the actual method was a secret? Regardless of how all of that worked, Langdiechi Palace had decided to send one of their immortal scholars to help lead the Commission.

Xianü Fengjiajiao (which Hermione was positive was a title of some kind and not a proper name) was a particular expert in geomancy and agriculture, and was the Director of the department in the Commission concerned with efforts to restore farmland damaged in the war or industrial contamination, as well as their plans to exploit the aliens' terraforming beetles to greenify deserts and other such environments. While her knowledge of her own field was almost literally unparalleled — it wasn't at all surprising that she might have something to show for centuries of dedicated study — her understanding of other fields could often be quite hit or miss. One of the researchers from her department, an Indian man she called Jahid (probably a given name), spent the whole meeting at her side — she'd ask him a question now and then about something someone had said, a constant stream of increasingly granular clarifications as Xianü would follow up an answer with additional questions.

It was sort of fascinating to listen to, honestly. Partly because Xianü's very existence was fascinating — Hermione still wasn't used to people like the Morrigan and the Queen Mother of the West actually being real — but also because Xianü's follow-up questions would sometimes show unexpected insights, making connections Hermione would never have thought of. If this was what all of the scholars of Kunlun were like, she was deeply disappointed that the likelihood of ever meriting an invitation was so terribly low. She suspected she would love to visit, even if only for a few days...and even though she suspected the whole bloody library would be in languages she couldn't read anyway.

Jahid had been valiantly attempting to describe the dilemma to Xianü through much of the meeting, which took some effort — Xianü might have seen a fair bit in her who even knew how many centuries of life, but space travel was even newer to her than it was to muggle science. Between listening to or participating in the various conversations going on, Hermione would eavesdrop on the odd pair discussing the problem, and the two general strategies most of the room were turning over. She would admit, her confidence in her own suspicion that neither approach would lead to a solution had been buoyed by Xianü's bleak evaluation of the different ideas floating around. Of course, Xianü came off faintly superstitious, speaking of magic as a force of life itself that could hardly be expected to function correctly in a place so dead as the depths of space, but even if the language she used felt a little silly at times, her reasoning was flawless.

After spending some time discussing the idea of using a paling to trap ambient magic — Xianü was very pessimistic about it, though Hermione didn't quite follow the logic, something about the effect she expected such a strategy would have on the character of the environment within — Xianü said something which seemed perfectly innocuous, at first. "It is too bad you cannot simply cultivate a lens."

"Excuse me, a lens?" Jahid asked, sounding about as confused as Hermione was.

"Ah, this is not what you call it in Europe, I cannot recall what it is." Of course, the academic language in magical China was, as one would expect, Chinese — Classical Chinese, that is. Xianü's French was quite good, but even after a few years she was still sometimes tripped up by academic jargon. "As a river will flow downhill, the flow of magic is guided by the living things of a place; and as one may change the course of a river by shaping the earth, one may change the course of magic by shaping the life upon it."

"Geoscaping, we call that. But I'm still not sure what you mean by a lens."

"When geoscaping, one may cultivate the environment such to draw in magic toward a single point, where it may be focussed into great works of enchanting and ritual. Or to provide the power necessary for wards such as those we have to keep the Immortal City secret and safe."

Jahid nodded. "I believe you're describing to a geomantic vortex. In the Western tradition, we're familiar with the phenomenon, but we have never developed the skill with geoscaping necessary to produce them artificially — though the possibility of doing so is known from the observation of American warding techniques." He didn't say that it wasn't common knowledge that the ancient wards of Kunlun had been raised through similar methods, but Hermione assumed he didn't want to get too close to asking the sort of question Xianü wasn't supposed to answer. The immortal scholars of Langdiechi Palace could be very protective of the city's secrets. "I think I understand, now. You are saying that the motion of a vortex might be used to hold enough energy to power enchantments, or at least to slow their escape long enough that the reservoir can be renewed."

"That is the thought, however silly it might seem." Xianü tilted her head back and forth in a little sideways nod, letting out a low hum. "Of course, I know of no alchemical or industrial method to cultivate a vortex. There is the issue of the energy you would be drawing in as well, of course. In the classical method, you needn't worry about this, as the ambient energy you might need is produced locally, through the ordinary function of living things — the same living things that give shape to the vortex itself. I'm uncertain it is possible to achieve the same results through industry. Metal and stone simply do not have the same relationship to Magic as growing things, and, perhaps this is simply outside of my area of expertise, but I don't know how that can be changed."

"No, I wouldn't call it a silly thought, but you're right, I'm not sure how useful it is..." Glancing her way, Jahid frowned, appearing somewhat confused. "Is something the matter, Ms. Granger?"

It wasn't until she noticed that Jahid was looking up at her that Hermione realised she'd stood up at some point — staring at Xianü and Jahid, hardly breathing, her head practically sizzling, her heart pounding in her chest. People had noticed her stand up, eyes being drawn to her, a circle of quiet slowly expanding through this side of the room, but she hardly even noticed, still silently staring. After a moment, she found her voice, muttered, "Say that again."

Jahid blinked. "...Is something the matter?"

"No, not you. Xianü." Hermione was definitely pronouncing that incorrectly — she was fluent in French, her Arabic was excellent, and she could speak little bits of Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, but she didn't know any Chinese at all. "What you were saying before, about vortices."

Unlike Jahid, who continued to seem very confused, Xianü looked merely curious, giving Hermione a thoughtful look. "Very well, Ms. Granger." This side of the room had gotten quiet enough that, instead of speaking directly to Hermione, she turned to address everyone watching. She gave a brief summary of the discussion she and Jahid had just been having, her thought that it was a pity they couldn't simply shape a vortex inside their vessels, that she didn't think there was any artificial means to create one. "And at that point we were interrupted by Ms. Granger," she said, turning to look back up toward Hermione, "who seems to be having a moment of inspiration."

...She didn't know if she was, exactly, there was just something. Instead of responding to Xianü, she just pointed at her, turning to look around at the people listening. "Am I the only one who thinks there's something there?" Belatedly, it occurred to her that pointing at people was very offensive in some cultures — ooh, she hoped she hadn't just unthinkingly blown up any chance of ever being invited to Kunlun...

There was silence for a moment, people glancing at each other. After a bit, one of the alchemists in the room (Hermione had forgotten his name, they didn't work together) leaned forward to say, "I'm not certain there is. I can confirm the Sage's suspicion that there is no artificial means to produce a vortex."

"We might be able to replicate the effects on the ambient environment with warding."

"There would hardly be any point — the energy at the boundary would still dissipate, if perhaps more slowly than it would against a hard wardline. We would still need to generate magic to sustain it—"

"—and so we're back to that problem all over again. It's an interesting thought, but..."

"Hold on, let's not be too quick. If we can make the vortex strong enough—"

"It could never be strong enough to neutralise the vacuum pressure."

"It doesn't need to be, we only need to—"

There was more chattering from there, the brief calm immediately breaking apart into separate discussions turning over one point or another. Hermione wasn't even really listening, still on her feet, staring down at the table. It was like a word on the tip of her tongue, the solution to a puzzle an instant from snapping into place — there was something there, she knew there was, but she couldn't...quite...put it together. It was terribly frustrating, glaring down at nothing and biting the inside of her lip, her breath hissing through her nose (the sound reminding herself of her father in a temper), she knew there was an answer there, but she just couldn't see it...

The whole time, she was dimly aware of Xianü watching her. Eyes thoughtfully narrowed, head tilted, thoughts clearly turning in her ancient mind. (Hermione actually didn't know how old Xianü was, precisely, but she had to have been around for centuries plural, at least.) After a few minutes of noisy chaos, Xianü said, "Excuse me." When the room didn't immediately quiet — as much activity as there was, Hermione doubted very many people had even heard her — she smoothly rose to her feet, her hands lifted up to shoulder-height at her sides. "Excuse me. Excuse me," again and again...

The conversations gradually petered out, people turning to face Xianü. Eventually, it was quiet enough that Sydykov was finally able to make himself heard over the noise, once the room was silent gesturing toward her. "I understand you have something for us, Xiánǚ."

Dipping her head to Sydykov in a nod, she said, "A question of a sort, President." Briefly, she again explained their digression about geoscaping and vortices, for those on the opposite end of the room who might not have been listening the first time. "The possibility of constructing an artificial vortex, by means of artificial methods, was beginning to be discussed, but as it went I had another thought. Perhaps this is foolish — I am a scholar of the earth, these matters of space travel are beyond the scope of my expertise — but is there any particular reason why we may not simply cultivate a vortex in the typical fashion?"

...

She meant literally cultivate — fill a space ship with gardens, growing things, so as to produce an ambient environment which could be used to supply what their enchanting required. Enchanting only worked within reach of a living biosphere...so they'd bring a biosphere with them.

It sounded, on the face of it, absolutely insane...and yet...

Hermione glanced around, examining the faces of the other researchers and administrators in the room, to gauge their reactions to the suggestion — and, in doing so, she caught a dozen others doing the same thing at the same time.

In the heavy thoughtful silence filling the room, Xianü still appeared calm and thoughtful and curious. Her expression hardly even seemed to have changed, as though she didn't even realise that she'd managed to render speechless a room filled with some of the foremost scientists and magical experts in the entire bloody world with only a few sentences. "It would need to be a living environment, to best support the shaping of the energy so generated. Not only growing things, but the microbes and insects that support them, fungi. Ideally we would include some small animals as well."

That would require soil and water, of course, but that shouldn't be a problem. The latter was easy enough to manage with magic, and the former could be harvested from Earth...or even created with some sand, plant matter, and their reverse-engineered terraforming beetles. They wouldn't need to worry about keeping the soil fertilised long term, simply keep a population of the beetles to continually refresh the necessary nutrients...

The biggest issue, as Hermione could see it, would be space — she wasn't an expert in geomancy, but there would be a minimum volume that would be required to generate an ambient environment like this. This solution wouldn't work for tiny unmanned craft, or small shuttles and the like. For larger craft, though, space stations...

"So," Xianü said, gazing around the room, eyes slowly moving from one face to another. "Am I simply being foolish?"

Nobody said anything, for long seconds, as everybody processed the proposal and its implications simultaneously.

...

It sounded absolutely insane, but Hermione thought it was worth a shot. Nobody else had any better ideas.

Over the next moments, it seemed like most of the Commission's directors and principle researchers came to the same conclusion. And so they began to discuss how they would go about cultivating gardens aboard spacecraft, to bring Earth magic with them out to the stars. The political leadership had wanted something unique to contribute to the Law of Five — and Hermione was struck with the heady feeling that the Commission had just discovered how they would go about it.

(Needless to say, the rest of the galaxy was going to be rather blindsided by the emergence of literal magic spaceships.)

Chapter Text

28th December 2001 (69:8:7)
— Zero Day plus 06.03.26

After an instant of crushing blackness, the familiar wards of the House of Black brushed over her like stepping through a layer of silky curtains, and the garden courtyard snapped into existence around her. It was well into the evening, the winter sun having long since vanished, but it was still bright enough in the courtyard, illuminated with soft blue-white enchanted lights. The ground was hidden with a mix of grass and crawling herbs, patches of brush here and there along the walls, winter roses glowing red or white or violet under the lights. A football goal had been put up at one end of the courtyard, and toys of various sorts had been scattered here and there.

There were children around, an eclectic mix of humans and wilderfolk and nymphs and vampires, frozen in place standing or sitting on the grass to gape at her. Beth grinned back at them, amused — they probably didn't see people apparate around here very often.

Like with Potter stuff, the properties held by the House of Black had been entirely transformed in the years since Zero Day, though the direction that transformation had taken was quite different. The Blacks had always had a somewhat more urban focus than the Potters — while they had managed to work up some agricultural output to help with the famine, they hadn't had the preexisting plantations sitting ready, or a number of small farmers under vassalage like the Potters had. The lands around Ancient House and especially Ravenhome did produce a fair volume of food these days, but it wasn't much in the grand scheme of things. Aside from properties rented out in various magical enclaves throughout the country, these places had also been almost entirely depopulated, home to only Sirius, whatever guests he might have over, and the elves.

Or they had been depopulated, until Zero Day — Sirius had had a significant fraction of the nonhuman population of London evacuated straight to Ancient House, where many of them had stayed ever since. Ancient House had been enormous to begin with, numerous homes and workshops connected by a maze of corridors, but in the years since it'd effectively been developed into a small city, the grounds all around converted into farms and orchards. And while they still didn't have much in the way of agricultural production, they did boast considerable industrial production, the workshops dotted through the labyrinthine structure retooled to support the enchanting and alchemy used in modern tech. They'd started with little things, like producing the crystals used in the old radios and mixing alchemical ceramics, helping to meet the demand for base components, but as the locals were better trained and educated they'd moved into assembly, according to Sirius even starting with full complex enchanting and manufacturing. In a limited capacity, sure — they certainly couldn't build anything so complex as the phone in Beth's pocket without outside assistance — but it was still impressive.

Especially since many of the people here hadn't even been able to read six years ago. Magical Britain hadn't had a public education system as such, so it hadn't been unusual for poor children to not learn basic things like how to read — and that was especially the case for the most destitute denizens of Knockturn Alley, many of whom were nonhumans who hadn't even had basic rights under magical law. But while Sirius had been away fighting, he'd left a few people in charge, who'd been given the mandate to do what was necessary to make their community here functional in the long term; one of the things they'd decided to do was to offer education in basics like reading and maths, and also enchanting and potions and alchemy, helped along by the more literate of the residents. It'd still been pretty early on when Sirius had managed to land one of the first contracts to produce diamonds for the early crystal radios from all the way in Vietnam — negotiated through crystal radio, in fact — moving into more complex work as their workshops were improved and the locals' education advanced.

So, while Rock-on-Clyde and the lands around it hosted a sizeable agricultural community, Ancient House had become a factory town in miniature. There was even a council and a labour organisation and a little schoolhouse and clinic and everything. Though probably the strangest thing to many people would be how few humans there were around — there were some, but the population was mostly made up of the nonhuman residents of Knockturn Alley and tiny Starlight communes from around the country. Even most of the human children Beth saw probably had werewolf parents.

Excluding the goblins' hidden homes, Ancient House must have the highest percentage of nonhuman residents of any locality in the British Isles. Sirius joked that they could power the wards on his ancestors' rage and horror alone.

Beth stepped inside into what would be a light sunny sitting room if there were any sun at the moment, finding a collection of adults...and a few cats she were probably also adults (wilderfolk). Someone was able to point her toward where she could find Sirius — most of them recognised her, which wasn't a surprise, she was recognised most places she went on Earth these days (probably why the children had been staring, in retrospect) — so she started walking, after passing through a dining room and a salon finding a long hallway, lit cool soft moonlight silver. (The lighting had been changed ages ago to tones more comfortable for the largely nonhuman residents, some of whom would have issues with magically-simulated sunlight.) Along the way she passed by one of the workshops, by the chattering and the drone of mixers and crackling of magic on the air currently in use — no surprise, this was probably the 'morning' work shift for the nocturnal residents. A pack of children came rushing down the hall, mostly blue-skinned water nymphs and a pair of vampires accompanied by a wolf pup of all things (probably wilderfolk), chased by a harried-looking young woman (vampire), Beth pressing herself against the wall to let them past.

It was fucking messy at Ancient House these days, always something going on and dozens and dozens of children running about, but Beth was sure Sirius liked it that way.

Eventually she found herself at the 'town hall', what had once been the residence and offices for the Lord of the Family converted into the administrative centre of their little town, with meeting halls and offices and storage spaces and archives and whatever else. Most of the frippery had been stripped away in the process, but there was one room that was still somewhat fine, the floor covered in a rich thick carpet, the walls rosy wood panels, the ceiling a glittery black tile that reflected the light from the flamelight lamps like stars in the night. Bookshelves and cabinets with various trinkets on the walls, a grand hearth carved with roses and ravens, displaying the Black arms overhead, plush furniture was arranged in a couple conversation circles, still showing some hints of luxury but close and comfortable and almost intimate. This was normally where the little town's leadership or guests would come to discuss issues into the night, or else simply socialise. The sort of place where relationships were established and deals were made — every institution of a certain size needed at least one, Sirius would say.

And Sirius was here, dressed in the same relatively plain linen clothing as the others — mass-produced by a combination of magical and muggle methods, common in Britain now — but easily identifiable by his wild curly black hair, the cold crackle of his magic. His face turned toward her even as she stepped through the door, probably feeling her magic as easily as she could feel his. Breaking into a grin, "Beth! You made it! If you'll excuse me gentlemen, ladies," with a little twirly bow toward the women in the group, "I need to speak with my goddaughter about my travel plans. Have you eaten yet? We can stop by the kitchen on the way."

She shook her head. "I'm good, I ate when I was visiting Verushka."

"I'll bet you did," Sirius drawled, his eyebrows dramatically wiggling. One of the women giggled.

"Make those stop, or I'll burn them off. We're not like that anymore, she's got a wife and a kid now and everything." It was always somewhat awkward talking to people she used to sleep with — she still had some pretty explicit letters from Verushka and everything — but that was ages ago, she was over it by now.

"Sure, sure, only teasing. Did you want a drink for the road, at least?" he asked, pointing at a liquor cabinet.

"Yeah, why not. What do you got?"

They stepped back out into the endless corridors of Ancient House, Beth now carrying a glass of apple brandy made from fruit grown at their orchard and fermented and distilled on-site. (It hardly ever left the grounds, most of the production going toward food, they didn't produce enough of luxuries like these to sell them.) Sirius mostly wanted to know what she'd been up to since she'd returned to Earth — while she couldn't make live calls most of the time, they could leave each other messages, and they'd already caught up on the rest at the Christmas party at Rock-on-Clyde. She'd only be home for a couple weeks, so she wanted to drop by to see as many people as she could in that time, popping around the planet to catch up with people she'd met in the war or the years since.

"I assume you remembered to drop by to see that little girl of yours while you were in Vietnam."

"Linh, yeah." They were walking out onto the grounds now, what had been empty grass interspersed with half-heartedly maintained gardens converted into farmland. Despite the season, there were plants growing, rows of grain and vegetables still low to the ground — the wards controlled the environment enough to easily get a second crop during the winter, but these would have only been planted a couple months ago now, still young. Sirius was leading them toward the cider mill, where she assumed this surprise of his was waiting. He hadn't explained what the hell this surprise was supposed to be, just that he wanted to show her. Something to do with the "travel plans" he apparently needed to talk to her about?

"How old is she now? I have a few pictures that you took in one of your earlier trips, but you know how I am with dates."

Beth sighed. "Fifteen."

Sirius turned to give her a look, frowning a little. "What was that tone for?"

"She wants to join the Army. Vietnam first, later transfer somewhere she can go to space."

"Been a bit of an influence, have you?" he drawled, his smirk audible, she didn't need to look to know it was there.

"Shut up."

"Take it as a compliment, kitten — you've been that little girl's hero ever since you saved her life from evil space aliens. It's no surprise she wants to grow up to be just like you."

"I know," Beth groaned.

"Hey, weren't you fifteen when you joined the Army?"

"I know, Sirius, shut up about it already..."

Thankfully, he dropped the subject of Linh's future quickly, realising she didn't want to talk about it. By this point, they were past most of the fields, the path straight enough that Beth could see through to the cider mill, the structure difficult to make out in the darkness, the thick web of leafless branches between here and there. She noticed after a bit more walking that she wasn't seeing just the cider mill — there was another structure there, in the small clearing around the mill along the shore of a little stream. With all the trees in the way, it was difficult to make it out, the shape not quite resolving into something recogniseable, just a blocky blob in the night. In places matte, seeming to absorb the light, in other shining, like metal or glass, the profile alternately blocky and curved, with a few spikier bits poking out—

She suddenly froze, her boots scritching on the dirt path. "Sirius, is that a spaceship?"

Turning back to her, he was grinning wide enough that she could make out his teeth, gleaming in the night. "Yep! Got her about a month ago now, we've been working on fixing her up ever since."

"...How much did that cost you?" The economics of the Hand were complicated, and Earth was quite primitive by their standards — their money really wasn't worth much. He might have been able to work his way up to a private freighter bartering directly with whatever the Blacks had sitting around, but...

"Less than you're probably thinking — like I said, we've been fixing her up. Come on, let me show you around."

Beth had seen the cider mill on previous visits. While the Blacks had produced a fair amount of cider once upon a time, even enough to sell, as the family had declined the volume they'd put out had gradually decreased, until the operation had shuttered altogether. One of the projects Sirius had taken upon himself to keep his hands busy after the worst of the fighting had been to fix the place up and start making cider again — there'd been a party when the first batch had been ready, a good long list of friends and family had been invited, had a modest little banquet out on the grass. (That first batch hadn't been particularly great, though the brandy he'd made the same season was better. He'd improved with practice.) The foundation of the building was ancient, visible in some of the grey slabs of stones around ground level, crumbling and marred with streaks of green and orange from mould or whatever, thanks to the dampness from the narrow babbling stream it sat against, the bulk of the structure was newer, wooden sides with a ceramic tile roof. It was the size of a modest house, tall enough for two stories — though there was only a single floor, the internal space taken up with equipment — the cellar beneath nearly as large, with far more room for casks than Sirius could ever use any time soon. It was hardly the most impressive thing in the world, Beth had been to wineries and distilleries which easily put it to shame, but it was plenty for Sirius to play around with, make small batches of stuff as a treat for the locals.

The spaceship parked right next to it was easily the size of the whole structure, above- and belowground spaces put together, and perhaps even larger. A murky shape set up on skeletal landing gear, the trees around were too dense to allow it anywhere to land — there had been a grassy patch running up to the water, but it'd been filled in with young apple trees now — so Sirius had it settled along the stream, some of the struts in the water but the ship wide enough that most of them were fully on land. Not the best position, spaceships were fucking heavy, they could sink into soil pretty easily if you weren't careful, but she assumed Sirius must have firmed up the ground to support it with a bit of magic. It was hard to make it out, a big dark blot in the night, but a wave of Sirius's hand cast a blob of light, the blue-white glow cast over the surface of the ship, resolving into a recognisable shape.

That was a tunakshalhi-odaka, Beth recognised it instantly, and she suddenly understood how Sirius had managed to get his hands on one. For whatever reason, certain classes of starship ended up becoming monstrously popular, and proliferated all across the galaxy, often sold as quickly as manufacturers could produce them. The tunakshalhi-odaka had been designed on...one of the Monatšeri worlds, which one was slipping her mind at the moment, the first hull laid down nearly three centuries ago now, itself based on a design going back almost two thousands years. It was a light to medium freighter (exactly how it ended up being classified depended on local definitions), with a reputation for being sturdy and reliable, and also highly customisable. Different manufacturers were often willing to sit down with a client and discuss their particular needs and tailor a new ship to their purposes, but there were also countless replacement parts and modifications which could be swapped in and out, more recent models of the class designed to be modular to ease the process, every tunakshalhi-odaka slightly different.

And Beth said different manufacturers because there were dozens. Part of why she'd forgotten where it'd come from was because it was irrelevant: the original manufacturer had realised they'd stumbled on solid gold, but didn't have the production base to meet demand, so instead they'd licenced out the design to other producers for a very reasonable fee. By the time the Law had reached Monatšeri space, it'd long ago escaped their control, plenty of 'unauthorised' products floating around out there, so they'd decided to simply make the design public and free to use, instead offering consulting services to manufacturers to help ensure quality. These days, most tunakshalhi-odaka were actually produced in the Republic of Akame, putting their own little flourishes on the common design.

This one she thought actually originated in Monatšeri space. Tunakshalhi-odaka were roughly cylindrical in from, or perhaps a half-cylinder, skinner at the front and fat at the back, sort of like an elongated pear cut in half vertically and laid face-down. While that general profile didn't change much, different producers made their own elaborations, reflecting personal style or cultural preferences, and this particular arrangement of sharp lines and gentle curves struck her as very Monatšeri. Sirius might not have changed the structure much, but the paint job was definitely original — all done in black and red and yellow (House of Black colours), the edges at the back had been textured like feathers, almost like the spread wings of a raven, beneath the wide windows of the cockpit in front lips pulled back to bare sharp teeth, a wavering in the black colour like fur, hints of a wolf (or a black dog) grinning in threat. Sirius did have some artistic talent, but she assumed he must have gotten someone to do that for him, since he wouldn't know how to use the equipment necessary to set in colouring that would survive through reentry.

While Sirius was showing her around, she noticed the name emblazoned on the side, in Roman letters and transliterated into Minnisiät, alongside an insignia representing it'd been registered with the Law — Lupus Arcto, the Wolf of the North...or out of the North, possibly, it was awkward to translate.

Looking at the name, she was struck with a sudden pang of sadness. The name could just as easily be in reference to himself — his animagus form was often mistaken for a wolf — but she had a feeling it was at least partly in memory of Remus.

"What do you think?" Sirius asked, after giving her a good long moment to look it over.

"Nice work on the paint job. You said you've been fixing it up?"

"Yeah, she needed a bit of work. She's an old girl, been flying for—" He cut off with a whistle, clearly thinking. "I'm not sure, the calendars don't quite line up. A bit over a century, maybe? A lot of outdated parts, some of the supports stopping the engine cones from ramming up in the back starting to weaken, some minor little bits of wear, you know how it is. Why I could get it so cheap."

Shooting him a look, she asked, "And you're comfortable with flying in something you fixed up yourself? You're not exactly an expert, Sirius."

"I'm a fast learner," Sirius drawled, grinning back at her all crooked and cocky. "How long do you think it took me to take apart that motorcycle and put it back together better than I found it?"

"...That's different."

"More complicated, maybe, but same idea. Here, let me show you..."

They took a little circle around the outside of the ship (or not so little, the thing was a little less than eighty metres long from tip to tail), Sirius pointing out different components visible from the outside, talking about the work they'd done on it, or parts he'd simply needed to order replacements for. The superstructure he'd had touched up on the station — Beth wasn't sure how he'd managed to wrangle that, maybe pulling strings through connections in some government somewhere — but the outer hull had been entirely replaced with modern magical ceramics, the interior surfaces almost completely covered in runes to further protect them from damage. Not completely impervious, of course, sustained fire from turbolasers or a direct hit with a fusion warhead would still fuck him up, but pretty damn strong, at least. He'd also gone through the superstructure and the inner hull and internal walls with some more enchanting to help it hold up better, prevent feedback and the like, that sort of thing.

The engines had been practically junk, but he'd been able to find replacements — hardly state-of-the-art, the model nearly a decade old now, but still quite good. He'd also modified them, leaning on work coming out of the Commission these days to increase thrust and more efficiently deal with waste heat...and even entirely remove the need for fuel. That last one he hadn't actually managed, since the power requirements were just too absurd to meet with magic. He still needed the fuel to start the fusion reaction, and give it a kick every now and then, but with a bit of help from a friend in the Commission — not Hermione, someone he'd met on his own — they'd managed to cut down fuel use to almost one-eighth of its rated efficiency, Jesus...

(He didn't directly say as much, but she assumed his friend in the Commission had used it as an opportunity to experiment and bring the data back to his colleagues. Eliminating the need for fuel seemed like an obvious thing they'd try to work on.)

The ship had already been armed when he got it...suspiciously well-armed, actually. There'd been a turret at the rear, and a pair of high-powered turbolasers at the front, and a fucking fusion missile launcher, fuck. Was this a captured pirate vessel? or maybe a smuggler? It was starting to sound like it, which might also have something to do with why Sirius had managed to snap it up cheap. Anyway, obviously the Law hadn't let him have any fucking fusion missiles, so he'd kept the turret but torn the rest out. In place he'd put in something he'd whipped up from the prototypes some people in the Commission were working on, he lead her around to the nose to point out the long barrels fixed along either side of the cockpit, each of them easily ten, fifteen metres long. The barrels were enchanted to propel objects in them up to absurd speeds — the maths suggested that the system he had here could get stuff up to as much as a tenth of the speed of light, which was ridiculous. It was currently set up to fire little slugs of iron, about five centimetres across and twice that long, which might not sound like much, but fire those off at crazy high speeds and they'd tear through just about anything pretty quickly.

Beth had heard the Commission was working on something like this. Their ultimate goal was actually to manage higher speeds than that, so they could overwhelm the best deflector shields — ships protected themselves from debris by putting out a steady pulse of their antigravity stuff, which was why traditional projectile weapons were useless in space combat — preferably in excess of point-six light speed, at which point whatever deflexion shields could manage would result in a hit anyway. They were mostly just theoretical models at this point, obviously that wasn't the sort of shite they could test on Earth, but it was a big part of their weapons development strategy.

For one big reason: "Have you figured out how to automate the conjuration of your ammo?" Transfiguration was temporary, but that didn't bloody well matter when shooting it at someone — it only needed to last long enough to make contact.

Sirius made a little eh sound, shrugging his shoulders. "No, that's a little beyond me at this point. I think they're going to use their computer shite to fix that, and that's a little above my head. I have these racks it feeds in from, though, enchanted with anchoring spells — I'll just go by and refill the racks whenever I use any. Hopefully I won't need to but, you know, just in case."

"Just in case," she agreed, nodding. The galaxy was, unfortunately, quite a dangerous place, the precaution was reasonable. "You've got a lot of magic in this thing, though. How are you getting that working in space?"

"What, did Hermione not tell you yet? They fixed that."

"Sure, I heard something about living things working as a focus, but I didn't think they'd figured out how to make that work yet." Last Hermione had told her they were putting together a test module to confirm their theory was correct, and to test out exactly what the limits were, so they knew how to work within them. She was pretty confident it would work, but it was just a theory at this point. Of course, that meant magical spaceships would all have to have big living gardens in them, but Beth thought that was pretty neat, actually — and at the very least, Earth engineering would end up with a very particular aesthetic to go with all the ridiculous magic nonsense.

Sirius grinned at her, looking almost smug. "Well, why don't we take a look inside? You'll get it when you see."

The boarding ramp was down but, curiously, Beth couldn't see through the entry hatch, appearing to be sealed with smooth metal (or ceramic, apparently). It turned out the reason for this was because it was warded — Sirius held her hand and led her through the threshold, a curtain of magic passing over her, left blinking against the sudden appearance of internal lights, warm sunlight on her skin. And then she just kept staring, because it was green in here.

She was standing in some kind of common room, or lounge. There was a kitchen area to one side — it looked like Sirius had replaced whatever might have been there before, those were magical appliances — chairs and sofas scattered about, the positioning somewhat more cramped than Beth might expect in a home, given the limited space. There was a second level, a walkway in a ring all the way around but the middle left open, which was more wasted space than she would generally expect — either the previous owners had decided to sacrifice extra rooms for passengers for the open space, or Sirius had done that alteration himself. There were a few doors around, which she knew would lead to bedrooms and a bathroom, to the front one hallway that led to the cockpit, to the rear one to either side of the kitchen area that led back. Presumably it was much the same on the upper level, though maybe missing the corridor leading forward. This was pretty typical for a ship of this class, though the empty space in the middle was somewhat unusual.

The very odd thing was the green everywhere. Instead of a metal grating or some other synthetic material for the floor, the entire space — with the lone exception of the ceramic tile in the kitchen area — was carpeted with grass, mixed in with clover and some creeping herbs here and there, mint and oregano. There were more herbs drooping out of pots hanging from the ceiling, or suspended in the empty space in the middle, and not just herbs, there were strawberries and tomatoes and chillis, fruits and flowers at different stages of development adding splashes of colour here and there and everywhere. There were vines crawling along the walls, flowering white and blue and violet...and those were blackberries, perhaps, the long canes held in place by the vines, berries half-hidden by the foliage...

Turning in place, her eyes wide, she could hardly breathe. It felt alive in here, it had the smell, earthy and green, the subtle buzz of unseen insects...or not unseen, she spotted a bee hovering around some flowers just there. "What the hell...?"

Sirius was openly grinning at her, clearly pleased with her reaction. "Like it? Maybe went a little overboard, it probably would have worked with less. Especially since the computer shite and the engines are still all muggle tech. You know, magic doesn't interfere with their electricity? Apparently we still don't know why."

"...Yeah, I heard." That's because it wasn't electricity, per se — they used a funny balancing of the potential between electrons and positrons to...do stuff. Beth didn't understand it, exactly, she hadn't needed to to make it through the required science materials, just that it was absurd quantum physics shite and how to do basic repairs. It could still be disrupted with magic, but the same shielding they used to prevent destructive feedback or resonance that might cause short-outs would also stop magic from fucking with it. "Sirius, how did you do this?"

"I didn't, actually. Come on, I'll introduce you to my little miracle-worker, I think she should still be putting the finishing touches on the garden."

It turned out "the garden" was the main cargo hold, or at least it had been before his "little miracle-worker" had gotten to it. Beth could understand why Sirius was calling it a garden, though, because it certainly looked like one, if rather more naturalistic than most she'd seen before. The floor (ground?) covered with clover and crawling herbs, without the grass in the lounge and the hallway back here — which had also been filled with greenery, of course — there was brush along the walls and separating the large open space into sections, roses and currants and lavender. Within the sections were different groupings of plants, mostly edible ones but also with some wildflowers mixed in, not in neat and orderly rows like Beth might expect from cultivated plots but in seemingly random bunches and blobs, carrots and onions and peas and chillis and potatoes, several different varieties of herbs. And it wasn't just the plants, Beth saw a few more bees flying around, there was a rustle of something shifting about under a row of bushes, she spotted a cat stretched out napping in the simulated sunlight...

And they had rather effectively simulated the sun, it felt like they were outdoors. The walls and the ceiling were sky-blue, even with puffy patches of clouds, a bright yellow glow of the sun overhead, she needed to shield her eyes to look, bright and warm, the air shifting with a subtle breeze. Sirius's enchanting work, obviously — she could tell it was artificial, the clouds flat, the shadows didn't quite look right, a tingle of magic on the air, but it was still very well done.

There was a wood nymph present, her low voice drifting through the space — she was singing, magic thick and warm, strawberry flowers stretching up out of the bed of clover unnaturally quickly, a greenspeaker? Supposedly that was a talent both humans and nymphs could be born with, crossing species like omniglottalism. (If it also cropped up in other species, Beth hadn't heard of it.) Like all wood nymphs, her skin was a rich brownish-greenish colour, her hair a solid snowy white, decorated with flowers and glittery glass beads woven through its length. There were more beads in strings around her wrists and her ankles and her neck and her hips, attached to piercings through both ears at several places, her lip and her nose and her eyebrows, some with hanging chains that glinted in the light, and more piercings at her collar and down her spine and along her hips and through her nipples...

Beth did recognise the cultural affectation — extensive piercings were very common among the Mistwalkers, a somewhat reclusive subculture within magical Britain. Perhaps she was from the Greenwood, she was aware a large number of nymphs lived there, that they practised old agricultural rituals which had been quite handy in the aftermath of the invasion. She wasn't taken aback by the jewellery at all, just that she was seeing so much of it: the woman was completely naked. Which, again, not unusual for nymphs — they tended to be reluctant to adopt certain human cultural practices, like living indoors, or wearing clothing — but it was a little awkward to walk in on a stranger like this. Honestly, Sirius, he could have gone ahead and warned her...

"Good, Star-Pup, you're back," the woman said, in Cambrian. Despite herself, Beth cut Sirius a bemused glance at the pet name, but he didn't seem to notice. "I'm about done here, if you wanted to double-check the plans for—" She looked up, cutting herself off when she spotted Beth. "Ah! You didn't tell me you'd be returning with a guest."

"Sorry about that, I wasn't sure if she'd be making it tonight. I've told you about Beth, my goddaughter?" His hand light on the small of her back, he lead her deeper into the garden, carefully stepping over a pack of carrots. "Beth, this is Cleo, Cleodora, we're going in on this venture together. By which I mean I'm paying for and fixing up the ship, and she's keeping things alive enough in here for the magic to work."

Grinning enough to show her teeth — soft and warm and gentle, in the way a lot of nymphs seem to come to naturally — Cleo said, "Yes, it has been a very amusing project, I can't wait to see it fly. And it is nice to meet you, Beth, Sirius speaks of you often. But I didn't know you were coming tonight — I can put something on, if you prefer."

Beth hesitated for a second. "Um, if you're more comfortable without, that's fine. I've been around nymphs a bit, I'm...more or less used to it."

"Good, I'll go without then, thank you."

"Sure. Um, sorry in advance if I stare a little — the piercings are new to me." And she was realising just now that there was a glint of metal between her legs, Beth gritting her teeth and forcing herself not to look down, come on, don't be a bloody creep...

Cleo, of course, just kept smiling back at her. "That's all right, it doesn't bother me. Humans can be so squeamish about these things. So, Sirius is showing you around?"

"Yeah, Beth was just asking me how we got all this growing in here, and you're the one to ask."

"Mm, modest. It took a bit of doing, but with some elemental sunlight it wasn't so difficult. Here, I can pull up a bit and show you..."

Their project was somewhat absurd, given that they'd basically needed to design the infrastructure to support things like this from scratch, but it wasn't truly that complicated, in principle. With a couple quick charms, Cleo pulled up a mat of dirt held together by roots, scooping the stuff beneath out of the way, eventually revealing a textured ceramic surface at the bottom — Sirius had knocked out all of the floors, took directions from Cleo about how deep she needed the soil to be, and had new floors put in that much lower. The ceramic was alchemised and enchanted with various magics to help support things, but that was over Beth's head — and Sirius's too, actually, Cleo had been in charge of that part, adapted from the indoor planters the Greenwood used — fitting them had been somewhat awkward, shrunk and twisted around to get them through the doors and fixed in place with alchemical adhesive.

Once they were in place, Cleo had moved several tonnes of fresh soil in to fill them — living soil, with all the bacteria and fungi and bugs and shite needed to support the healthy growth of plants. She then quickly moved through the whole ship singing the grass and clover and such to life, to establish a proper root system so the soil wouldn't dry up and die off. According to Sirius, she'd badly overexerted herself moving too quickly, had needed a few days to recover before the project could move on. (They should have done it in chunks, to spread it out, Sirius seemed somewhat guilty but Cleo hardly reacted to that part of the story, still placid and pleasant in that way nymphs had.) Then they started moving in the larger plants, and once some of those were established they started moving in some of the larger bugs — they had a small bee colony, which might even produce a little honey, but not really enough to use for much — and then some small animals, rodents, there was the cat, they were working at moving in some birds...

Beth was somewhat surprised that they were already pretty sure that it worked, Sirius's geomantic analysis suggested the ship produced its own ambient environment. From what Hermione had explained, she'd been under the impression that it had to be a full living ecosystem, with a complete food chain and shite, like, maybe even a natural one? with all the parts that went into it, which seemed absurd to just cut out and put in a spaceship. This did look less regimented than most gardens and such she'd seen, but it did still look like a garden — not all of the plants she saw around produced edible or otherwise useful things, but most of them did, far more purposeful than a natural environment. Cleo claimed that that was drastically overestimating the problem, all they needed was enough living things in dynamic relationships with each other. Just the plants and live soil (including all the shite in it) probably would have been enough, but the bees and other bugs and a few animals here and there made it feel more alive, which, since Sirius and Cleo were the most complex, most powerful living things here, would ultimately have an effect on its geomantic properties. Magic was weird like that sometimes.

Cleo wasn't quite satisfied with how it felt yet, but she figured once they gave everything a couple seasons to establish themselves, the environment on the ship would feel much more solid. As it was now, though, it was sufficient for their purposes — they would do a test flight in orbit around the planet, just to be sure, but Cleo's feeling and Sirius's maths suggest the ship would be able to support its own wards and enchantments. Which was bloody incredible, how had they even...

Well, Beth knew partly how they'd pulled it off, anyway: talking about the project, Sirius mentioned discussions with his friends in the Commission multiple times. By the sound of it, they were helping to pull some strings to get the ship and the parts here — interplanetary trade hadn't quite reached Earth in any serious volume, and there were still travel restrictions in place — and letting Sirius pick their brains for how they thought someone might go about this kind of thing, in exchange for his data. That did seem like a pretty sweet deal from the Commission's side of things. Sirius was putting up all the money to pay for it, and he and Cleo were doing most of the work themselves (or contracting people to do things they couldn't themselves, like mix the ceramic), and they would also be taking on all the risk in case something went wrong. From back when she'd done test flights, she knew the Commission had all manner of safety procedures, it could take some time for something to get from concept to execution — but Sirius was a private citizen and didn't need to report to their overseers, so he could move at a speed they simply couldn't.

People at the Commission could get in trouble if they sent up a manned flight before they were ready, and the thing exploded when the wards failed and killed everyone on board. But if some half-mad magical nobleman got himself killed fucking around? Well, that obviously wasn't their responsibility, was it?

Not that she thought it would make any difference to point out how the Commission was using him — she was sure Sirius would just laugh and insist it was a mutually-beneficial arrangement. Because he was a half-mad magical nobleman, and didn't give a damn about the possibility of getting himself killed fucking around with experimental technology.

She didn't think it was too likely he would get himself killed — it felt like the outdoors in here, she assumed she was subconsciously picking up on the presence of an ambient environment — but she couldn't help feeling somewhat exasperated anyway.

As high as the ceiling had felt in that room, there was even a second level. That wasn't too much of a surprise, given how large the back end of the ship was, but what they showed her up here was surprising: they had a bloody orchard. The trees were all quite short, most not even reaching her height, and Cleo claimed they would stay small — these were dwarf trees, cuttings taken from larger trees in such a way as to limit their growth potential. Their roots wouldn't reach too deep, but to ensure there was enough room Sirius had actually added space-expansion to the tray for this level, adding more depth to the ground. They weren't placed in regular rows, in bunches and blobs and curls, somewhat skeletal branches with bunches of leaves spreading here and there — still early in development, they'd fill out as they aged — some of them even had flowers, there were cherries and apples and limes, roman and holly, moss crawling up some of the trunks, the ground paved in clover and wildflowers, some bits of deadwood here and there where they planned to grow mushrooms, grasshoppers and dragonflies darting around, they were planning on getting birds in here too...

...Fuck. That was all, just, this was seriously impressive...

"You're leaving, aren't you." That realisation had slowly been sinking in as she was shown around, remembering Sirius referring to his travel plans. When he was done putting this ship together, he and Cleo were going to take off into space — and they weren't coming back.

Some of the cheerful energy of the tour abruptly fading away, Sirius turning solemn, he gave her a wry, crooked smile. "Yeah. Once this beauty is ready, I'm passing on the title to Deryn, and then I'm gone."

Beth nodded, slow, turning the thought over. "Where are you going?"

"Dunno," he said with a little shrug. "There's a whole bloody galaxy out there. Figured I would see some of it. I don't..." The rest of his smile vanishing, he glanced away. For a couple seconds he stared off into the distance, unfocussed, his expression blank but at the same time dark and heavy...

She wasn't quite certain what to do — Sirius still had occasional moods, leftover from his time in Azkaban — but before she could decide Cleo sidled up to him, hooked her arm through his. "You can tell her, Star-Pup."

With a twitch, he seemed to shake himself. He frowned for a second, then turned back to Beth, a thin, fragile smile forced onto his face. "There's nothing left to... Honestly, I've about had enough of this place. I've lost too many people, kitten, and it's... Everyone's so busy these days! I swear, finding these new aliens lit a fire under everyone's arses, everything's happening all the time, and there's just...no place for me here anymore.

"Maybe I could hang around, for you, I could make that work, but you're not here anymore. You're out there now. I thought of joining up, but I figured the chances we'd be posted anywhere near each other were about zilch, and..." His face went dark for a second, but then he blinked, lips twisted into a wry smile. "Two wars were enough for me."

"Yeah, I get it." Fuck knows there was little enough here for her either — she'd ended up where she was mostly out of the need to not feel fucking useless. It wasn't out of quite the same reasons, but she figured what was going on with Sirius was similar. "So, you're just going to wander around? doing what?"

"Well, I suppose we'll see when we get there. See the sights, meet new people—"

"Oh, so that's what you're calling it now."

Sirius let out a bright bark of laughter, some of the light sparking back to life in his eyes, Cleo at his side shooting Beth a warm smile. "Don't act all prim and proper with me, you little minx — how long did it take you to find some pretty alien lady to warm your bed?"

Beth shrugged. "Haven't yet. I'm an officer now, Sirius, I'm trying to be professional."

"Uh-huh," he huffed, sounding very sceptical.

"At least until I get my reputation for over-the-top heroics all nice and established, anyway, yeah. These people don't know me yet, you see, gotta make sure to make a good first impression — Gryffindor house pride and all that, you know how it is." Sirius just smirked, probably assuming (correctly) that she was already getting a reputation for pulling mad stunts in a fight, and it had absolutely nothing to do with Gryffindor house pride or whatever. "Besides, most of the people I talk to these days are my subordinates, and that's just fucked up."

"Fair enough. I might do some over-the-top heroics myself now and then, you know, if we're passing through and see something that needs doing. But mostly we'll just be...exploring. Between what valuables I can get off the planet, working the odd job and selling enchanted bits and bobs, I'm sure we can keep it going more or less indefinitely. And I might visit now and then, but no, I don't plan on moving back home, at least not full-time. I'm leaving, for good."

"Well...good luck. I hope you find what you're looking for out there." Not that she thought he really needed anything specific, just...something. "I assume you have a decent holocomm on this boat."

"Of course!" he crowed, grinning. "One of the ones that does, um, whatever they call those illusions, I don't know."

"Holographs," she said in Minnisiät, probably the word he was looking for.

"Sure, whatever. You can call me at any time, should make sure to trade our addresses before you go."

"I'll be out of contact a lot, for security reasons — you won't be able to make live calls, but you can leave me messages, and I'll get back to you when I can."

"So, same as it works now? I wasn't sure if that was an issue on our end or yours."

"Probably both, at least early on." They were still working at connecting Earth to the rest of the Law — being a little careful about it, not wanting to alert the whole damn galaxy that the original human homeworld had been found — so it wasn't out of the question that there might have been some interruptions to civilian communications. Turning to Cleo, she asked, "And what about you? I can believe Sirius deciding to go gallivanting off, we actually talked about him maybe getting a ship like this once before. But what do you get out of it?"

"How rude, Beth," Sirius gasped, his free hand coming up to his heart. "Are you suggesting I'm not good enough for her to want to keep me company for its own sake?"

"Just checking you're not kidnapping the poor woman."

"Ugh, such accusations, and from my own goddaughter..."

Cleo smiled through the teasing, seeming amused in a slightly absent sort of way — somewhat reminding Beth of Luna, in fact. As Sirius's grumbling trailed off, she said, "I suppose what I'm to get out of it isn't too far from what this one wants. There's a whole galaxy out there. We know well the life of this world, but this is not the only world where life came into being. There are hundreds of such worlds out there, thousands. They may be like us in some ways, I suppose — there are only so many ways a seed may sprout — but they will be different too. Whole worlds filled with life entirely new to us.

"I can hardly even imagine it!" her voice turning a bit sharper, energy slipping into it, smile slipping more toward a grin. For most of however long they'd been showing Beth around, Cleo had kept that cool, calm, almost detached vibe that nymphs seemed to default to, but it was clear she was legitimately enthusiastic about the trip she and Sirius were about to take, excitement leaking out intense enough Beth could almost feel it, an echo of it prickling down her spine and warm in her chest. "I want to... As many of these worlds as I can find, I want to see them, to learn of them — to listen to their songs, and learn how to call them. I... I have never wanted anything this much, to, to compel me to... I knew your godfather before," she said, patting Sirius's shoulder with her free hand, "he visits the Greenwood now and then. But when he spoke of his wish to cast himself out into space, to see what he could find, I...well, I was enraptured, yes? this is a good word?

"So no," she said, a coy curl slipping into her voice, "there is no kidnapping here."

...Well, it turned out Sirius hadn't just hired someone to take care of his space gardening, he'd managed to land a proper full partner on the project. That was good. Less likely to be personality conflicts if it wasn't just business...or if Cleo were just Sirius's latest lover. Beth was pretty sure they were sleeping together — they weren't being blatant about it, but something about Sirius's body language, the pet names, Star-Pup and my little miracle-worker, that was her feeling — but if they were going in something they both wanted to do, that was more likely to be stable. "Good to know. Hey, does greenspeaking work on alien plantlife?"

Her face again splitting into an energetic grin, eyes almost sparkling, Cleo chirped, "I don't know! I cannot wait to find out. And not only the plantlife, I am eager to meet the people too. Travelling to new places, and learning of and coming to love them with Sirius will be a great adventure." Sirius let out a sharp little guffaw, shooting Cleo a double-take, the corner of his lips twitching — if Beth had to guess, surprised and amused that Cleo had come out and said that right in front of her. Beth couldn't help a smile herself when Cleo turned to frown down at him (Sirius was short), the piercings in her eyebrows shifting as she frowned in confusion. "What is funny?"

"I don't think Beth needed to know we plan on screwing our way across the galaxy."

"...It's a big ship. I thought she would assume." The implication there being that Sirius and Cleo expected they would recruit people to join them, which, sure, Beth guessed, why the hell not. Especially with all the wars and shite going on lately, she wouldn't be surprised if there were plenty of people all over the place who had nothing going for them and would think joining these two nutters in their aimless wandering seemed like a good idea.

Grinning, Sirius turned back to Beth. Pointing at Cleo with his free hand, he said, his voice flat and solemn, "I love this woman. Have I said I love this woman yet? Seriously, Beth, go find yourself one of these."

Beth almost said something very crass about having fucked nymphs before, and she thought his must be special, but decided to keep that to herself. She didn't know Cleo well enough to guess whether she'd take that kind of joke the wrong way. "I'll think about it. This ship really is very impressive, and... Well. Good luck, you two, I really do hope it works out for you. You could really use a lucky break," she said to Sirius.

He gave her a toothy smirk. "You know me, Beth — I make my own luck."

"Well then you're a shitty craftsman, because you sure never seem to get any."

"Oof, right to the point again. You get that tongue from your mother, you know." Beth was pretty sure personalities weren't really genetic, but she got that he meant it as a good thing. Not a compliment, exactly, just saying she reminded him of Lily sometimes. "Anyway, that's enough serious talk, I think. Did you need to be anywhere tonight? Cleo likes to smoke and stargaze a bit before bed, I figured we could all hop over to the Greenwood — and who knows, maybe you'll be the one getting lucky this time."

Beth rolled her eyes, not at the suggestion that they should all get high and flop out in a field looking up at the stars together — mages didn't really use tobacco, by 'smoke' he almost certainly meant cannabis — but at Sirius once again trying to get her laid. She wasn't really complaining, it was just very silly. "No, I don't have plans until later tomorrow. Did you need to do anything to close up here?"

"I can go soon, I only need to check over the nursery and turn out the lights..."

Chapter Text

69:9:2 (28th January 2002)
— Peace of Sekot plus 04.09.02

Jacen Solo was wrenched back to alertness, cool thoughtless calm breaking in a blink — the timer had gone off. He reached over with slightly clumsy fingers — it often took a moment for the full-body numbness that came with the deep rest of Jedi meditation to fully fade — and deactivated the alarm with a couple taps at a display. Blinking to force his eyes into focus, he found the countdown on the navcomputer: twelve seconds to reversion.

Good, precisely on time. He looked out into the whirling blue and white chaos of hyperspace, staring at nothing in particular. Taking slow deep breaths, he flexed his limbs, rolling his shoulders and shifting in his seat, attempting to shake off the last of the lethargy.

He always felt cramped after spending extended periods of time in his X-wing — and the journey to Dimitra had been longer than most.

The countdown reached zero, and the constant low whine of the hyperdrive cut off with a deep thump. The ever-changing storm of hyperspace out the viewport broke, peeling away, revealing stars stretched into lines by pseudomotion, resolving into still points of cold distant light as the tiny craft fully settled into realspace. Jacen waited a moment for the static often accumulated when travelling through hyperspace to dissipate, before tapping at a display to begin a passive scan of his surroundings, while the systems began to work simultaneously reaching out through the Force.

At the center of the system was a yellow-white main-sequence star, at the prime of its life — named Ilios, according to his navcomputer — orbited by a variety of objects that his X-wing's systems were having difficulty identifying. The Iliak System was primitive, undeveloped — most systems that had hosted space-faring civilisations for any significant length of time had had beacons placed upon or in orbit around its major astronomical bodies, to ease navigation, but his sensors were not picking up any such devices. There was activity around the two largest bodies after the star itself, gas giants — the computer in time identified the larger as Dias and the smaller as Kronos — perhaps some manner of military patrol or nascent mining operation. The rest of the system was dark, quiet, without any hint of civilisation whatsoever.

The exception, of course, was Dimitra itself. There was a functioning navigational beacon, seeming to be broadcast from a defence station of Hand manufacture in orbit around the planet, but he would have been able to identify his destination without it. It was surprisingly quiet on scanners, very little in the way of transmissions broadcast from the surface — the station itself was noisy to the X-wing's sensors, yes, but whatever technology the inhabitants had must be too primitive to make much of an impression on the surrounding environment. That was no great surprise, according to the information Jacen had found Dimitra had only reached the earliest stages of space exploration when the Yuuzhan Vong had reached them. It was quite likely they simply hadn't implemented the modern technologies the X-wing's sensors had been designed to detect. The planet was still identified immediately through spectral analysis, emission bands suggesting the presence of nitrogen and oxygen and carbon, the image showing the blue of water and the white of water vapor and the green of vegetation. Of all the planets in the Iliak System, only Dimitra was known to bear life.

But even without the navcomputer's assistance, Jacen could have identified Dimitra on his own — in the Force, the planet burned, a nexus of life so bright and so intense and so vibrant it was impossible to miss. And deep, carrying an echo he could feel through his bones, as though standing within a drum the size of the planet itself, countless voices coursing through him, old voices, as light from distant stars reaching his eyes untold millennia after the start of its journey, standing upon an iced-over lake and looking down into the depths below, deeper deeper deeper...

A cradle-world — he knew it instantly, the feeling well familiar to him. While life had spread to a great many worlds, relatively few had been host to its generation. (Though relatively few still came out to a great number, as unimaginably vast as the galaxy was.) Terraforming barren worlds to support life was a slow, expensive process, but one that had been undertaken countless millions of times. And not only by their civilization either — theirs were not the first people to spread to the stars, they had evidence of no fewer than four layers of galactic civilization, stretching back millions of years before the proliferation of interstellar travel as they knew it. Very little was known about their ancient forebears, but it was known that they had terraformed new worlds as well, peoples long disappeared having left their mark on the fundamental makeup of the galaxy. But cradle-worlds, places where life came into being of its own accord, where it'd been nurtured from strings of self-replicating organic chemicals all the way to complex intelligent beings, they had a particular character in the Force, a weight, one that was unmistakable once one learned to feel it.

If the rumours were to be believed, Dimitra was not just any cradle-world. It was claimed to be the original homeworld of the human species, long assumed to have been Coruscant — but more curiously, it was home to an order of Force-users possessing mysterious abilities, seemingly able to rewrite reality itself on a whim.

According to the information Jacen had stumbled across, the Hand believed there were millions of them, all living on this single planet.

There were maybe a hundred Jedi in all the galaxy — fewer, if one didn't count the children.

Jacen was, in a word, fascinated. And so he'd come to learn.

He'd plotted the final jump to bring him into the system in the general vicinity of Dimitra, but several million clicks below the ecliptic, as a precaution. The Iliak System was newly discovered, and only partially explored — recklessly jumping into insufficiently understood space was an excellent way to splatter oneself across the surface of an uncharted asteroid, or perhaps revert inside of a star or a gas giant and be instantly incinerated or crushed. But it seemed the cartographers with the Hand had done their jobs well, Dimitra was located more or less precisely where the navcomputer had expected it to be. He plotted a course into the autopilot with a few taps and swipes of his fingers — the planet was too far off to fly by hand — once he was finished the ship began to maneuver, swinging around to point the nose straight toward the bright blue-white crescent floating against the black. He didn't feel the acceleration, the inertial compensation set to full, but he could feel the burn anyway, the hissing buzz propagating through the ship to vibrate through his bones.

His eyes fixed on the distant glowing arc of the planet, he merely waited, calm.

Dimitra certainly did have an especially strong presence in the Force, but it was hard to say whether it had any particular...flavor, so to speak. Some worlds he'd visited over the last several years had been home to particular orders of Force-users long enough to leave a mark on the environment, but, curiously, the so-called Mages of Dimitra didn't seem to have done so here. The world was so bright, intense, that it burned to look at, yes, but it didn't seem significantly different in character from any other cradle-world — simply more. Given that there were supposedly millions of these Mages here, one would expect they would have had more of an effect on the character of their world, not less. Interesting.

The planet had a single moon, making up a surprisingly large fraction of the primary's mass — not quite enough for them to be considered a binary planet, but it was quite striking. Jacen was certain Dimitra must experience quite significant tides on large bodies of water, and it would have noticeable effects on the weather as well. He was just passing the million click mark, about twice as far out as the moon's orbit — the planet to his back, the ship already spun around in preparation for the braking burn — when there was a gentle but insistent bing from his comm panel. He was being hailed.

A quick press of a button accepted the channel, there was only a brief pause before a voice was thrumming through the cockpit. The voice came through smooth and clear, broadcasting without encryption, speaking in Minnisiat, a trade language common in this region of space — he didn't sound human, the timbre off, but Jacen couldn't identify which species that might be. "Unidentified X.J.-class fightercraft, the Iliak System is under protective embargo, level three. Declare your intentions immediately or you will be found in violation of Defense Command provisional order one-six-nine-five-R.-M.-one-Iliak-three."

As the warning went on, Jacen felt his eyebrows crawl up his forehead — he had no idea what any of that meant. Protective embargo? Turning over the implications of the phrase, he quick flipped on his transponder, and then opened the channel from his end. "Excuse me, Dimitra Control, it seems I left my transponder off." He'd done so intentionally, of course, to reduce the likelihood of being spotted. It hadn't occurred to him that the Hand might move to defend such an undeveloped planet so quickly. "This is Jedi Knight Jacen Solo, on my personal transport."

There was a brief pause. It wasn't possible for Jacen to detect a single unfamiliar mind from this distance, but he imagined he could feel his interlocutor's surprise and confusion regardless. "Jedi Solo, the Iliak System is under a level three protective embargo. Travel is restricted to all external vessels without express permission from relevant authorities. You are warned to vacate the system immediately or incur legal penalty."

Even as the braking burn began, the powerful thrusters again setting the entire cockpit to vibrate, Jacen gave the panel a bemused look. It would seem he had a partial explanation for what they meant by protective embargo. "I would like to officially request permission to land."

"Landing privileges are denied to any armed craft outside of the direct command of the Defense Command or local Dimitran authorities — any effort to enter the atmosphere will be met with lethal force."

...They were deadly serious about this embargo of theirs, it seemed. They would never actually shoot him down — the GA's diplomatic contact with the Empire of the Hand was extremely minimal, but killing a Jedi (especially one named Solo) could easily risk war — but it didn't seem prudent to call their bluff either. Jacen reached to adjust his course, tilting his braking burn to bring him into an orbit around the planet instead of coming in for insertion. "In that case, I request a berth on the station, and permission to take an authorized shuttle down to the surface."

"I repeat, Jedi Solo," the man said, sounding somewhat exasperated, "the Iliak System is under a level three protective embargo. Travel restrictions are under effect. You are warned to vacate the system immediately or incur legal penalty."

Tilting his lips into a smirk, trying to adopt a shade of his father's confident, devil-may-care tone, he drawled, "I'm afraid I don't know what a level three protective embargo is, so repeating yourself doesn't do either of us much good, does it? I am not here as an agent of the Jedi Order, or of the Galactic Alliance. I have heard rumor of the Mages of Dimitra — I simply wish to study their arts, and perhaps share what I know with them. Cannot a compromise be reached?"

There was silence over the channel, longer this time. Jacen assumed the man was bringing this up to a superior officer. While he was still waiting, there was a twitter from the sensor panel — the ship was picking up a flight of fightercraft approaching him, still some thousands of clicks away but rapidly approaching. They were too far away to make out clearly, but the sensors had already identified them as Nṣis-class clawcraft, an exotic combination of Imperial and Chiss technology in use by the Empire of the Hand. Jacen was somewhat familiar with them, Jag and his detachment from the Hand had flown them against the Yuuzhan Vong. The ball cockpit looked somewhat similar to a TIE-fighter, but it instead had four wings in an X-profile, sweeping around in graceful curves — looking somewhat like the claws of some predatory animal, hence the name — taking on the silvery-blueish color of the exotic armor used by the Chiss. Each wing contained a high-powered blaster, more or less comparable to equivalents used by the GA, capable of a maximum speed similar to an X-wing but with maneuverability and an acceleration profile more comparable to a TIE interceptor, and, unlike Imperial TIE-fighters, was also equipped with full shielding, missile tubes, and a short-range hyperdrive.

They were, in short, more or less equivalent in combat threat to Jacen's X-wing — more dangerous, arguably, given their superior armor and maneuverability. Especially since he didn't have any torpedoes on board, he'd be outgunned facing a single clawcraft. Leaning on the Force for speed and intuition, he expected he might be able to survive in a fight against one, maybe two.

In the Hand's military, a flight numbered five.

A prickle of nerves crawling down his arms, he glanced up at the stars out the viewport, back down at the sensor panel. If he burned out now, he should be able to get away before the clawcraft could catch up. They were equipped with hyperdrives, but they weren't designed with long-distance trips in mind — and they only wanted him to leave, he doubted they would pursue.

...

But if he left, he would have come all this way for nothing.

He didn't think he was in imminent danger — if he were he'd be able to feel it. Perhaps they only meant to escort him to the station. He had been told that any attempt to turn towards the planet would invite a lethal response, perhaps this was standard procedure. He should at least wait until he heard back from—

"Jedi Solo, an escort is approaching your position. You will fly with them to Dimitra Orbital, where you will be guided to a landing pad. Do not power your shields or your weapons. Do not approach the planet."

"Understood. Do I have permission to shuttle down to the surface?"

"That has yet to be determined. My understanding is that my superiors wish to speak with you first."

Well. That was progress, at least.

He waited in silence for a moment, watching the blips on his sensor board representing the five clawcraft approach — contemplating what exactly it was that he'd stumbled upon here. His discovery of the existence of the Mages of Dimitra had been entirely incidental, rumors he'd heard while wandering around the Unknown Regions searching for the Blazing Chain and the Sorcerers of Rhand. A disappointingly unfruitful journey, as it happened. He had managed to at least confirm that the Blazing Chain existed — the expansion of the Empire of the Hand had pushed the Force-sensitive raiders further and further out into the wilds, the wars of recent generations driving their society close to total collapse — but he hadn't even encountered any rumors of the Sorcerers of Rhand, or even the region of space they supposedly ruled. As large as the Unknown Regions were, it was possible he was simply looking in the wrong places, but he would think people over here should at least have heard of their existence, given how thoroughly developed transportation and communications infrastructure was out here.

Honestly, he was beginning to suspect Cronal had made the whole thing up as some sort of inscrutable gambit to play with Uncle Luke's head. Jacen couldn't imagine what he might have expected to gain with his stories of a fictional society of death-worshippers, but Cronal had been thoroughly insane — at this point it seemed the more likely option.

He'd been contemplating a visit to Sith space — the continued existence of Sith society out in the Unknown Regions had taken him completely by surprise, though they'd changed so much in the five thousand years since their war with the old Republic that they were hardly recognisable — when he'd come across a video being passed around on the Hand's insulated network. It was a video of an exhibition duel between two human women, Force-users, seemingly thrown on a whim, held out in the courtyard of some university somewhere. The fight was fast, the two of them teleporting around within the space bound by some manner of shielding — one seemed to be using an ability similar to Aing-Tii space-folding, the other more exotic, disappearing and reappearing in bursts of black fire — conjuring flames coming in a variety of fantastical colors, tossing bright balls and curves of multicolored light back and forth — they fizzled out when they reached the shielding, but he noted one strike the ground first, erupting into an explosion much like a small grenade — seeming to create metal discs and wires out of thin air, even living animals of some kind (he didn't recognise any of the species), the ground under their feet flowing and shifting and changing, all at the direction of the little wooden sticks held in their hands...

The pair were from a recently-discovered world, which had somehow managed to survive an attack by the Yuuzhan Vong despite having only primitive industrial technology, not yet even having reached the stars. There were more images and videos of the delegation brought up to be taught the language (part of the Hand's procedure to admit new members), though few were nearly as dramatic as the duel between the two women. Or, duels, as it turned out — it seemed the two of them would occasionally fight to blow off steam, there were videos of several different duels floating around on the net.

It was suggested that these Mages of Dimitra, supposedly numbering in the millions, were in large part responsible for their undeveloped world's miraculous survival against the Yuuzhan Vong — and, having watched those exhibition duels all the way through multiple times, Jacen could believe it. The power demonstrated by those two was... It was different, at the very least. Jacen could start a fire without too much trouble, but the volume they conjured was remarkable, and the rainbow of colors it came in, he assumed they held some additional properties he couldn't even guess at. He had no idea what those blobs of light even were, but the energy some of them released when they struck the ground or their opponent's shield, one punched a bloody hole straight through the target's chest — a wound which was then miraculously healed in the space of a couple minutes — no, he'd never seen anything of the kind. And the way they could manipulate matter, twisting and changing at their whims, even conjuring something out of nothing...

That Dimitrans apparently referred to their arts as magic, translated literally, might have seemed somewhat silly to him — magic was simply how superstitious people referred to expressions of the Force they lacked the understanding to explain — but he did have to admit the term was...descriptive. There was something simply magical about the abilities displayed in those duels, power beyond comprehension, reminding Jacen more of the sort of thing one might see performed by ancient sorcerers in works of fiction.

If they truly had millions of these 'magic'-users, he could believe the Yuuzhan Vong had failed to conquer them, regardless of their primitive technological development.

So, of course, he'd needed to see it for himself. Finding a current star chart that actually included the route to Dimitra had been somewhat difficult, he'd needed to trade a favor for it, but now he was here.

And now he was suddenly reminded that he'd meant to avoid contact with the Hand's security apparatus if it all possible. He had absolutely no idea what he was walking into.

Perhaps it might have been wise to familiarize himself with the laws and procedures of the government here before he found himself in this position, but it was too late for that now. He was certain he wasn't in any true danger, but the force with which they'd reacted to his presence was still somewhat unnerving. His skin itched a little as the clawcraft approached, fingers twitching for the stick. But that was only paranoia, he didn't feel under threat, he would know it if he were in danger.

Honestly, it might just be personal history bubbling up. He never had liked Jag — not just because his sister had been sleeping with him, though of course that hadn't helped either.

The clawcraft approached, the leader of the flight — calling herself (he thought) Shield Six, no name — ordering him to follow the course she was about to transmit to him, and to make no deviations. It took a second for the navcomputer to interpret the data, formatted somewhat differently than the standard back home, but soon he was burning off again, angling toward the defense station. The clawcraft were arrayed around him, in weapons range but far enough off to be little more than dark blobs out the viewscreen, prepared to intercept him should he move out of line.

Though they weren't evenly distributed around him: the screen was somewhat lopsided, three planetside and one spaceside, and following directly behind him. He frowned down at his sensor panel, feeling a prickle at the back of his neck, the solution to a puzzle hanging just out of reach.

Protective embargo...

For whatever reason, the Hand was taking Dimitra's security deadly serious. Jacen had been flying around Hand space for a couple months now, and he'd never seen anything like this — which was especially peculiar, because if anything Dimitra had demonstrated against the Yuuzhan Vong that they didn't need the assistance. He couldn't imagine why, but after a couple seconds he decided the reasoning behind it wasn't relevant to his interests. But he could use that realisation to plan his plea to be allowed entry.

It helped that he suspected he'd do perfectly fine with the truth: he was here to learn, and nothing further.

The autopilot performed its pre-programmed braking burn, the fighter left to drift toward the station at a manageable speed — a few quick twitches of the stick swung the ship around so he could see the station through the bubble. Huge now, a couple clicks wide and several across, a sphere with a blunt cylinder to either end, the surface crawling with knobbly features too small to quite make out. He'd seen a few of the Hand's defense stations since entering their space, but he'd never gotten this close to one. Their profile was significantly different from Golan platforms — no wider across than some but more massive, with a greater volume of enclosed space — but he assumed their defensive capabilities were more or less equivalent. The Hand used a peculiar mix of Imperial and Chiss technology, with a few of their own innovations, which could make them somewhat difficult to predict, but it would be difficult to say whether their military craft were better or worse, simply different.

He'd been wondering whether he should be speaking to Shield Six about finding a berth, having been given no further instructions, when the ship suddenly shuddered around him, an alarm on the inertial compensators blaring. It only took a quick glance at the sensor panel to confirm what he'd already guessed: he was caught in a tractor beam.

He was being taken prisoner.

His hands moved automatically, a flip of a couple switches bringing up the shields, priming the capacitors to initiate a flutter, a twitch of the stick swung his nose away from the station, there was a scream of another alarm as his sensors picked up an active weapons lock, he reached toward the main—

—a hard pull on his chest, clattering and vibrating, ears ringing with alarms, dread heavy in his throat, a hot flash of—

—empty—

—he froze.

If he tried to make a break for it, they would shoot him down. He wouldn't make it. It was too late, they already had them.

Despite the sharp tang of resignation burning in his chest, he found himself rather bemused. It seemed they truly were taking their defense of Dimitra deadly serious — they were willing to kill a Jedi who also happened to be the son of the former President of the Republic to guard their secrets. That was...interesting.

"Jedi Solo," the voice of Shield Six interrupted his thoughts, "power down your shields and thrusters immediately."

He rolled his tongue over the roof of his mouth, before flicking open the channel. "Excuse me, Shield Six, the tractor beam took me by surprise."

"To prevent accidents, all craft docking with Dimitra Orbital are tractored into their berths."

"Ah. Understood." Letting out a shaky breath, he released the stick, and switched off the shields. "My apologies, Shield Six."

There was a brief pause, and then the sensor alarm went silent — the weapons lock was gone. "Sit back and relax, Jedi. We won't drop you."

This one wasn't a human voice either, but he still got the clear impression the woman was mocking him. While the tractor beam dragged Jacen in toward the station, he sat with his hands in his lap, staring at a point straight in front of him. He focussed on his breathing, smooth and even and calm — trying not to remember the yammosk, tentacle tight around his body, pulling him inexorably closer to the many-toothed maw...

(He did not like having control of his ship stripped way from him.)

Sunk halfway into meditation, he was almost surprised when he was drawn into the landing bay. The space reminded him immediately of Imperial design, the perfect white walls and the black floor — perhaps this was one thing the Hand had inherited from the Empire. It was empty save for a smooth, graceful-looking craft, perhaps a touch over twenty meters long, that he assumed was a luxury shuttle of some kind, the rest of the floor empty. So far as landing bays went, it was quite small, perhaps restricted access for certain important officers and guests. If it were used infrequently, that would also explain the lack of deck crew about.

The only figures he saw on the deck were an officer in the trousers and overlong jacket in red and black of the Empire of the Hand, and five soldiers in the striking white and black armor of Imperial stormtroopers. He'd been aware the Hand still used the style — Uncle Luke had mentioned it, telling the story of his and Aunt Mara's diplomatic mission into their space over a decade ago now — but he hadn't seen them himself yet, not having encountered any during the search for Zonama Sekot. Despite never having fought stormtroopers himself, the war with the Empire before his time, he still felt a faint chill at seeing them there, waiting for him.

Turning his eyes away, he firmly shook his head, frowning to himself. He was being ridiculous. The Empire of the Hand might have some lineage in common with the old Empire, but they were different. Chances were none of those stormtroopers were even human — they were extremely rare in this area of space (which just made the presence of their original homeworld here even more fantastical). He was a guest, at no point had he been given any indication that he wouldn't be allowed to leave, they'd practically been begging him to turn away. He'd grown up on too many stories from his father and Chewie — and more rarely Uncle Luke, never one for bragging — of the dramatic escapades of their youth, seen too many holos dramatizing events from the period. It was simply the uniform of their special forces, probably brought in because he was a Jedi, just in case. There was nothing to worry about.

He'd fully calmed by the time the fighter was gently set down on its landing struts — according to his sensors, the tractor beam hadn't disengaged, but he assumed they meant to hold him here at least until his ship was shut down. So he went about doing so, going down the list of flipped switches and commands typed out onto panels necessary to safely power down the highly complex little ship, the motions automatic from repetition. There was a brief delay when one of the panels complained at him about several different systems being overdue for maintenance, but he just swiped it away and continued on. As the final commands were sent — the computer locked to an encryption key hidden in his lightsaber, which seemed prudent — there was a long, falling whine as the electronics depowered, the panels and illuminated switches all around him winking out.

He patted his pockets, quick double-checking he had everything on his person, before tugging on the handle to break the seal on the hatch. The air in the landing bay was somewhat cool, with a noticeable bite of ozone — as expected, given the span of open space to one side, the atmosphere held back with a force field. He wasn't strapped in, having unbuckled himself early in the final hyperspace leg and never redone it, so with a gentle, subtle push through the Force he vaulted over the side of the cockpit and lightly landed on the floor, as smoothly as dropping down a step. Normally, pilots entered and exited X-wings through a boarding ladder, and nobody was wheeling one over, but thankfully he didn't have to worry about that.

Which meant he couldn't close the hatch again, of course, the latch a good two metres over his head. But that was simple enough to fix — a blink and he'd reached through the Force and pushed the latch into the locked position, the hydraulics lurching into motion to press the hatch back into place.

He heard the clacking of boots against the tile, the warm presence in the Force of six beings approaching him, turned to find the officer and five soldiers approaching him. Now that he was closer, he could see that at least three of the soldiers certainly weren't human — their profiles were subtly wrong, the motion of their steps hinting at alien physiology. The officer was Sith — in the sense of the species, deep red skin and a pair of ridges running along the top of their skull from the forehead back, fleshy tendrils dangling below their chin from the corner of their lips — which was still somewhat peculiar to see. Sith hadn't been seen on their side of the galaxy for going on five thousand years now, the name somewhat inappropriately claimed by Dark Jedi in their absence multiple times over the course of millennia. He only knew what they looked like because he'd seen images captured during their war with the old Republic and preserved for all this time.

They were the most populous species in the Empire of the Hand — not representing a majority, but a sizeable plurality — so he had seen plenty around while he'd been poking through their space, but it still felt a little peculiar. Experts back home were quite certain that the Sith were extinct, and had been for millennia.

The Sith officer approached within a couple of metres before coming to a halt, the soldiers clicking to a stop more or less in sync in an arc around them — he'd been observing them for some seconds now, but he was still uncertain of their gender, the species had very minimal sexual dimorphism. "Jedi Solo," they said, their voice smooth and breathy...and sounding quite androgynous to his ear, not helping with the gender question. "Well come on Dimitra Orbi– Orbital."

"I speak Minnisiat." The officer had been speaking in Basic, presumably for his benefit, but it was very obvious that they didn't know the language very well.

Their round shoulders drooping a little, a pulse of relief ringing from their mind, the officer said, "Yes, that is much better, thank you. Welcome to Dimitra Orbital. I have been tasked with escorting you to a room where you may wait until the Director and a local representative are prepared to speak with you."

Jacen wasn't certain who the Director was supposed to be — not the commander of the station, that would be a military rank — but a local representative would presumably be a Dimitran here to evaluate his request to learn this magic of theirs. "Very well. Lead on, then—" He glanced at the lapels of their jacket. "—Lieutenant." The Hand actually had multiple ranks he would translate as lieutenant, this one he thought was roughly equivalent to a more junior full lieutenant, meaning above the level of a second lieutenant, it was somewhat confusing.

"I must ask that you surrender all weapons on your person before proceeding. Outside military personnel are not permitted to enter the station armed — no offense intended, of course, but the system is under protective embargo."

"So I've heard," he drawled, a little amused despite himself. He still wasn't certain precisely what that meant, but Hand officers kept repeating it as though he should. "That will be simple enough, since I'm not a member of any military."

A flutter from the Sith's mind and from a couple of the soldiers, a mix of exasperation and confusion and tension, their head tilted a few degrees in a gesture he wasn't certain how to read. "You are a Jedi Knight."

"...The Jedi Order is not a military organization."

"Did you not fight the jusannu alongside your Republic? Did you not personally command soldiers in battle? Do the Jedi not enforce law with the full authority of the Republic to this day?"

Well. They were wrong, of course, but if those were the terms they were using, it was hard to argue the point. "I suppose. In that case, you could say I'm retired — I haven't performed any of those roles for some time."

"Regardless, I must insist you surrender your lightsaber before proceeding."

He blinked. "My lightsaber?" Even in diplomatic contexts where all other weapons were forbidden, Jedi were never asked to hand over their lightsabers.

"Naturally. It is a weapon, is it not?" The officer was watching him, closely, their mind steady and attentive. There was a tension in the soldiers, hard and sharp and ready. They hadn't yet pointed their weapons in his direction, rifles held loose with the barrels pointed up over their shoulders, but he got the very clear impression that they were preparing to do so at any second.

That he was being asked to hand over his lightsaber took him aback for a second, but even while he blinked over at the officer his mind was still running ahead. The Jedi had absolutely no presence in this segment of the galaxy, never having reached this far west — the culture around the Jedi, the symbolism of one's lightsaber, this would all be entirely alien to them. The only experience they were likely to have with lightsabers would be through the old Sith Lords, who had a very different reputation...and had been gone for millennia now, so any practices around such things would have died out in the intervening time. It was unreasonable to expect them to hold the same reverence toward the Jedi, and the respect for their accoutrements, that was common where he'd grown up. "I can expect it will be returned to me when I leave the station."

"Of course."

"Only if I'm leaving the system, or would I be permitted to carry it with me down to Dimitra?" He might have to reconsider staying to study with the Mages if he had to leave his lightsaber behind for however many weeks or months that was going to take.

"That is for the Director and the local representative to determine."

...Fine, he would argue his case with them. Smoothly and casually, with as much of an air of easy unconcern as he could muster, he unclipped his lightsaber from his belt, flipped it around, and held it out with one hand. The officer tilted their head, and one of the stormtroopers stepped forward to take it — Jacen's fingers twitched, as though threatening to clamp down, but then the metal slipped out of his grasp without resistance. A plain box was produced from somewhere, the lid slid open as though on a track, the length of his lightsaber disappeared inside it. The stormtrooper confirmed the lid was locked in place, before turning to the officer to snap a quick salute, and then walking off in a seemingly random direction. He assumed there must be equipment lockers or a safe or something over there, where his lightsaber would be safely stowed away until it was time to return it.

"Very well," the officer said, drawing his attention away from the departing stormtrooper. "I will escort you to your room now. Please follow me." They turned on their heel and began to lead the way, two of the stormtroopers moving to pace them a couple steps behind to their left and right. The other two didn't move though — not until Jacen had walked past them, at which point he heard the clacking of armored boots against the smooth tile, the soldiers taking identical positions behind him.

At having two armed stormtroopers walking right behind him, Jacen felt the hairs at the back of his neck stand up, but he ignored it. Their weapons were still powered down, pointed up and away — he would feel it if he were under threat.

They walked for a short time down a plain, undecorated, white-sided hallway, their passage silent but for the steady clacking produced by the stormtroopers and the lighter swishing of the officer's jacket and the padding of their lighter boots. Before long they came to a lift, a brief ride bringing them elsewhere. This hall was somewhat more colorful — down the middle of the floor was a long rug, gray edged with red, pale yellow stars scattered seemingly at random, the white of the walls partly hidden with curling streaks of green and blue. On both sides of the hall were either doors, the frames surrounded with wood panelling — some synthetic material designed to appear like natural wood, he assumed — or else blocks of windows looking in on some manner of lounge, here a comm station, individual kiosks set in booths for privacy, what looked to be a casual restaurant, several beings sitting at the low tables here and there, plenty more of that false wood around...

The first hallway had been entirely empty of people, but there were some here — the officer had clearly brought him into a more populated area of the station. It wasn't densely inhabited, however, only a handful of individuals or small groups showing themselves in the common areas, several in the hall walking this way or that. The station was somewhat new, and he expected it was oversized relative to the traffic coming through Dimitra, placed in anticipation of a time further along in the planet's development. Jacen felt eyes drawn their way, curious. He supposed it wasn't every day they saw someone come down this way escorted by stormtroopers.

After a few minutes, the officer walked up to one of the wood-framed doors. They poked at a panel set into the wall near the handle, then fiddled with a pad pulled from their jacket, a long series of taps possibly some manner of security code. An indicator on the panel lit up orange, and the officer turned the handle and pushed the door open — Jacen was a little bemused to see that the handle wasn't just some eccentric affectation, the door actually swung on hinges. They glanced back at him, tilted their head, and then led the way into the room.

...It looked like a small but comfortable apartment. The door led into a living room area, a block of tile immediately around the entrance giving way to fuzzy reddish carpet, a few padded chairs and sofas arranged near a holodisplay, a small table with a couple chairs at one end near what seemed to be a cramped but fully-functional kitchen. There was a hall leading further back, which he assumed would lead to the refresher and a bedroom. Interestingly, the walls were entirely done in wood panels, black with an almost metallic sheen to the veins. It wouldn't be difficult to mass-produce some synthetic substitute, but it was peculiar that there was so much of it.

Feeling rather bemused, he turned a bland smirk on the officer. "This is quite nice for a prison cell."

It could be difficult to read the emotions of alien species sometimes, but that was undoubtedly exasperation. "You are not a prisoner, Jedi Solo. It may be a couple hours before your meeting can be arranged. Until such time, I would think you might like the opportunity to rest, perhaps have something to eat. The kitchen is stocked with some basics — you are free to take whatever you like. The terminal is unlocked, though it is set to only access public channels and libraries. Two guards will be placed at the door, but you may leave to explore the station if you wish — they will accompany you, but they will not prevent you from visiting public areas. Though there isn't much to see, I'm afraid, there is very little traffic coming in and out of the system so the station is still quite barren. There will be an alert on the terminal when it is time for your meeting, or one of the guards will inform you if you are away.

"Do you have any other questions or requests, Jedi Solo?"

He was getting the very clear impression the officer didn't like him much — he wondered what he'd done to annoy them so badly. "No, Lieutenant, you've been more than accommodating. Thank you."

Only slightly mollified, the officer nodded. They pulled out their pad and took a quick glance at the display. "A representative has volunteered to hear your request. A shuttle is being prepped to go down and pick them up — I would expect one and a half to two hours until they are prepared to meet with you."

"Very well." Given the circumstances, he could admit it might have been a lot worse. He'd spent months trying to get the attention of the Aing-Tii, most of it spent in accommodation much less comfortable than this. A couple hours' wait wasn't so bad at all. "Thank you, Lieutenant."

The officer nodded again, and then they were leaving, and Jacen was left alone. After considering his options for a couple seconds, he decided he might as well take the opportunity of the delay to wash up. He'd been stuck in the cramped little cockpit of the X-wing for quite some time, after all, he expected he'd gotten a bit...rumpled. A little exploring down the back hall, and there was a fully-equipped refresher in here, good.

As he'd learned was typical in Hand space — or at least the parts influenced by the Sith, who had a cultural preference for such things — there was an actual bathtub, with a shower that used actual water. Back home, it wouldn't be unusual to find such amenities out on the Rim, or in the more well-to-do neighbourhoods in the Core, but it would be extremely peculiar to find on an orbital space station, suggestive of some eccentricity on the part of the designer or whoever had commissioned the place. Even then, it'd be unusual outside of luxury suites. He wasn't particularly surprised to find it, having spent some time in this region of the galaxy, but it still struck him as a little odd.

Not that he was complaining — he'd grown up washing with water, hadn't been stuck with sonic showers as the only option for significant periods of time until the war against the Yuuzhan Vong had started up. But to him this preference was a remnant of his privileged upbringing, not just...what was normal. It was honestly still a little odd to be somewhere a proper bath wasn't considered a luxury.

But since he was here, and had over an hour to wait, he might as well take the opportunity when it was offered. They'd even left scented oils to mix in with the water, though he didn't recognise most of the names, presumably some ornamental plants native to some world within the Empire of the Hand...

Some minutes later — partially submerged in the warm water, an unfamiliar spicy-floral scent tickling at his nose — Jacen levitated his pad over to his hand. It seemed he would be given the opportunity to argue his case before one of these Mages, and it would be foolish not to prepare, since he'd been given time for it. He doubted it would feel appropriate to read off a pre-written statement, but he could work out a basic idea of what he wanted to say. The precise wording would be different, yes, but there was value in organising his thoughts, of playing around with a few turns of phrase ahead of time — he'd seen his mother doing much the same on more occasions than he could count, and he liked to think he'd inherited the skill.

(People often said Jaina took after their father, and Jacen was more like their mother. It often felt like an insult when Jaina said it, but he didn't take it personally — he was well aware that the two of them had never gotten along.)

After however long spent lazing in the bath, scrawling out and repeatedly going back over notes on what he wanted to say, Jacen stepped back into the living room, his hair dried and the wrinkles worked out of his plain Jedi-style trousers and tunic with his own original tweak on hassat-durr. He quick checked the terminal, but there weren't any messages, and the soldiers hadn't come in looking for him — it hadn't been quite an hour since he was left here, so there must still be more time. The kitchen was, indeed, stocked, a little bit of poking around and he found an instant meal pack of spicy noodles with exotic vegetables and a can of flavored muqsa — Sith food, an acquired taste, but even their cheap, mass-produced processed products were quite good (or at least flavorful) — and soon he was sitting at the table, eating with one hand and continuing to poke at his notes with the other.

They were somewhat scattered, unfortunately, even after being given over an hour to work at. It might be easier to plan his approach if he knew why the Hand was being so cautious with Dimitra, or if he knew more about these Mages. Unfortunately, he truly knew very little about how the Empire of the Hand operated — which seemed petulant and foolhardy in retrospect, given that he'd been fully aware he'd be spending some significant time in and around space under their control. He'd learned first-hand how obsessively protective they could be with information, their communications network entirely isolated from the one back home. They were in contact with the Chiss and another government further south he knew even less about, but that was it, no communications were open with the rest of galactic society.

He'd been somewhat surprised to learn that the Hand wasn't even in direct contact with the Empire — he'd assumed they were, the Empire effectively extended into the Unknown Regions, but the two were entirely separate from each other. A fair span of space between the two wasn't even controlled by either party, dominated by slavers and pirates. There was a single artery connecting the two, at Nirauan. Jacen hadn't been made aware of this during his brief visit years ago, but while both communications networks reached Nirauan, they were not connected even there: official messages from one government to the other were transmitted to their embassy on Nirauan, where they were downloaded onto a datacard and then physically carried to the opposite embassy, who transmitted it on. The care given to data security was impressive, if unreasonably paranoid.

They were about as protective with their astrogation data as well. Getting his hands on a proper starchart of the region had been frustratingly difficult — ships constructed within the Hand had black boxes built into their navcomputers that prevented the data inside from being copied. The device would spit out the necessary data to plot a jump only request, only providing basic information at any other time, and was hard-wired to prevent any attempt to slice it out. It could possibly be done, by someone with the proper skill in such things, but Jacen wasn't such a person. Ships from outside the Hand could travel in their space, but if they wanted to use the Hand's up-to-date starcharts they needed to make a request at the beacon in-system, which would spit back out the data they needed for a jump, and only that jump. They'd need to repeat the process for every leg on the journey. It was hardly onerous, the protocol automated, but it was still a pain to deal with, and limited one's options somewhat, as it for the most part prevented taking pit-stops in uninhabited systems.

As inconvenient and controlling as it might seem, Jacen did understand why it'd been designed in this fashion — some of the ships which travelled in their space required that degree of hand-holding. While most of the technology on this side of the galaxy was more or less comparable to theirs, one area where the locals were truly disadvantaged was in computer technology. They effectively didn't have droids at all, and the more limited processing power available meant that modern navcomputers were effectively an impossibility. Instead, the complex job of plotting hyperspace jumps was offloaded to immobile supercomputers, hooked up into the navigational beacons maintained in settled systems. A very similar network had once been maintained by the old Republic, but it'd been gradually phased out as shipboard computers had become powerful enough to take on the burden themselves, roughly four thousand years ago now — that development, for whatever reason, had simply never occurred out here, the technology in the Unknown Regions lagging behind in this one particular area.

The Hand might have access to Imperial computer technology, but they were in contact with other societies out here in the Unknown Regions that didn't — if they wished to keep up good relations with their neighbours, they must maintain a hyperbeacon network to permit travel by craft lacking modern navcomputers. That this system could also be used to control the movement of people more effectively than was possible back home was more than likely a secondary benefit...though Jacen had never heard of that power being abused. He was certain everyone's travel was being monitored by some system somewhere, but from what he'd been told, people were only denied jump data if their ship was registered to a person wanted for serious crimes, murder or piracy or the like. And, of course, ships manufactured inside of the Empire of the Hand could be equipped with modern navcomputers, circumventing the need to interface with the network at all. If they did value that degree of control, they certainly didn't seem to use it, or to be interested in stopping people from avoiding it.

The astrogation data in local navcomputers was firmly locked away, which was peculiar. The only benefit he could think of was to prevent that data from making its way into...

...the East. Back home, where they knew effectively nothing about the Empire of the Hand, or any of the other civilizations out here.

Frowning to himself, Jacen looked through his notes, finger idly tapping at the table.

Protective embargo. He'd wondered, who exactly where the Hand protecting Dimitra from? While the restrictions placed upon foreign visitors seemed more extreme, from what he'd been told even travel by Hand citizens was limited. The Unknown Regions could be a quite dangerous place — the Republic was civilized in a way this region of space simply wasn't, having been held together by a more or less stable government for going on twenty thousand years — but the Dimitrans had managed to hold off the Yuuzhan Vong all by themselves, despite not even having achieved space flight. Even in the relative chaos of the Unknown Regions, surely there were relatively few things that could threaten them.

But the rumor, floating around whispered in tapcafes and debated in chatrooms, was that Dimitra was believed to be the original human homeworld. There didn't seem to be any confirmation of that yet, in any official capacity, but the theory had been raised.

Us, he realized, all the curious little things he'd noticed since learning of the Mages of Dimitra months ago clicking into place. They were protecting Dimitra from us. The humans of the known galaxy, the Alliance.

...After a moment of thought, he could admit that was reasonable. For complex sociopolitical reasons, there'd been an intermittent rise and fall of human supremacist attitudes throughout history. Perhaps the most virulent had been a period of more than a thousand years in which the old Republic had been restructured into an explicitly human project, aliens sorted into a variety of castes afforded fewer and fewer rights and privileges the further they stood from humanity in the twisted perception of the rulership. Some aliens had been determined to be undesirable, and had been fully enslaved or even exterminated — entire species had been wiped out of existence, in some cases not even their names remaining. The regime had eventually been put to an end, after a brutal war against a splinter Republic led by Alsakan and the early Jedi Order, but not until after a dozen centuries of repression and genocide. The Imperial period represented another spike of human supremacist sentiment, but compared to the enduring horror of the Pius Dea Republic it was hardly even a blip.

And the simple fact of the matter was that these attitudes had not been entirely extirpated. Some planetary governments had transitioned from the Empire to the Republic unchanged, preserving discriminatory policies all the way through to the present day. Such practices were often illegal under Republic law, but Republic law as a concept was often theoretical at best — the capacity of Republic institutions to interfere in local affairs was limited by design, in an attempt to avoid the tyranny of the Empire. Well-intentioned, but perhaps naïve, given the exploitative conditions enforced in countless localities unabated, Jacen knew for a fact that slavery was still widely practiced all over the galaxy, despite technically being unlawful...

Many humans still believed, implicitly, that they were simply better than other beings. It was an unstated assumption to far too many, even generally good-hearted people, something that simply was, baked into the culture so deeply that few ever thought to question it. So fundamental it was that it was encoded in the language, the conventions of how Basic was spoken: one might call a human from halfway across the galaxy simply human, but a non-human born on one's own homeworld might be called alien. The bigotry assumed in the use of "alien" was so deeply encoded that Jacen even used the term to refer to non-human species in general, reflexively, despite realizing, if he slowed down to think about it for a few seconds, that he truly shouldn't.

It was quite common for well-meaning humans to declare that all beings were entitled to certain human rights — the history of formalized discrimination suggested by the term itself seemingly never occurred to them.

As firmly entrenched as the attitude was, learning that Coruscant — the ancient capital of the Republic, the glistening jewel at the heart of the galaxy — was not truly their original homeworld would not break human supremacism. No, Jacen suspected it would only be inflamed. Learning of their true home might encourage the rise of a sort of...universal human nationalism, so to speak, but there was one additional factor that must be considered, and that was the Mages of Dimitra themselves. Such powerful Force-users, if those recordings he'd seen were any indication, wielding abilities the like of which he had never seen or even heard of before...and Dimitra was home to millions, a population of Force-sensitives vastly out of proportion compared to practically any society on record.

And these great, numerous Force-wielders were found on their homeworld.

No, Jacen could see how that could easily transform into something...dangerous. If he were whoever had made the decision to contain news of Dimitra's discovery, he might have done something similar. The Hand had already been quite secretive, of course, perhaps a strategy of Thrawn's to isolate them from the rather tumultuous politics of the late Empire — not to mention that same human supremacist sentiment, as humans were exceedingly rare out here — but to guard Dimitra even more closely, to be put on even higher alert once they realized who Jacen was, to be willing to shoot him down if he flouted instructions, no, suddenly he understood.

If this discovery were known back home, it would not be long until too many human supremacists began to covet Dimitra. They would want to claim it, for themselves — to return home, so to speak, to bring their lost homeworld into galactic society as they recognised it.

The Hand might be a highly competent, highly militarized society, but compared to the Alliance they were small, outnumbered and outgunned by orders of magnitude. If it came down to it, they would not be able to resist such a crusade.

In that light, he was somewhat surprised the Hand had been willing to admit Dimitra as a member at all, and hadn't simply hushed up the discovery and left them to their own devices.

But, as monumental as the potential threat truly was, in it Jacen saw how he would convince them to let him land — and then, when he was finished learning whatever of their arts the Mages might see fit to teach him, depart again to continue on his way.

Luckily for him, he was not an ordinary Jedi.

He had some time to turn over his adjusted approach, before there was a high soft bing, one edge of the holodisplay flashing orange. A couple seconds later the door clicked open, and another officer in the Hand's uniform poked their head in — this was an entirely unfamiliar species, somewhat predatory in their profile with a long jaw and oversized fluffy ears and clawed hands grasping the door, their skin hidden by a thick layer of pale orangish fur. That Jacen didn't recognize their species wasn't unusual, the Empire of the Hand was filled with countless peoples entirely unknown back home. Their voice was rich and low and husky — reading to Jacen as masculine, but it was generally wise to withhold judgement with unfamiliar aliens — telling him that it was time for his meeting with the Director, the officer was here to escort him.

The trip was quite brief, a short walk through the hallway outside the room to a lift, a somewhat lengthy hall bringing him to a surprisingly open area. It had the look of some open courtyard, a large open central space lined with mezzanines on two of the four sides, the walls there glass fronts for...shops and restaurants and the like, perhaps. Though it appeared that many of them were unused, what he could make out of the darkened interiors barren. There were banners hanging from the walls, a few of which he recognized as belonging to member states of the Empire of the Hand, the tiles of the floor arranged to reproduce the white hand encircled by stars of their insignia at massive scale. There were people around, walking this way or that or lingering chatting over drinks, though the space was quite empty.

The officer didn't slow, Jacen looking around the square while following along. He was led into what he registered as some sort of civilian diplomatic office, they quickly passed through a somewhat barren but clean and comfortable lobby, into a hallway, past a workspace with a few desks, occupied by what he presumed to be receptionists at work, two of them speaking through comms and another reading some text on their display — none of them even gave the unfamiliar man flanked by an officer and a pair of stormtroopers a second glance — down a hallway for a short distance, coming to an office—

Jacen tensed at the power on the air, potential drawn in close and coiled and ready. There was another Force-sensitive in the room with him.

The office was large and well-appointed, as he might expect of what he suspected might be the head of the Hand's diplomatic mission in Dimitran space. The ceiling curved up overhead as it retreated from the door — it didn't reach double-height, at the opposite end of the room perhaps only the equivalent of a floor and a half of space — fanning out somewhat to make a wide obtuse segment of a circle. There was a desk straight ahead, with a single chair for the Director opposite a few for visitors, to one side what was clearly a workstation, a computer terminal and a modern-looking fabricator, curiously enough. To the other side was a seating area, a sofa and a couple chairs, against the wall a simple kitchen area, likely intended for little more than to store some snacks and prepare tea. Most of the back wall was transparent, looking directly out into space with a dominating view of Dimitra, most of what Jacen could make out in daylight, water blue and verdant green, the cloud cover shining brilliant white.

The Director was a human man, tall and broad-shouldered, with a strong jaw and dark hair greying at the temples — Jacen's father's age, perhaps, a little older. By the age and the fact that he was human, Jacen assumed the Director had been a part of Thrawn's original expedition out into what was now the Empire of the Hand, possibly assigned to the post to act as a more familiar face for the humans of Dimitra...or perhaps he was curious about their lost homeworld and had jockeyed for the position, impossible to say. The Force-sensitive, the Mage, was a human woman in the prime of her life, her skin taking a light brownish tone, hair a silken black pulled into a tightly wound plait that extended down to her hips. She was wearing what was clearly some manner of native dress, a long skirt and a wide sash wrapped a few times around her torso to more or less fully cover her, the entire surface thick with intensely detailed embroidery in complex geometric patterns, showing practically every colour of the rainbow somewhere, glittering in the light as she shifted, perhaps including metallic wire. There were bracelets around her wrists, rings on her fingers, multiple piercings through her ears and even one in her nose, some kind of hairband hidden save for where it crossed over her temple, a string of little star-shaped pendants hung to rest against her forehead, all of it in shining polished gold, gemstones glinting here and there and everywhere.

And, of course, she burned in the Force, almost more intensely than he'd even expected. Though it was different from Force-sensitives he'd encountered before, despite the sheer sense of power about her feeling more...controlled, almost regimented, as though energy had been drawn from the Force and gathered around her, held close and tight and waiting, ready to leap into action. It was a curious feeling, he wasn't sure how to interpret it. Between the finery and her power, some manner of leader among the Mages, perhaps? He knew absolutely nothing of how they were organized, but it was no surprise they'd found someone of some importance to hear his request.

They both turned at the entrance of Jacen's little group, the Mage giving him a slow look over while the Director spoke, the faintest accent lingering on his Minnisiat. "Good, thank you, Lieutenant." A lower rank than the lieutenant who'd escorted Jacen from the landing bay, but still a position he would translate as lieutenant regardless, because the Hand's system was confusing. "You may go. And you two can wait outside, thank you."

"Excuse me, Director," one of the stormtroopers said, in a voice that definitely wasn't human — though, again, Jacen couldn't begin to guess the species. "But I'm uncertain whether it would be wise to leave you alone with the Jedi. I would prefer to call the Captain."

"But he isn't alone, is he?" That was the Mage, speaking in, surprisingly enough, perfectly smooth and comfortable Minnisiat. Dimitra had not been discovered that long ago, certainly not long enough for someone to learn the language to such a degree of fluency. Jacen suspected she must have learned it through some Force technique, perhaps similar to Theran listening — that was how he'd learned Minnisiat himself. It was promising that the Mages were capable of such things, making him only more curious to investigate himself. "This Jedi of yours is unarmed; I am not. I have no doubt I can protect the both of us if need be."

He felt one of his eyebrows arch up at just how very confident the woman was in her ability to beat Jacen in a fight — surely he was the first Jedi she'd ever met, she should have little understanding of his abilities. (Especially since he was not an ordinary Jedi.) It would be impolitic to actually express his scepticism under the circumstances — he had no intention of starting a fight, and it'd be more comfortable to have their conversation without stormtroopers looming over his shoulders — but the Mage clearly picked up on it anyway. Her dark eyes steady on his, one corner of her lips curled into a subtle smile, beneath the contained coils of thrumming potential wrapped about her her presence feeling smug, almost challenging.

It was obviously bait, so he didn't bite. "I am no threat to either of you. I've come to Dimitra in peace." For some reason, there was a sudden ring of amusement from the Mage, letting out a thin snort — Jacen didn't know what was so funny about what he'd just said.

"Ah good, you do speak Minnisiat," the Director said. "That does make things far more convenient — I understand you don't speak Basic."

That aside was directed to the Mage, who tilted her head in acknowledgement. "A little bit, but not enough for this sort of conversation, no."

"Good, good. You two may go, I'm certain the Captain would agree that Nāgamaṇi herself is more than enough to guarantee our safety." There was a brief pause, but then there was a sharp series of clicks as the stormtroopers snapped off salutes more or less in unison, then turned and followed the officer back out the door. The Director tapped at something Jacen couldn't make out at the inside of his wrist, the door zipped quietly closed. "All right, Solo, I've got one absolutely critical question to start off with: how the hell are you here?"

Jacen blinked at the man — had he misspoken? "Excuse me, Director, did you mean to ask why?"

Mind fizzling with irritation, his eyebrows furrowing, he snapped, "No, Solo, I said what I meant to say. The Iliak System is under protective embargo — the beacon network will refuse to chart a course anywhere near here without the proper authorization, and the precise position of the system cannot be found on publicly available starcharts. How are you here?"

Ah, yes, he supposed that would follow. "I see. I'm not certain it would reassure you to know that I acquired the astrogation data I've been using to travel through the Empire of the Hand from a slicer I tracked down along the frontier. I have no idea where he procured the data from."

The Director scowled. "You will surrender everything you have on this slicer before you leave the station."

Jacen froze for a moment, feeling out the rigid tension of his presence — not approaching too closely, unless the Mage (Nagamarni?) was sensitive enough to feel such an intrusion. After a couple seconds of thought, he nodded. "Very well. I will copy all the data I have, and write a report containing everything else I know." The slicer had struck Jacen as a scoundrel regardless, even if the Hand snapped him up it would be no great loss.

"Good." Some of the tension falling away, the Director let out a thin sigh. Turning to the Mage, he said, "We can play this friendly, if you prefer. Your call."

"We may sit down, then. I've brought tea."

"Ah! You're in for a treat, Solo — Dimitrans love their tea. There are so many variations I'm certain I could sample a new one every day and never run out."

His immediate reaction was skepticism — Dimitra was only one world, the options would be limited — but after a second to think about it, approaching the seating area laid out to the side to meet the Mage and the Director, he admitted that might be at least understandable hyperbole. Dimitra might only be one world, but it was a cradle-world, one where the natural environment had been largely preserved — there was likely a wide diversity of living flora found on the surface. If only a fraction of it were aromatic enough to be made into tea, that might still seem like an endless variety to someone more accustomed to the homogenizing effects of modern interstellar commerce. Dimitra was hardly the only world with a tea culture that Jacen was familiar with, but it was the only one which had retained much of its biodiversity.

He would have to investigate further himself while he was down there. The food would likely be unusually varied as well, could be interesting...

Jacen was rather thoroughly wrenched out of his own thoughts when the Mage produced a plain kettle out of a small bag settled on her hip. It was absolutely impossible that it could have fit in there — the big was a tiny thing, he hadn't even noticed it on her at first, hidden by the folds of the sash, and the kettle was full-sized, bronze. She set the kettle down on the low table at the centre of the seating arrangement, and then reached into the bag again...her hand vanishing into it halfway up the forearm, despite the little thing being small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, pulled out a tall bottle, far larger than the bag...

Was that thing...larger on the inside? Jacen had heard of such things before, of course, primarily in old legends, heard a few references to the exploitation of the folding of space from the Aing-Tii. But he'd never seen such techniques with his own eyes before — not even from the Aing-Tii, who he suspected were capable of it, so secretive as they were with outsiders. It was trivial to use the Force to fool someone into thinking something was smaller or larger than it appeared, but there was simply no room on the Mage's person for these objects. The only explanation was that that bag was larger on the inside than the outside, as bizarre as that sounded.

The Mage smiled at him, apparently picking up on his reaction. The bottle set on the table, she flicked her wrist, and Jacen flinched at the sudden appearance of an object so bright and so noisy in the Force that he had to shrink away, clamp down on his senses simply so he didn't blind and deafen himself. The artefact was far less impressive to mundane sight: it was a thin wooden rod, roughly a foot long, covered in delicate carvings, a serpent wrapped about the handle and tiny little blossoms here and there. A flick of the rod, there was a subtle twitch in the Force, and—

A simple three-legged wire stand appeared on the table. It was not there a second ago — the Mage had, seemingly, created it out of nothing.

Despite his dumbfounded shock, Jacen still felt himself smile. It seemed the recordings he'd found on the net had not been somehow tampered with. Dimitran magic truly was something.

Jacen closely watched through the whole process of brewing the tea, much of which was done with the assistance of exotic Force techniques — he was distantly aware of the Director nearby watching him, his presence feeling almost smug, silently waiting. An egg-shaped ceramic capsule was retrieved from her bag, twisted open over the pot to dump the contents inside — the aromatics, presumably — and then she pointed the rod at her opposite hand, and shimmering blue flames poured out of the tip. It obviously wasn't natural fire, simmering and popping in the Force, and the Mage cupped the flames in her hand, leaving her unharmed and burning on despite the lack of fuel. She brought her hand up close to her chin, the point of her wand idly twirling, and whispered into the flames, softly enough that all Jacen could hear was an indistinct hiss — though she was certainly doing something, the presence of the fire in the Force seeming to slip, their blue colour shifting into green, some of the tongues flicking silver at the edges. She held her hand over the stand and then turned her wrist, letting the flames slide off her palm, passing through the wire of the stand to settle directly on the surface of the table.

He cut a quick glance at the Director — if he was at all concerned with the Mage playing around with fire in his office, he wasn't showing it. Presumably he'd seen her do this before.

Next, the Mage picked up the kettle, now a stream of water bursting out the tip of the rod, directed straight into the kettle. She held it for a time, before the flow of water stopped, and the kettle was set down on the stand over the flames. The bottle was plucked off the table, the Mage gently shaking it in her hand, perhaps mixing the contents. "I prefer a strong masala cay," she said — not looking at them, her attention on the kettle. "I hope you two don't mind."

"Ah, that name is familiar, I believe I've had this one before."

"You may have, though I doubt it was quite the same. Everyone mixes it a little different."

"Well, the last time made quite an impression. The spice is no harsher than certain Monatšeri dishes, don't hold back on my account." The Sith, he meant, that was their name for themselves in their own language — "Sith" properly referred to the Force-wielding nobility, who no longer existed. The term had also stuck in Minnisiat, but was only used when referring to the species, their society in general was always called "Monatšeri" instead.

"Yes, the Monatšeri do enjoy their spices, don't they..."

The kettle began to boil far earlier than Jacen thought should be possible, some property of the unnatural flames perhaps speeding the process along. A swish of the rod and the flames vanished, put out as easily as switching off a light. The mage tapped the kettle with her rod, once and then a second time, each with a sharp ringing in the Force. She paused a moment before tapping it a third time, and then some fluid was poured out of the bottle into the pot, an opaque white — milk, perhaps. There was another tap on the pot, and with a swirl of the rod three cups simply appeared sitting together on the table, seeming to be made out of reddish clay. The Mage picked up the kettle and poured a stream of liquid into each cup in turn, the beverage coming out a rich and creamy brown color.

Jacen could smell it from here, sharp spices tickling at his nose. Unless there were some very interesting plants down there, he assumed it must be a blend made of multiple different sources — the Mage had said it involved mixing, so that would make sense. There was something that had bite to it, something smooth and warm, something almost more floral, it was very complex, difficult even to describe the scent. Somewhat similar to some varieties of muqsa, or the more...interesting cakes served at Hapan balls, or Devaronian stews...

The pouring done, the Mage held a cup out to the Director first, who accepted it with a grateful nod of his head, before handing a second to Jacen. From close up, the scent was even more intense, all but burning through his sinuses. He waited for the Mage to sit and sip from her own cup before tasting it — doing so was polite in many cultures, it seemed a reasonable precaution. The tea was at once sharp and smooth, acrid and sweet, some spice warming his skin on top of the physical heat while at once there seemed to be a chill as he let out a breath, his mouth and his throat and his nose tingling. Since he was unfamiliar with the contents, it was impossible to pick out any particular flavor, but it was very complex, seeming to aim for all of his taste receptors simultaneously, tripping some more strongly than others but still finding them all, like a garment stitched every color of the rainbow...

It was interesting, he would give it that. He might have preferred a somewhat less intense brew, if only because all the unfamiliar ingredients all at once was a little overwhelming, but certainly not bad.

There was a brief silence as they all tasted their drink, before the Mage spoke. "Now that the tea has been poured, we may speak like civilized beings."

The Director shot her a quick, crooked smile, taken with an almost fond sort of amusement — Jacen had already gotten the impression that they'd met before. "Yes, I suppose we may. You have a hell of a lot of nerve turning up here without warning, Solo," he said, the good humor on his voice vanished in an instant. "I thought it was made quite clear to Skywalker that the Empire of the Hand will tolerate no interference in our internal affairs from your little Order."

"I have not come here as a Jedi. I—"

Before he could even start his pseudo-prepared statement, the man snapped, "Do not play games with me, Solo. I don't think you understand how badly you've overstepped by showing your face here, of all places — I am still contemplating whether to have you arrested."

"I understand perfectly well, believe me, Director..." He trailed off to take a sip of the intensely flavourful tea, and then gave his head a thoughtful tilt. "Was there a name that went with that title?"

The man scowled, but he answered anyway. "Corvan."

"Director Corvan," Jacen acknowledged with a little nod. "And I don't believe I caught your name?"

"I am called Nāgamaṇi." The way she said it gave Jacen the impression that it wasn't necessarily her birth name, some nickname or title, but he supposed if that was what she wished to be called by. "The name Jacen Solo is familiar to me, from the documentation we were given during our language lessons. Are you the same Jacen Solo who is the son of Leia Organa and Han Solo?"

He was somewhat surprised that a Dimitran knew his parents' names — it seemed their fame reached all the way to newly-discovered planets in the Unknown Regions. "Yes."

"The same Jacen Solo who defeated the Yuuzhan Vong mage who orchestrated their invasion of the galaxy."

He wanted to contest the use of mage, but he supposed that might simply be what the Dimitrans called Force-sensitives. "Yes."

"Mm." Taking a slow sip of her tea, Nāgamaṇi watched him for a moment, her eyes sharp and perceptive, her presence in the Force flickering. Her eyes flicked to Corvan, her head tilting in a gesture. "Continue, then."

The Director might have intended to say something, but before he could Jacen continued, "I understand how seriously the Hand is taking the matter. When the tractor lock came in, I began a maneuver to flee — I stopped when I felt my own death. We both realize that the Alliance may have considered that an act of war."

"Only if they find out about it," Corvan drawled, something challenging in his gaze.

"Please understand me, Director, I did not intend that observation as an accusation. I am merely saying that I realize the Hand considers my intrusion in this system serious enough to risk angering the Alliance. And I suspect I've guessed why."

"That you've violated a protective embargo on a newly-contacted civilization isn't enough?"

Once again, Jacen wished he'd thought to familiarize himself with the Hand's operational protocols ahead of time — Corvan's wording suggested this was standard practice with primitive worlds. It seemed more enlightened than what was typical in the Republic, he had to admit, as much as it vaguely irritated him. (An Imperial successor state should not have a better record where their treatment of pre-hyperspace societies was concerned.) "I don't imagine the matter is treated with such deadly seriousness in all cases. No, something else motivates you: you believe you've discovered the original human homeworld, and you are concerned what the rest of humanity might do should they hear of it."

Corvan scowled, the flickering fires in his mind demonstrating Jacen had guessed correctly without needing to confirm it verbally. "As I said, the Empire of the Hand will tolerate no interference from the Jedi, in this or any other matter."

"I have no wish to interfere. In fact, I think it a reasonable precaution — the unique cultural heritage of such newly-contacted peoples as the Dimitrans should be protected, I think we can both agree. And I can hardly guarantee that our fellow humans in the Alliance will be...so inclined. If we can come to an agreeable arrangement today, I would be willing to have my navcomputer wiped of any data that may lead back to Dimitra, and I would give my word that, upon my return home, I will speak of this place to no one."

There was a brief pause then, the Mage and the Director both staring at him. Corvan's reaction was clearer — surprise and skepticism, a frothing edge of frustration — but Nāgamaṇi was much harder to read, halfway hidden under the noisy bands of power wrapped around her. Her face was about as inscrutable, not expressionless as such but communicating nothing all the same, watching Jacen through the steam rising from her tea, sitting with her legs folded up on the chair, her shoes left abandoned on the floor. She hardly even seemed to be blinking, her eyes steady on his, only moving so much as to take a delicate sip from her tea.

Wrapped up in their little staring contest, he almost missed Corvan speak. "Why are you here, Solo?" It wasn't the first time he'd asked precisely that question, but the tone was much changed this time — less confrontational, low and cool, almost tired.

"As I said before: I have come to learn. You and the others here call me a Jedi, but I'm not truly, not anymore. I feel I haven't been for quite some time." He paused to take a sip of coffee, the tone he'd finished on making it clear he wasn't done, delaying for effect. Corvan, at least, realized that was what he was doing, one of his eyebrows ticking up a little. "For as long as I can remember, it has always been taken for granted that I would become a Jedi. It was impossible not to notice that my sister and I were gifted, so deeply aware of the Force that we knew each other's thoughts, from infancy."

"You were bonded twins."

Jacen blinked at Nāgamaṇi, slightly taken aback. She'd said that as though it were an established phenomenon, something that was known, that didn't require any additional explication. "Excuse me?"

"It's not unusual," Nāgamaṇi said, a curl of amusement to her voice. "In multiple births — twins, triplets, so forth — it's common for the mind and soul to develop intertwined, to come into being in resonance with each other. To the bonded siblings, they do not entirely perceive themselves as separate individuals, but a single consciousness spread across multiple bodies. The thoughts and feelings of the other are as intimate as their own, they can see through each other's eyes, move each other's hands, as one being. As the children age, as experiences affect one body but not the other, they slowly grow apart, until they have diverged enough for the bond to break, and they become independent persons like any other, with only the memory of their communion left behind."

As the Mage spoke, he found himself all but holding his breath, a prickling chill breaking over his shoulders, staring unblinking. It was a couple seconds after she'd stopped speaking before he managed to whisper. "Yes. I haven't..." He cleared his throat, took a quick sip of the tea. "I've never heard anyone express it before, we were...never quite able to explain it to anyone else in the family. But it was... Yes, it felt much like that."

She nodded, unsurprised. Almost casually, she said, "I hear the break can be quite traumatizing."

"...It was disorienting. We were eight. We'd just been relocated to Coruscant, the city was...loud, and— We'd never lived full-time with our parents before, which was an adjustment, and being alone only made it worse." He hesitated for a heartbeat, before admitting, "We could still hear each other if we were close enough, in the same room, which helped. We still can — or we could last time I saw her, years ago — but it's weakened enough to require skin contact now."

"That's not unusual, yes," Nāgamaṇi said, her tone soft and almost...reassuring? Sympathetic, perhaps. "Opposite-sex siblings rarely make it that long, and for those whose bond lasts for more than a few years, it's common for there to be..." Her head swayed back and forth for a moment. "Think of it like an echo, lingering well after one has ceased speaking. It will weaken with time, and distance. If you've spent years away from her, I would expect it's fully faded now — you will never know her again, not like you once did."

...Oh. That was unfortunate, but he supposed it was inevitable regardless. "We've grown apart, I imagine even the echo wouldn't have lasted much longer." If he understood correctly, it didn't help that he'd been avoiding that sort of contact since at least the start of the war — they'd found themselves too stubbornly locked in disagreement, it was uncomfortable.

"Perhaps not. But forgive me the interruption, I was curious. I believe you were about to make a speech."

He resisted the urge to frown at her tone — it hadn't sounded explicitly insulting, but he couldn't help the feeling she was mocking him — but he tried to brush his suspicion off as well as he could. "As I was saying, it was always expected I would be a Jedi. And I did truly wish to be one, once, it was all I could imagine, practically all I could think about. In a very childish sort of fashion, you understand, wanting to be the great hero in stories, to live up to my uncle's legacy. I learned a hard lesson in the dangers of hubris at the Academy, and I began to wonder."

The memory was still as clear to him as though it were yesterday. He and a batch of other teenage hopefuls had come to the point in their training when they were directed in the construction of a lightsaber. They'd been given the supplies and the instructions, yes — though Jaina had stubbornly refused the focussing crystals on offer and instead crafted her own in a microbial tank, a decision Jacen understood much better now than he had then — but they'd been warned not to play with them. To do nothing with them until Master Solusar had checked them over, and to certainly not mess about without adult supervision.

But they'd been teenagers, and filled with pride in their rudimentary powers, and eagerness inspired by stories of Jedi heroics. And they'd been terribly foolish.

Their hubris cost Tenel Ka an arm.

They'd snuck out, early in the morning, with their untested lightsabers and only slightly more developed skills. They'd decided to have a 'duel' — nothing serious, slow and playful, more cautious than they would be with the practice staves they were more familiar with. There'd been a fault in Tenel Ka's craftsmanship, the circuitry flared and sparked, the blade winked out...even as she'd been moving to block a swing. Jacen had reacted too slowly, hadn't seen it coming in time, tried to pull back, managed to stop himself from disembowling her.

But he'd caught her arm, thrown out for balance as she flailed to skip back out of the way, at the elbow.

(When he closed his eyes, he could still smell burning flesh, the echo of her screams ringing in his ears.)

Tenel Ka had refused to get a prosthesis, instead taught herself how to do everything herself, one-handed, brushing off offers of assistance with stubborn pride. Seeing it had pained him terribly — still did, if he was being honest, though it'd faded somewhat with time — it'd been months of occasional nudging comments from him before she'd explained why. She knew how badly they'd messed up, that they were lucky, if anything, that she'd only lost her arm and not her life. As Hapan royalty, the very best medicine in the galaxy was available to her, a replacement could feel all but seamless — but she was worried she might forget. That she would allow herself to become too confident in her abilities once again, that she would let her confidence and her recklessness run away with her, that she might do something unreasonably foolish, and that next time someone might die for it. She wanted the absence of her arm as a constant reminder, of how dangerous it could be for someone with their abilities to lose themselves, for even a second.

As perverse as it sounded, when he came to understand Jacen had felt almost jealous. He had no scars from that encounter to remind him.

"I did not wonder whether it was misguided to wish to become a Jedi, no, not yet. That was too big of a step for me to take then. Instead, I wondered whether something hadn't been lost in Palpatine's purge of the old Order. Knowledge was certainly lost, yes, the writings of Jedi going back countless generations, accumulated wisdom our Order now cannot even imagine. My uncle, as impressive as his accomplishments are, I couldn't help but think: he was a weapon, forged with a singular purpose. It seemed much of what we were taught at Academy was...almost martial — as so many Jedi are today, essentially acting as police, or as force multipliers or advisors in the military. And that is what you would expect, as we were all taught by Master Skywalker. And he was taught, by Yoda, to fight Darth Vader and the Emperor, and for no other purpose. That very limited training, what little he was able to find that survived the purge, that was all he had to offer us. Whatever else Jedi might have been, before, that was gone — instead we have become weapons, with no hand to direct us.

"I could never convince those around me. I cannot count the arguments I've had with my sister, our brother Anakin, our peers at the Academy, around and around in circles." More than anything else, it was his doubts that had driven them apart. She'd even slapped him once, on Duro — he didn't remember what she'd said, precisely, the hit, the snarl on her voice before she stalked away, more clear in his mind than the words. He couldn't even entirely blame her for the reaction, if he was being honest. At the time, she'd been on medical leave from Rogue Squadron, walking with a brace from her leg and hip being torn up in the impact, effectively blinded, her corneas still adjusting from being regrown. Still reeling from the loss of her wingmate in the same battle, and they'd been close, Jacen knew, Jaina had just finished composing a message to Anni's family. She had not taken well his feeling that perhaps Jedi shouldn't be fighting at all, the unspoken suggestion that it was wrong for her to fight, that...

That he was better than her, somehow, for his refusal to turn his Force-given powers to violence. He hadn't meant it that way — but, in that moment her hand was in contact with his face, he'd understood that was how she'd interpreted it. After breaking his self-imposed passivity in order to rescue their mother, when he'd admitted that he still thought doing so was wrong, but that having their mother's death on his conscience was too high a price to pay, there'd been a second where he'd thought Jaina was about to hit him a second time.

Instead she'd called him a coward twice over, once for wishing he could run away and meditate in a cave somewhere while they were actively being invaded by the Yuuzhan Vong, and again for not even being able to accept consequences of that conviction...but that she was glad he was with them now, at least.

(She didn't understand him, not really. She hadn't understood him since they were children, not truly since they'd been literally of one mind.)

(Jaina was content to make herself a weapon, and could not conceive of his revulsion as anything other than cowardice.)

"And over the course of the war with the Yuuzhan Vong, I only became convinced there was...something more, out there. That we were missing something. In my time as their prisoner, I had come to the revelation that the picture of the Force that my uncle had been given, of light and darkness as separate powers in opposition, that this was incorrect — the the Light and the Dark were two halves of a whole. That the Dark was not opposed to nature, but a part of it, the predator as well as prey. My uncle, who was always more...

"He believed I had a different path. He acknowledged the deficiencies in his own training, that there may well be much he couldn't teach us. As I became more dissatisfied with the role of a Jedi, he did not attempt to reprimand me, to force me to conform, but simply offered what wisdom he could, directed me to contemplation and self-discovery. Even defended me from those dissatisfied with my direction among our family and the other Jedi. And when I came to him with my revelation, he was skeptical at first, but I taught him to feel the Dark in little everyday interactions — in violence, yes, between beings but also in the swoop of a hawkbat, but in smaller things also, in the little manipulations of social interactions, in mundane greed, even in possessive love. My father's frustration with the ever-malfunctioning navcomputer. All around us, all the time, a natural part of reality. The Unifying Force, we came to call it, that greater power which is all things, containing within it both the Light and the Dark, at once in conflict and in harmony.

"In my fight with Onimi, I came to realize we had been thinking too small. He had power, yes, he was Force-sensitive — but his was not like ours. It was not the Light nor the Dark, not the Force at all as we knew it...but it was there. I could not even see it, so far beyond my understanding it was. I could fight him, I could see the effects of what he was doing, but I could not see the how, I could not see the source of his power...at first. There was one...brilliant moment of, of enlightenment, where I could see beyond the horizon, Onimi's power and his whole life stretching behind him — and an entire galaxy beyond him, all the Yuuzhan Vong, who had been invisible to me a moment before. And beyond them endless horizons, knowledge that I could see just an arm's reach away, that I could begin to touch...

"And then the fight was over, and so was that moment of knowing. But I could not go back, having seen what I had seen, and knowing how blind the Jedi are. How truly...small our knowledge of the Force, how limiting our role is. And so, when it seemed the situation back home was beginning to relax into a new routine, I left. I have not truly considered myself a Jedi from that moment, no, I became instead a student in search of that wisdom I had nearly reached before it was snatched away again. To see those horizons once more, to know them. To find, somewhere out here, the knowledge that might help me find my way there again."

He'd lingered to help pick up the mess, for a time. After the invasion, all the destruction the Yuuzhan Vong had wreaked on the galaxy, the three months of constant fighting that had been the final phase of the war, what had been the Republic had effectively been in tatters. Countless planets had been occupied, some of them permanently changed by the invaders' terraforming techniques, the economy in complete disarray, refugees numbering in the quadrillions. It would be years before galactic civilization was even functional again, but the recovery would take generations — and even then, society would never be the same again, the scars of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion had left a permanent mark on the galaxy.

Even if that mark was less noticeable in some regions than others. The Yuuzhan Vong had been aiming for a decapitation strike against the Republic, to dismantle the institutions that united them and the industries that enabled their war effort — they'd carved a path to Coruscant, and focussed on capturing key industrial worlds and hyperroutes. The far south of the galaxy, opposite the Core from the Vong's invasion corridor, had been effectively untouched, and many of the worlds removed from the major hyperroutes had been left alone, for the most part. Some had been in the process of being converted into plantation worlds — Dimitra was doubtless one such example — but their fleet had only comprised so many ships, and there were far more stars in the sky. The more developed a system was, the more likely it was to have been ravaged. And while most of the Yuuzhan Vong had respected the ceasefire, some among them had not, packs of unreformed zealots who continued the fight on their own — last Jacen had heard, Jaina had volunteered for the effort to hunt them down, hoping to use her persona as the Trickster embodied to intimidate as many as possible into surrender.

He'd stuck around to help for a time, but it hadn't been long before he hadn't been able to contain his compulsion to search. Most of his family, his friends, they hadn't understood — it likely hadn't helped that he hadn't been able to quite explain what he was searching for. They'd lost so many friends, his parents had still been mourning Anakin, yet raw over three years after his death — Jaina had still been mourning too, in her own cold, angry sort of way — and they hadn't been able to understand why he felt the need to leave. His sister had seemed almost disgusted with him, even Aunt Mara had gotten visibly frustrated.

Uncle Luke had simply told him to consider it seriously, to look to the Force, to his instincts for guidance. And after a couple days of reflection, when Jacen said he still wanted to go, Luke gave him all the information he had on the different Force traditions out there, and said he would be welcomed back when he was ready.

(His parents and his sister might not understand him, but at least Uncle Luke always did.)

"So I set out, seeking out whatever other knowledge of the Force I could find, to learn from whoever would teach me. First I travelled to Dathomir, where the Daughters of Allya successfully repelled a Yuuzhan Vong occupation — in much a similar fashion as to Dimitra," Jacen said, with a little tilt of his head to Nāgamaṇi. "But while much of their witchcraft was new to me, their understanding of the Force was not. They see the Force in terms of Light and Dark, much as the Jedi — in fact, my uncle suspects Allya, their semi-legendary founder, was a Jedi who'd crash-landed on the planet — though their view of it is in some ways even less developed, obscured in primitive superstition. Once it seemed there was little they could offer me there, I moved on."

The clan Mothers had not appreciated Jacen's questions. Over the course of generations, the rudimentary knowledge of the Force imparted by Allya had degenerated into spiritualist superstition. His more philosophical approach had been seen as heretical, in a way even more threatening than the Nightsisters — they, at least, still acknowledged the basic precepts of their faith. It had not taken long before he'd found himself simply no longer welcome among them.

"I next visited the Theran Listeners of Nam Chorios, whose practices I found far more...tempting. The native sapient life of the planet are sessile crystals — hardly even recognizable to the eye as organic, but thrumming with life in the Force. In learning to communicate with such exotic life, the Listeners had cultivated unique wisdom, gaining the ability to master language of all kinds — it is through their techniques that I have learned Minnisiat to speak with you now — and are perhaps the greatest healers in all the galaxy, despite their relatively limited access to modern technology. And the presence of the Tsil magnifies the Force almost like a lens, I felt I could see deeper from Nam Chorios than I had at any other time in my life, aside from during my fight with Onimi. For a time, I thought perhaps there I could find what I was looking for...but as clear as my sight was there, I could not see far enough. The Listeners and the Tsil had no more to teach me, so I moved on once more."

The Tsil had warned him not to leave, though he hadn't been able to understand why — true communion with the Tsil was more an art than a science, something only the greatest masters among the Listeners were fully capable of. The best Jacen had been able to read was that the Tsil were aware of the suffering in the rest of the galaxy, and were concerned he might be harmed. He'd been somewhat flattered, honestly, but their concern wasn't enough to keep him there, not when his exploration was unfinished.

"Next I visited the Jensaarai, though I did not stay long. They are a splinter group from the Jedi, with some half-remembered wisdom passed down from the ancient Sith, and thus they had little to teach me. I spent a far longer time with the Aing-Tii, who provided a very...unique point of view. They see the Force not as Light and Dark, but a single fundamental essence which may take many expressions, distinct in appearance but sharing a common character — as light passing through a prism may display a rainbow of colors, so may the Force when it is expressed in the physical world. They have a fascinating view of time, and our place in it, and powerful abilities to manipulate space, similar to your bag there," with a nod toward the unassuming bag hidden at Nāgamaṇi's waist. "They hold to a radical egalitarian ethos, believing that no being is more worthwhile than any other, contributing to a zealous hatred of slavery, taking it upon themselves to assault any slaver vessel that drifts into their space, freeing the slaves and executing their captors.

"I found their view of the Force and the universe compelling, their abilities fascinating...but what repelled me from the Aing-Tii was their hypocrisy. They claim to believe no being is more valuable than any other, and yet no alien has ever been welcomed into their order — it was difficult enough for me to even get their attention, and I was only permitted to learn what little of their beliefs and practices they were willing to share with an outsider. And while they do fight oppression within their own space, providing their protection to the other beings there, they did nothing to oppose the Empire, they offered no assistance against the Yuuzhan Vong. They remain unmoved, hidden in the shifting wilds of the Kathol Rift, unwilling to offer a helping hand despite the enslavement and deaths of trillions, quadrillions! And they think themselves enlightened! No, I could not stay with them, despite what wisdom they might offer, not for long."

In their unwillingness to act to help the suffering masses just beyond their borders, Jacen had come to more clearly understand how those around him had felt about his own reticence to act, in the early phases of the war. It was not the same, not truly, but he better understood how it must have looked from the outside. He intended to apologize to Jaina, the next time he saw her — he couldn't remember what he'd said to her that day on Duro, precisely, but he couldn't help feeling now that he'd earned that slap.

"After a brief visit to the Baran Do Sages, who possessed interesting abilities but little knowledge of the Force I was not already familiar with, I continued on into the Unknown Regions. I came with the intent of learning from the Blazing Chain and the Sorcerers of Rhand, but—"

Scowling at him, Corvan snapped, "The Chain are pirates and slavers, and nothing more. They might have some among them with power in the Force, but I'm sure they have nothing to teach you, only a few simple tricks passed down from one generation to the next. And I have never heard of these Sorcerers of Rhand."

"Yes, I've come to similar conclusions," he admitted, with a sort of self-deprecating smile. "I suspect the Rhandites may be nothing more than a fanciful story one of Palpatine's cronies invented to frustrate my uncle. I was surprised to learn of the continued existence of the Sith out here, but I quickly decided I had little to learn from them — the knowledge of the old sorcerer-lords has been thoroughly lost, and I suspect the modern Monatšeri would not appreciate my asking questions.

"But while I was exploring this region of space, I heard a rumor of a newly-discovered world. A people who, while primitive by the standards of the civilized galaxy, had power in the Force such to resist an invasion by the Yuuzhan Vong. Numbering in the millions, an entire society, these beings had mastered exotic powers unseen in the rest of the galaxy. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw it myself, recordings of some manner of duel, two human women casting about balls of light that..." He trailed off, frowning at Nāgamaṇi. It was difficult to feel through the bands of contained power wrapped tight around her, but he was certain that was exasperation bubbling up from within her. "What is it?"

Her voice a low drawl, her lips curled, Nāgamaṇi said, "I'm certain Beth will be very pleased with how far those recordings have spread. I'll have to tease her about if I see her again."

"You know one of the duellists?"

"I know both of them, Elizabeth Potter and Ḑiguqhȧnna — we were all on the language team, that's when the recordings you saw were taken. Beth is the human. She was already famous on Dimitra, I'm sure she's thrilled that her renown is reaching across the stars."

"I'm sorry, I was under the impression both duellists were human."

"Ḑiguqhȧnna is lilin, Beth was the one with the freckles. Go on and finish your little speech then." He took a breath to speak, to ask what a lilin was — both of the duellists had appeared human to him, and he'd thought Dimitra had gone entirely uncontacted before the Yuuzhan Vong — but before he could even get the first syllable out Nāgamaṇi jumped ahead of him. "No, never mind, I know what you're going to say. Your search for other 'Force' traditions—" The word was said with a dragging note Jacen didn't know how to interpret, her lip curling. "—has brought you to Dimitra. You were about to ask for permission to land, so you may study our magic, to seek the wisdom that was denied you. So humbly, of course, absent of any suggestion that you suspect our practice of magic, developed over six thousands years of constant study, all the religion and philosophy and science motivating and buttressed by it, to ultimately be beneath you."

For a moment, he could only stare at Nāgamaṇi, taken aback. Her voice had been flat, no sense of anger on her presence that he could detect, the content of what she'd said seeming to clash with her easy, cool bearing. Jacen was reminded of his final meeting with the Aing-Tii monks he'd been working with, when he'd come to them with accusations against their isolation, disdain on their words but their voices and minds tranquil... "I believe there may have been some misunderstanding. I don't believe your traditions are beneath me."

"Don't you?" she asked, her voice light and amused, one eyebrow arching up her forehead. "I wonder, when you reach the next stop on your little tour, what story you will tell them about what we primitives failed to teach you."

"I didn't—"

Ignoring his protests, Nāgamaṇi glanced to Corvan. "Let him in."

Jacen's voice died in his throat, his jaw snapping closed sharply enough his teeth clicked. What? Hadn't she just been saying...?

The Director seemed almost as taken aback as Jacen, glancing between the two of them, suspicion flickering in his mind. "I don't suppose I should have Solo removed to his room before asking you again."

"I'm fine, Corvan — we would know if he were attempting to manipulate me. Remind me to tell you about mind magic some other time. Come to think of it, it may be wise to equip as many of the command officers and political leadership with defensive amulets as reasonably possible."

"Defensive amulets?" Jacen asked, pushing past his surprise and confusion enough to get the words out.

Glancing back at him, Nāgamaṇi offered, "Go ahead, reach for my mind."

...That seemed unwise. Not only for diplomatic reasons, though that was also a factor — he didn't know why Nāgamaṇi had seemingly changed her mind on a whim, there was no telling whether she might declare offense and demand he be barred entry — but the idea of looking toward her thoughts gave him an odd prickling of unease. He couldn't say why, exactly. It didn't feel like a premonition, and while there had been something daring about the way Nāgamaṇi invited him to make the attempt, she didn't seem threatening now, sitting there perfectly at ease, her body loose and her face mild. And yet, he couldn't help the subtle feeling that he was being watched, a predator in the bushes, ready to pounce at the slightest wrong move.

The bands of power held close against Nāgamaṇi's skin continued to burn.

"I think I would rather not," he decided.

Nāgamaṇi smirked, in a blink her expression transforming into something sharp and venomous. "Smart boy." Abruptly slipping back into the easy calm she'd worn for most of their meeting — now striking Jacen far more like a mask, a façade of calm hiding the threat beneath, much as the power around her would be undetectable to Corvan — she turned to speak to the Director again. "He may be an annoying, self-important, sanctimonious little prick, but—"

His voice flat, sharp, he said, "He's sitting right here."

The Mage pretended not to hear him. "—only one man, in the end. If what I've been told of Jedi is accurate, it isn't as though he can do any harm. Though I must insist his navcomputer be wiped, and we will need that oath not to reveal our existence to anyone on the other side of the Rift."

She was looking to him now, both of them were, clearly expecting him to say something. Swallowing his wounded pride — Nāgamaṇi was giving him what he wanted, it didn't matter that she didn't like him — he dipped his head. "You will have it, of course."

"Good."

"Very well," Corvan said with a heavy sigh, his mind prickling with uneasy exasperation. "I must insist the X-wing stay on the station — allowing munitions as powerful as the torpedos on that thing to remain in the system outside of our control would be a violation of our agreement with your government."

"The torpedo bay is empty, your technicians may confirm that themselves if you wish." He might ordinarily be loathe to admit he was more vulnerable than he seemed, while so far outside of the Alliance's borders in potentially hostile space, but he didn't see how it could harm him at the moment.

"In that case, the reactor is as dangerous as a proton torpedo anyway — you're not flying that fighter down to the surface."

Before he could agree, Nāgamaṇi said, "He can take the shuttle down with me. Was there anything else you need, or may we leave immediately?"

Jacen took another second to swallow down his irritation with being talked over. He was a visitor here, as knowledgeable as he was he would be a complete novice in their arts — humility would be the order of the day, until he could establish himself. "My lightsaber was confiscated when I boarded the station. Other than that, I am prepared to leave at your leisure."

There was some discussion then, as the details were arranged. Jacen's X-wing would be locked down for the duration of his stay on Dimitra — he warned them they wouldn't be able to access the computer, but it seemed that wasn't necessary— prepared to be transferred over to a transport when it was time for him to leave the system. To be certain he couldn't reverse engineer any jump data that was left behind even after wiping the navcomputer, he would need to be ferried to some other system before being released. He would cooperate with Dimitra, and the systems he'd jumped through to get here, being deleted from his navcomputer before he would be permitted to go. If he did not cooperate, he would be held until he did; if he attempted to make a break for it, his ship would be destroyed, stranding him (and incidentally destroying the data). Nāgamaṇi clearly didn't think the precaution was necessary, seeming almost impatient with the proceedings, but Corvan had Jacen sign documents affirming that he understood the terms he was agreeing to anyway.

Once that was out of the way, Corvan handed him a datacard loaded with geographical and cultural data, as well as some guidance on practical questions such as how public transportation on Dimitra functioned. Jacen had absolutely no idea what a gate was supposed to be, but it seemed the entire planet was connected by a network of them, so he would soon find out. Corvan gave him a final warning about not making a nuisance of himself — the existence of the wider galaxy was still new to Dimitrans, the situation was delicate — before he and Nāgamaṇi walked out of the office.

Escorted by stormtroopers again, of course. They were likely here to ensure Nāgamaṇi wasn't harmed while under the Hand's protection more than anything, since he'd been given permission to be here now. While he understood they had little reason to trust his motives, the precaution was unnecessary — he felt quite certain that Nāgamaṇi could defend herself perfectly fine.

Doubly so since she was armed — in retrospect, he recognised the wooden rod she carried from those recordings — and he was not. As harmless as she seemed, after feeling the viciousness on that smirk, he suspected he might be outclassed.

(The bands of power held close against Nāgamaṇi's skin continued to burn.)

He waited until they were in the turbolift, zipping along toward the landing bay — the same landing bay he'd arrived in, he'd been told his lightsaber would be returned to him before they left the station. While he would prefer to have this conversation in private, without a few stormtroopers breathing over their shoulders, it didn't seem appropriate to stand here in awkward silence without addressing the matter either. "Thank you, Master Nāgamaṇi."

A flicker in her mind, inscrutable past the power wrapped around her, Nāgamaṇi cut him a glance. "What's that master nonsense about, Solo?"

His response to the expected question on what he was thanking her for dying in his throat, he blinked at her for a second. "Perhaps it doesn't quite translate into Minnisiat. Where I come from, it's the expected form of address from a student to their teacher, especially in arts such as magic." He felt slightly silly using the word, but it was simply what the Dimitrans called it.

"Oh, I'm not teaching you."

"...Excuse me?"

"I'm having the pilot drop us off in Vārāṇsī, where you can go off and be somebody else's problem. What gave you the impression I'd be teaching you?" He supposed he didn't know how to answer that question. He'd simply assumed, given that she'd decided to guarantee his passage down to the planet. Before he could come up with a response, she continued, her mind bubbling with amusement, "I'm not a schoolteacher, Solo — I'm a healer, in a highly specialized field. Come back to me with certifications in healing and spectral alchemy, get some experience under your belt to prove you're not a bumbling amateur, and then maybe I'll deign to show you a couple things.

"Normally I'd expect the required course of study to take ten to fifteen years, but you seem clever. You might do it in eight. Come find me then, if you're still interested." She continued to meet his eyes for a moment, the faintest curl of a smirk to her lips, before she turned away to watch the door. Waiting for them to open out into the proper level, calm and smooth and unconcerned.

In retrospect, he wished he'd decided to delay attempting to thank her for taking a chance on him until they were in private. She might not have said it directly, but Jacen had understood the message all the same: you, boy, are beneath me. The presence of the stormtroopers in the silent turbolift car, impassively watching, made the insult bite all the harder.

(He didn't realize it at the time, but Nāgamaṇi would only be the first Mage to turn him away.)

Chapter Text

69:9:16 (11th February 2002)
— Zero Day plus 06.05.09

The war against the wakali had been slow and brutal — but they were, gradually, winning.

The wakali had been a serious issue in this region of the galaxy for roughly two hundred years now, due to some social developments in their society that remained little understood. Despite how long they'd been fighting the wakali, the rest of the galaxy didn't actually know that much about them — they were intensely supremacist, basically thought all other beings were animals put into existence explicitly for their benefit, so weren't exactly inclined to share much of themselves with outsiders. Couldn't even interrogate them, everyone they'd managed to capture alive would just scream insults at people whenever they were approached, and would find some way to kill themselves at every opportunity. Some had even gone as far as repeatedly bashing their own head against whatever hard surface was available, badly enough to cause lethal brain hemorrhages by the time security intervened.

From a few statements here and there, observations made over generations, their assumption was that wakali who spent any time captured by 'lesser beings' were considered to have been tainted somehow, would be forever exiled from their people. Former slaves suggested such events were considered to be spiritual deaths, in a way, if not proper physical ones — apparently wakali even held memorial services for their captured peers, even if they had reason to believe they were still alive. They would refuse to negotiate for the release of prisoners because, as far as they were concerned, any wakali in captivity was already dead.

They were native to an outlying cluster, orbiting the Core a long distance 'below' the plane of the ecliptic. There was some kind of disturbance in hyperspace wrapped around the galaxy, yes — similar to the Rift down the middle, it'd been observed to be slowly decaying with time, allowing the scabs to invade — but the space within their weird galactic anti-transportation wards was much larger than the galaxy itself. There was the galaxy roughly in the middle, a rotating disc with a bulging ball in the middle, but there were things outside of just the basic shape. There were two companion galaxies, mostly just called Companion C and Companion D — dwarf galaxies, big clumps of stars that were so far away nobody had ever reached them. They were hundreds of thousands of light-years away from the galaxy proper, and there was basically nothing in between here and there, which made travel pretty much impossible.

Space really was stupid big when you thought about, honestly Beth's brain just broke when they started talking about the distances between things inside the hyperspace disturbance. It was thought that the disturbance was artificial, like some anti-transportation wards an ancient civilisation had put up — given how fucking huge the thing was, and that it'd held for at least twenty thousand years and probably much longer, she really had to wonder who the fuck those people were, that was insane.

Anyway, there was also a Companion A and a Companion B, two more dwarf galaxies orbiting theirs, but some people argued with the terminology. From readings of the light that the stars put out or whatever the fuck, they thought C and D had formed with their galaxy, but those clumps of stars had just stuck out there for whatever reason. A and B, on the other hand, were the remnants of some other galaxy that was in the process of being absorbed by theirs. There were signs in the structure of their galaxy, some of the arms bending in weird ways, some clusters or nebulae orbiting in funny directions, but the other galaxy had gotten torn to fucking shreds. The theory was that the other galaxy had been significantly smaller than theirs, and had been less...gravitationally coherent, or something, so when they collided with each other their galaxy had mostly managed to hold its shape but the other one had gotten messed up, ripped into pieces and scattered all around. Companion A was currently close enough to the disc (way on the other side of the Rift) that it'd been explored and settled thousands of years ago, but Companion B was too far away — they'd sent automated probes out to poke around, but as far as they knew nobody had actually travelled that far.

Beth said currently, because space was fucking huge, so the process of the collision happened over an absurd time scale. It'd been going on for millions of years, thinking about it made her head hurt.

There were bits of their galaxy that were actually leftover pieces of the other one, that had just been captured and started orbiting the Core like everything else; on the other hand, bits of their galaxy had been ejected in the process, clusters or even lone star systems zipping around the deep black of the empty space inside their bubble. There were, like, thousands of these deep halo objects (as they were called), but the space in the bubble was so fucking huge that it didn't make that much difference, still effectively in the middle of nowhere. They were denser as you got closer to the galaxy, but some of them went winging way out there, on crazy elliptical orbits that sent them so far they actually crossed the hyperspace disturbance — meaning that, even if you could fly that far without needing to refuel, you'd end up stranded travelling at sublight speeds anyway.

The wakali were from a nearby DHO, a curling nebula that'd been ejected during the collision, orbiting below and west of the Core — close enough that travel between it and the rest of the galaxy was possible, though difficult. There were a few other species native to the nebula, but they'd all been either genocided out of existence or enslaved, the wakali dominating the entire region. There had been occasional raids on the nearest systems in the galaxy proper going back over a thousand years, wakali showing up to attack seemingly at random, blowing shite up and snatching people away, but they'd been small in scale and very rare.

Then, a couple hundred years ago, the wakali had begun streaming out into the rest of the galaxy in force, and nobody was really sure why. The best theory they had was that the wakali had been at war with each other, their aggression and domination directed at other wakali, but that one faction had ultimately proven victorious, conquering the entire nebula. The period of unification had caused some social changes that resulted in it no longer being appealing to war with and enslave each other...so instead they needed new targets. After all, they couldn't just stop having slaves — if they did, then they higher beings might actually have to do some work for once, perish the thought.

They'd spilled out into the galaxy just to the west of the Core, near where the border between the Law and the Republic of Akame was now, conquering and enslaving a pretty big chunk of space. Where they happened to be positioned meant that they'd stumbled across Chiss space within a century of reaching the galaxy proper — they were the first people the wakali encountered who could actually fight them toe-to-toe. The wakali and the Chiss ended up in an awkward stand-off, the wakali picking at systems around their borders, the Chiss offering neighbouring systems protection, attempting to create a buffer zone between them. The Chiss probably had the advantage in a fair fight, but the wakali outnumbered them, a situation that was only getting worse by the decade, as they conquered more systems and more wakali made the crossing from their home.

Mítth-räw-nuruodo had realised they'd been in a losing position — the wakali would ultimately build up the numbers they needed to overwhelm the Chiss before they struck — so he 'accidentally' started a war. With a smattering of local allies and the Republic of Akame, they managed to push the wakali most of the way out of the galaxy, liberating billions upon billions of slaves in the process. Some of the freed worlds ended up joining the Republic of Akame, but once the war was done the Chiss retreated back to their original borders — the Chiss had very strict rules against expanding beyond their traditional borders, for reasons Beth didn't quite understand. The wakali had hung back for a bit, but once the Chiss and the Republic of Akame turned their backs they'd begun their invasion of the galaxy all over again...reconquering and re-enslaving many of the worlds that had been freed, because of course. This time, the wakali were smart enough to not risk directly antagonising either of the big states that'd just kicked their arses, instead spreading along the Core and toward the north...

...through space that was now the Law of Five. When he'd been sent by the Emperor of Colussan on his expedition across the Rift, Mítth-räw-nuruodo decided to start a second war with the wakali. Kind of got the impression the bloke had a grudge against them, but they were fucking evil genocidal slaving bastards, so, fuck 'em. Blah blah, the whole story about the founding of the Law and its initial wave of expansion, basic history lesson stuff. The various wakali war parties had been scattered in all directions, pushed beyond the borders of the growing Law of Five, picking around the edges to survive like vicious packs of scavengers.

See, the original impression the Chiss had had of the wakali was that they were a nomadic people, but that wasn't exactly true. It seemed fucking implausible that an entire civilisation could even be nomadic in space, but she kind of understood why the Chiss might have gotten that idea. A wakali war party was made up of the combat ships, yes, but then there would be a train of civilian ships behind them, which would move in once the fighting was done. They would descend on a system, the warriors killing anyone who resisted, before the people who actually ran shite came in and made an inventory of all the valuables — including the people, because of fucking course — the industry and agriculture of the system reorganised to serve their interests, some security and some civilians left behind to keep order. And then the war party moved on, supported by occasional shipments coming in from their conquered systems.

But the various war parties in operation would occasionally receive reinforcements that came in from somewhere, and sent shipments of supplies (and slaves) out somewhere. It wasn't until the war that founded the Law that they figured out what was going on there. They managed to identify the nebula the bastards came from, and cut off the routes their horrid fucking slave empire was supplied through — their foothold in the galaxy was part of the Law of Five now. What little tatters remained in the galaxy proper were isolated from each other and increasingly pressed by the Law and their allies, war parties scattered and scrambling to survive. The wakali had been fucked, basically.

And then, around a decade ago, there'd been a sudden resurgence, another concerted invasion taking the Law and the other states out here completely by surprise. It turned out the scabs had gotten into contact with them, and instead of just conquering the bastards themselves, had apparently decided they would be more useful as a distraction. The scabs helped the different groups get into contact with each other — travelling through routes significantly below the plane, space empty enough not to worry so much about charting routes but having to travel long distances, equipping their ships with extra fuel tanks to make the trips — and armed them with a bunch of specialised scab bio-tech to give them an edge. The attack had come seemingly out of nowhere, from multiple directions at once, the wakali coordinating across absurd distances.

At the same time, the scabs began their own invasion of the galaxy — because of course, why not give everyone multiple things to worry about, awesome.

Funnily enough, the scabs had been relatively easy to deal with, sort of because they were far more aggressive. The wakali were out for, like, glory or personal enrichment or something (they honestly weren't sure, they didn't talk much), but the scabs explicitly wanted to conquer the entire galaxy — the scabs brought the fight directly to the Law and the Chiss and the Republic, while the wakali were more or less content to pick off weak systems and sit on them. The scabs had had the more dangerous military, but they also attracted attention just existing, so the war had been focussed disproportionately on them, the wakali mostly only involved when they attacked a system already under someone's protection, or they...well, did a terrorist attack, she guessed? They did hold grudges against the people who'd kicked their arses the last couple of times, but they didn't really seem to be at war 'against' the Law in any coherent way, it was confusing.

The main force of scabs had been dealt with without too much trouble — the scabs, frustrated, decided to keep arming the wakali, and another group of bastards down south of the Republic of Akame that Beth didn't really know anything about, while themselves turning their focus Beyond the Rift — and the Law of Five and the Republic of Akame turned toward clean-up operations. There had still been pockets of scabs scattered here and there, like the ones that'd attacked Earth, but there were also still wakali out there. So, at that point the greater focus of the Law ended up turning on the wakali, since scouring the galaxy looking for people to root out meant they started running into them more often. The Law did send a single expedition over Beyond the Rift to help out with the war against the scabs over there, but from then on they were basically just mopping up.

And they were still mopping up. Space was big, and there were fucking countless places that scabs or wakali could be hiding. They were also basically exploring at the same time, because there were still big sections of this segment of the galaxy that hadn't even been charted. So, they'd sound out a jump, hop their way over, and sometimes they would stumble across a system occupied by the wakali or the scabs, oh shite, guess we get to kill these bastards now, blow the fuck out of them and then hang around a bit to make contact with the natives, do what they can to help out. You know, basically what had happened on Earth — the big difference was that most other people needed way more help than they had.

It was a slow process, because space was fucking big, the war dragging on year after year. But they were winning, bit by bit. Less and less frequently they stumbled on pockets of unreformed scabs — there was a peace treaty, signed years ago now, the scabs still fighting now were the ones who'd refused to lay down their arms — and they were cornering and obliterating one wakali war party after another, freeing the worlds under their domination. They'd even begun to prepare an assault on the nebula itself for the first time, to end this fucking thing once and for all.

There was some talk about the ethics of completely obliterating wakali civilisation, as they were poised to do in the next few years, but Beth honestly didn't give a damn. If they wanted to give up their slaving ways, fine, they could come to the table; if not, they could all fucking die for all she cared. Yes, Hermione, she realised she was talking about genocide, but there was a line.

Beth had been transferred — promoted, technically — over to the Seventh Expeditionary Fleet, which had been tasked with hunting down one of the war parties known to still be operating in the galaxy proper. There were elements of the fleet directly harassing the wakali navy, which was a serious fucking pain. Because the wakali were evil bastards, their warships had two layers of hull — there was the inner layer, which actually protected the ship and everything, and then there was a narrow band around that...surrounded by an outer hull, most of which was composed of hundreds of transparent bubbles, each containing a living slave, naked and terrified. The idea, of course, was to get their enemies to hesitate to fire on them, lest they kill innocent captives in the way. It could be avoided, the bubbles didn't cover everything — the engines and the weapons and the shields still had to get past — but it made battles extremely tedious, because the good guys had to be obsessively cautious with their aim. And also they couldn't use high-volume munitions, because those would incinerate the captives same as everyone else.

Typically, the strategy was to disable wakali ships by knocking out the things that they could hit, and then board them, to fight the wakali through the corridors, in close quarters. Those operations were sort of infamous, because the total lack of useful cover and the wakali setting booby-traps meant casualties were high, and apparently wakali ships were fucking horrifying on the inside, which should be no surprise to anyone. They'd gotten pretty good at taking wakali ships with a minimum of casualties among the slaves, so it was generally thought to be worth it, but it still sucked.

Beth would trade for that job in a heartbeat. She couldn't imagine how it could possibly be worse than what she was already doing.

The detachment of the fleet she was with was tasked with liberating occupied planets, to cut off the war party's supply lines — freeing the slaves was its own reward too, of course, but there was also a strategic purpose to it. Since getting back from leave like five or six weeks ago, she'd already participated in two of these operations. The first one hadn't been so bad. The settlement had been focussed on agriculture, like a big damn planet-sized plantation, but it'd also been a relatively new possession, and the population had been quite low. They'd come in lightning fast, hitting the wakali in several simultaneous skirmishes, overwhelming them practically before they could even really do much. Helping set up the slaves with some emergency medical care and supplies, flag down someone from the Resettlement Authority to figure out what to do with everyone — she thought they'd probably just leave them there with some support, make it an independent settlement, but at least some of them probably had somewhere to go home to — all of that had taken far longer than the liberation of the planet itself. And most of that wasn't her job.

The second one had been fucking miserable. Honestly, serious competitor for the worst experience of her entire life.

This world, Oxlapś, had been known to the Law before. They were an early spaceflight civilisation, pre-hyperspace, which the Law had made contact with during the lull after the second war with the wakali. While first contact had been pretty friendly, the residents of the planet had refused the offer to join the Law — from Beth's understanding, in large part because they still had their own issues to iron out, which would complicate the prospect of actually joining an interstellar government like theirs. Oxlapś had been put under a protective embargo, preventing anyone from fucking with them, the Law occasionally calling in to double-check they were okay, offering the occasional shipment of medical supplies or whatever. There were several situations like that scattered around, some of them ended up joining the Law, others just stayed in their systems (the jump to hyperspace travel was extremely difficult), the Law checking in to make sure they were still okay every few months but generally leaving them to their own devices.

Oxlapś was deep in one of the regions of space that had been conquered during the wakali resurgence. The Law's small monitoring station in the area had been overwhelmed immediately, the fleet pulled in too many directions all at once to do anything about it. That was twelve years ago now, and they haven't heard from Oxlapś since.

Oxlapś had been a developed, industrialised world — primitive by the standards of spacefaring civilisation, but inarguably more advanced than Earth. They'd had colonies and stations dotted through their whole solar system and everything, the planet featuring major cities, the total population estimated at something like eight billion.

It was a lot less than that now.

The scabs hadn't just given the wakali weapons, they'd also given them stuff sort of like what the scabs used to rewrite people's brains to better control all their slaves. What the wakali had was far more basic than the scabs' best stuff — the effects limited so as to not elevate a potential rival, or so the theory went — and far more easily reversible, and they didn't have enough of it to brainwash entire planets of billions of people. But they did have enough to enforce their control over a percentage, who could be used to more effectively dominate the entire population, minimising the manpower they needed to dedicate to keeping slaves in line. So, when it came time to liberate the planet, they weren't just fighting the wakali occupiers, but also hundreds of thousands, even millions of locals, who'd been forced to fight by the implants controlling them — implants which were reversible, so they had orders to take as many of them alive as reasonably possible.

Not that that was always in their control. The Law's preferred strategy when liberating a planet was to come in with the big guns straight on to the bad guys, attracting their attention, while small parties zipped around dropping caches of weapons, inviting the locals to rise up and join the fight. There were strategic reasons for this — any locals who joined in would be increasing their numbers, and uprisings sprouting up all over the planet would be extremely distracting, making it easier to tear the occupiers apart — but it was also good for diplomatic reasons. The Law busting in giving slaves weapons to go kill their oppressors made a hell of a first impression, and far too often people might worry that new people coming in just meant they'd be trading one set of masters for another — the first talks with recently liberated slaves tended to be more friendly when they had guns in their hands, especially since the Law's diplomats would normally turn up unarmed. They'd still have armed guards, of course, but it was the symbolism of the thing, you know.

The locals didn't necessarily understand all the details about how the implants worked, all they knew was that their own people had turned against them to work for the wakali. And, well, Beth couldn't deny the possibility that some people had cooperated with the wakali of their own accord, hoping to get some special privileges out of it — that kind of shite had happened in basically every occupation of anywhere in the history of ever.

Beth and her people had been trying to bring the suborned natives down nonlethally whenever possible. The locals they'd armed hadn't bothered.

Or, if she was being honest, she'd started out following their orders to avoid killing the locals defending the occupation whenever possible — her resolve to put in the effort to save them had weakened over time, before she eventually stopped reminding her people not to shoot to kill. And until she'd started putting piercing curses through skulls herself.

There was agricultural land on Oxlapś too, of course, but most of the population had been concentrated in cities, where the bulk of the people were forced to work in enormous factories, packed into flats practically elbow to elbow. When the wakali had come, there'd been room for everyone — or most people, at least, Beth could admit she had no idea what the economic situation had looked like — and the population had even declined rather severely since then, but buildings took resources and labour to maintain. The wakali certainly weren't going to put in any more than the bare minimum just to make these lesser beings comfortable, no, of course not, so large swaths of urban areas, even whole cities had been abandoned, the workers crammed into overcrowded flats near their workplaces. The chaos of the invasion, billions of people being uprooted from their homes, causing a horrendous famine, the absolutely shitty conditions they'd been kept in, best estimates were that the population had declined by well over half, perhaps dipping as low as three billion...or even closer to two. They simply didn't know for sure, it was still early...and also not Beth's job.

Her job had been fighting, on the few wakali headquarters here and there, yes, but also through the streets, in enormous factories that were built with so little eye for safety they were practically booby-trapped, through the overpopulated tenements. The fighting had been close, and chaotic, and miserable, and it'd gone on for weeks.

Urban warfare fucking sucked, it turned out.

And that was without getting into the surprises the wakali had prepared for them.

The wakali were fucking bastards, of course, it wasn't unusual for them to mow down crowds of slaves to try to get at enemy fighters. After all, they thought other species were lesser beings anyway, no skin off their nose — if they won the battle, they'd just get more slaves. But then there were the booby-traps, bombing entire fucking rows of buildings just to try to get a single squad of soldiers, they'd killed so many of the locals trying to fight off the Law, fucking hell...

The constant smell of ash and burning flesh reminded her of the worst of the war against the scabs in Vietnam. She could feel it on her skin, it took forever to come off in the shower, she'd just shaved off all her hair to get the smell out...

Then there were the baby bombs.

Army slang, the officers didn't really approve of the term, but it was what the soldiers defaulted to. The wakali had been given a lot of fun toys by the scabs — including, as it happened, biological weapons. Now, the scabs hadn't really used this sort of thing on Earth, for whatever reason, but it was an established tool in their arsenal seen on other fronts. They had a few different kinds of spores, as they were usually called, airborne infectious agents that would practically melt through people's bodies, releasing their own cloud of spores that would go on to infect others. Outbreaks normally burned out very quickly, since the spores could only survive a short time outside of a living body, turning inert within minutes, and they multiplied so quickly and sloppily that they rapidly accrued transmission errors, which in most cases resulted in an outbreak fizzling out within a few minutes even in ideal conditions.

Ideal, what a fucking joke...

The spores could be implanted into people, contained within some kind of shielded bubble, which would break after a set period of time. When that happened, the carrier would quickly be eaten apart from the inside out, releasing spores that would spread to the people around them, and then the people around them, a wave of death spreading outward, killing hundreds of people in a matter of minutes.

The wakali liked to use children. The smaller and more pathetic-looking the better — most of the time they'd give the kid a good beating before letting them go, for maximum sympathy points. They'd leave them behind when they were about to lose a building or a street, for the good guys to find.

Baby bombs.

The first time Beth encountered one, she didn't catch what was happening in time. They'd been warned about the tactic by then, but the warehouse had been huge, and crowded, and there'd been shite piled up everywhere, and it was dark, and noisy with people chattering in multiple languages, she hadn't realised anything was wrong until she heard the screaming...

It was a horrible way to die.

That people were basically melted wasn't really an exaggeration, blood welling up all over the place, their skin seeming to bubble and ooze, their eyes, some kind of fluid dribbling down their faces—

Beth had figured it out once she saw it, but by then it'd been too late — she'd cast an oversized shield charm, cutting off one end of the warehouse from the rest, the effort burning all down her arm. There was nothing that could be done about the spores. The scabs had variants that acted more slowly, and that you could at least try to treat — some of them were incurable, but they'd had success with others — but this kind simply acted too fast, there wasn't time. There was nothing that could be done. The only option was to contain the spread, and wait for it to burn out.

And watch people be eaten apart, screaming until the blood filling their lungs stole their voices, reduced to wet whimpering.

After the first time, she'd been more careful, and she'd caught most of the rest. If she acted quickly she could get what was basically a big bubblehead charm around the carrier, containing them and only them.

And then she only had to watch a single child die in terrified agony.

Beth had had nightmares about it literally every time she'd managed to get to sleep in the last eight days. She suspected she would continue to for a while.

So yeah, Hermione, she realised the planned campaign against the wakali homeworlds was genocidal, and she didn't give a single fuck about it. There was a line, and the wakali had crossed it with the fucking baby bombs. The evil bastards could go straight to hell, for all she cared.

The liberation of Oxlapś had been fucking awful, was what she was getting at — it was hard to think of anything worse. She hadn't actually gotten injured at all, but it was still harder than anything she'd ever done. And there were more planets to liberate on their itinerary, and they had no idea how many of them were going to be as bad as Oxlapś. Some might even be worse, as difficult as that was to imagine.

Needless to say, Beth and her people were in desperate need of a break.

Their commanding officers realised that, thankfully. It was standing policy for everyone who'd been involved in serious battles like Oxlapś to be given a break, preferably for at least a month, to cool off and get their heads back on straight before going back into it. That wasn't always feasible, unfortunately — since they were pushing their war against the wakali on multiple fronts, and also hunting down scab remnants and dealing with fucking pirates on the fringes, they didn't really have more people to swap in to continue pressing this war party. Normally they'd be sent home for the duration, or at least put down for shore leave somewhere, but that simply wasn't possible this time. Once the wakali fleet was cornered, they'd have to be brought in to help finish them off, and that could happen at any moment.

They still thought it was important to give the soldiers time to cool off, though, so they were going to get time off. Once they handed Oxlapś off to the Defence Fleet and civilian relief teams — the best representatives for the locals they'd been able to find had practically begged to join the Law this time, understandably — the detachment of the fleet that had been involved had been sent to the nearest controlled system, the ships hooked up for refueling and repairs. Navy types were on reduced duties, since they hadn't seen the truly brutal stuff, helping with the repairs and keeping things running, while the army people were more or less released to do whatever they wanted. They had the run of the ships and the station (as long as they didn't get in the way), they didn't have to report in, they didn't even have to return to their bunks at the end of the day if they didn't want to, nothing.

The officers did have a little bit they were supposed to do — Beth's immediate subordinates were supposed to keep an eye on all of their people, make sure nobody was badly falling apart, discuss with the other officers if it seemed like any problems were coming up. She had reports she was meant to send up the chain every few days on her estimation of their present readiness, how well they could be expected to fight if they were ordered back into it. And honestly, she didn't think they were doing that badly? They'd lost some people — the fighting had been messed up, and of course some of their company had been on the wrong end of that warehouse — so they were a little light, and people were a bit shaken up, some of them had lost friends. But the opinion of the junior officers and NCOs mostly seemed to be that they were angry.

They wanted the wakali dead. Beth suspected some of them might be a bit reckless if they jumped back in it too soon, but they'd make it, mostly.

(A pretty good chunk of the soldiers who'd fought on Oxlapś were probably going to need psychiatric treatment when the war was over — she wasn't the only one having nightmares.)

So, it really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that their brief break away from the front involved a lot of partying, if only to take their minds off Oxlapś. There were pubs and shite on the station, a large cafeteria that had basically been taken over, various common areas on the ships in their group, all of them seeing a rotation of men and women coming in, sound systems commandeered to play music — in some cases that had actually involved cracking in and rewiring things, but that wasn't exactly subtle and nobody had come in to stop them, so Beth assumed it was tacitly allowed — food being brought in from somewhere, not to mention a constant stream of drinks and drugs. The Fleet had a pretty liberal rule on intoxicants, basically it was fine as long as it didn't interfere with your duties, and they were all off-duty, so it seemed a lot of them had decided to spend as much of their break as possible drunk or high on something.

The parties basically never stopped, since people were on a spread of duty shifts, and they didn't have to give a fuck about the clock anyway. Some of the smaller party spots would dry up now and then, but the big cafeteria on the station never slowed down, the whole time loud and crowded and tight, air thick with the pounding of music and the smells of food and drink and inhalants and the body odour of who even knew how many different species, a big damn mess.

Beth felt a little bad about whoever had to clean up when they were gone...but not really that much. There were robots and shite that did a lot of it, and besides, this was partly what these stations were for. Dealing with the occasional Fleet group on a break was probably an expected part of the job.

There were a lot of what were basically drinking games — even if the intoxicant involved wasn't really a drink — and gambling — mostly trading favours or dares, because money worked differently out here — and dancing, and people just generally making a chaotic nuisance of themselves...occasionally breaking out into fights — Beth had heard of one that'd gotten big and bad enough that the people involved had been packed up into holding for the day to cool off...

...and there was also plenty of fucking, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. The Fleet was generally pretty liberal about that too, mostly only sticking their noses in when it started to become a problem. There really wasn't any other way to handle it, since the Law was composed of a bunch of different species with wildly different attitudes when it came to sex and relationships — enforcing any firm policy on a universal basis would be stepping all over someone's culture, no matter what it ended up being, so they'd settled on no policy at all. Well, that wasn't quite accurate, there were disciplinary rules that might come up, but that was only if it was creating interpersonal difficulties in the unit. It kind of happened all the time, in some societies in the Law it was normal and expected for soldiers to fuck around with their comrades-in-arms, as long as it wasn't causing big drama nobody really cared.

If there was one thing they were strict about, it was people screwing along the chain of command — things could get a little iffy across ranks, but when there were direct subordinates/superiors getting involved, that people weren't so casual about. It wasn't necessarily against the rules, but it was supposed to be reported and monitored for any abuse, and... Well, it was allowed, but it was very much not approved of by the culture within the Fleet, so it only rarely happened. Rare enough and controversial enough that it was always a subject of gossip, the couple in question basically always watched. Which, that they were being watched Beth guessed was sort of a good thing, since it was less likely people could get away with taking advantage or whatever, but it was not something she wanted to deal with herself. She got enough attention already being a fucking scary sorceress blowing shite up with literal magic, she definitely didn't need that.

And besides, like she'd joked with Sirius, she was working on building a reputation here. She didn't want to fuck it up by doing anything sketchy. Terrifying superpowered badass, great; creepy perv, no thanks.

Of course, she didn't want people to be actually frightened of her — bad for morale, that — so she always made a point of showing her face at social stuff and, you know, being normal. It helped that she was normal, or at least she would say so. The Dursleys had managed to do a pretty good job of convincing her she was a freak when she was little, but enough time among mages and then in the military had successfully driven in that she wasn't that weird, really — a bit odd, sure, but everyone was a bit odd in their own particular ways. And honestly, a lot of her oddness probably went back to having a fucked up childhood anyway, which was partly the Dursleys' fault in the first place. Not all of it, no, some of it was just Beth being Beth, but still.

Though even if she weren't trying to seem normal, she'd probably participate anyway — especially when there was music, and dancing. It'd taken a while for Beth to figure this out, but she actually liked dancing? She kind of liked parties in general, honestly. The parties in Gryffindor had been a bit much for her the first few times, but after a couple years, as she actually became proper friends with the chaser girls and wasn't so worried she'd get in trouble for doing something freakish, she'd gradually loosened up a bit and started enjoying herself. Though even then, she'd still be too self-conscious to do too much, just talking and laughing with people — the dancing only started happening when she tried alcohol, and was suddenly too drunk to feel awkward about it.

If there was music playing, and there was alcohol around, she'd definitely end up dancing at some point. She could dance sober, but when she was drinking it was inevitable.

It was pretty hard to be intimidated by the terrifying superpowered badass when she was being all clumsy and giggly on the dance floor, and just generally making an idiot of herself. She could tell because it was basically the only time people actually came on to her, seriously, not just flirting as a joke — though that could be just because they were intoxicated too, it was honestly hard to say.

Beth did have to be a little bit careful with what she took. There were drinks and tablets and whatever else around — it turned out super-advanced spacefaring societies had a lot of different drugs available — but some of them really weren't meant to be used by humans. Usually they wouldn't be actively poisonous...most of the time...but the dosage might be way off. Beth would rather not spend a night in medbay because she'd gone completely out of her mind overdosing on some exotic alien hallucinogen, thanks. She tried to avoid hallucinogenic things altogether, honestly — seeing and hearing shite that wasn't there made her freak the fuck out. Also, the one time she'd tried the big one that was passed around at parties a lot she'd had what was definitely a flashback, she'd thought she was back in Vietnam fighting scabs and everything was on fucking fire, nope nope nope, not doing that again.

She'd kind of forgotten how much it'd hurt being shot that one time, apparating straight into the crossfire like a fucking idiot. Yeah, that stuff had not been fun, no thanks.

(Apparently reactions like that did happen, but they were very rare — Beth was just lucky, she guessed. The dose had probably been too high, but still, she wasn't going to risk trying it again to find out.)

The couple days since they'd pulled in here had been kind of a blur. She'd reminded the NCOs to check up on their people, send her occasional updates so she could send her reports — she'd set intermittent alarms on her comm so she didn't forget. And then she'd, just, wandered through the party areas around, flitting in and out of one after another, until she'd found the fucking huge one in the big cafeteria. She didn't remember much about the first 'night' here, honestly, just scattered flashes. She'd woken up in one of the bunkrooms on the station, feeling awful — alcohol, definitely alcohol — she'd gone back to her room to wash up and change, got some bloody food in her, checked in with her NCOs (most of whom were about as hungover as she'd been). Once she was feeling better, and had gone through the short list of things she needed to keep up on, she'd done another loop around before finding herself at the big party again, rinse and repeat.

This was her third go around now and, like last time, she was sticking to unacimiś. She wasn't entirely sure what unacimiś even was — made from some kind of plant, she thought? — but it had the same warm, floaty, good feelings benefits of alcohol, but didn't make her terribly hungover the next morning. There were aftereffects, but the most noticeable was that it made her feel...kind of numb? Like, emotionally numb. Which was weird, and vaguely unpleasant, but it was way better than a hangover, so she didn't really mind. Also, she had basically no filter at all while she was on it, which was a little embarrassing in retrospect sometimes, but she didn't care that much.

She'd never understood Sirius's drinking problem, in part because feeling ill all the time seemed kind of miserable. Finding a drug that didn't make her feel awful when it wore off, and was pretty easy to get a hold of out here, was honestly sort of scary — she could feel how easy it would be to...develop a bad habit. Basically the only thing that stopped her from doing it more was knowing that she would definitely end up saying or doing something very, very stupid. No filter, like at all, it was bad.

It'd really only been a matter of time before someone came on to her while she was high on unacimiś, and she couldn't think of an obvious reason it was a bad idea.

The party was fucking loud, there had to be hundreds of people crammed in here, the alien music turned up so high she could feel it thrum through her, heart skipping along with the asymmetrical rhythm. She didn't have the language for music, especially music from other fucking planets, but this particular flavour of noise was familiar by now — she had no idea where it was from, but it was heavy and thick, with a lot of bass and shite, but it didn't have nice even repeating patterns like a lot of party music back on Earth. It kind of tripped her up a little sometimes, but that was fun too, kept her on her toes. She'd completely lost track of time, no idea how long she'd been here, feeling all warm and fuzzy and giddy, her head pleasantly spinny, surrounded by moving bodies, hot and close—

The arm looping around her waist from behind wasn't entirely unexpected — people would grab at her now and then, she might dance with someone a bit before squirming away again — but for some reason it felt familiar. Her fingers slipping through soft warm silky fur, the other body close against her back, breath in her hair...

Taqšuńi.

Beth didn't know how she knew who it was, she just did.

Taqšuńi was part of the tech team on the Kośalhath. Huge bloody kilometre-long spaceships were complicated fucking things, with a whole bunch of stupidly powerful advanced technology crammed into them, so it took an absurd number of technicians working around the clock to keep it all running. Beth had really only ever worked with the technicians that kept their bikes running, but there were separate details focussed on maintaining the fighter escort and all the different systems on the ship. Taqšuńi was on a special team who weren't assigned to any specific detail, the brilliant madmen brought in to deal with emergencies — maintaining tech by the book was one thing, running in and figuring out what was wrong at a glance and jury-rigging a solution in minutes was something else. Battle was incredibly stressful on a ship, when in a fight they could be seen running back and forth all over the place helping to deal with problems popping up, when they actually took damage it was people like Taqšuńi who kept the whole thing from falling apart around them, or just exploding.

The white techs (referring to the colour of the lapels on the uniform) had a reputation among the rest of the technicians as being slightly mad. Which, Beth didn't know, science and engineering types always seemed weird to her? They all had a little bit of Hermione in them, if that made sense...

She'd run into Taqšuńi a few times, but they hadn't actually talked much. Once had been business, to do with some weird fuck-ups going on in the sanitation systems in the infantry bunks, and a second time when Taqšuńi came up to her seemingly at random to ask about magic — except that was also business, it turned out, Taqšuńi had been wondering if Beth could conjure her magic tools for situations the standard kit was shite at. (The white techs sometimes had to improvise stuff on the fly, especially in emergencies, which worked but was super stressful.) Besides that, Beth just saw her occasionally at meal times, they really didn't know each other very well.

So it was bloody weird that Beth knew it was her without even looking.

Beth leaned back into her, arching her back to press her head against Taqšuńi's shoulder — tewari were shaped a little weird, the curve of their spine pushing their lower abdomen somewhat forward — her other hand coming up to find Taqšuńi's neck, fur soft and warm. The funny skipping beat of the music ringing in her head and thrumming through her, almost unconsciously moving against Taqšuńi, one arm around her waist to rest her hand on Beth's hip, she could feel Taqšuńi's nails through the fabric of her trousers, the other hand looping under Beth's raised arm to settle on her chest just under her neck, her collar low enough to feel the edge of calluses on her palm and fingertips, nails sharp on her collarbone—

She rocked her hips with the alien music pounding through her, Taqšuńi curling over her, a brush of fuzzy soft fur against Beth's cheek as her head dipped down next to hers, breath tickling along her ear and down her neck, fingers fisting in the dense smooth hairs covering Taqšuńi's shoulders and arm, her head spinning, a giddy giggle bubbling up her chest, a thoughtless grin pulling at her face—

With a little side to side squirm, she broke Taqšuńi's grip enough to turn around to face her. As she'd guessed, Taqšuńi was wearing trousers and an umaśi — kind of a skirt-looking thing that went from the bottom of the ribs to the top of the thighs (for modesty, mammaries on tewari were below the waist for some reason) — a colourful embroidered sash looping up over one shoulder (not for modesty, just decorative), Beth's arms came up around her shoulders and slipping under the sash, fur smooth and warm and pleasant all along both arms. Pulling herself up and into Taqšuńi, the other woman leaning into her, arms wrapping tight around her waist, Beth pressed her face into her neck, and oooohhh, her fur felt so nice on Beth's skin, all warm and soft and mmmm, she smelled nice...

Yep, high, Beth was very high right now, but she didn't really mind. Unacimiś was fun, she felt great, all bubbly and warm and giddy, and Taqšuńi was all close and soft, except for where her nails dug into Beth's hips sharp and hot, a hint of teeth along the shell of her ear sending a shiver down her spine and making her breath shudder, the spicy prickly scent lingering around Taqšuńi flooding her breath and tickling her nose. She could feel she was moving but she was hardly even aware of it, the music carrying her along without thought, clinging to Taqšuńi, the unfamiliar curves of the tewari body pressing against her, running her fingers through her fur...

...and also kind of, just, rubbing her face against Taqšuńi's neck and shoulder, which was maybe a weird thing to be doing? She just felt nice, that was all, it was kind of hard to even describe to herself, just smooth and soft and warm and mm. The drugs, it was probably the drugs. Apparently Taqšuńi didn't mind, though, her breath hot and rasping in Beth's ear, one hand left her hip, trailing up her back, cupping the back of her head, fingernails slipping through her hair to dig into her skin, pulling her close, the hand still low tightening on her hip, Beth's pulse throbbing in her ears along with the music, echoing in her teeth and her fingertips—

—without quite deciding to do it, Beth's hands were in Taqšuńi's hair — or the somewhat longer fur along the top of her head and down the back of her neck, anyway — the varying textures of loose hairs and twisted plaits and glass beads tangled up between her fingers, and her lips had found Taqšuńi's — tewari did have lips, like humans, though their mouths were shaped somewhat differently — she was pretty sure kissing wasn't even something tewari did with each other, but Taqšuńi clearly wasn't put off by it, her breath tasting of kellak and qariksa, hands running down Beth's sides making her shiver, a nip of sharp teeth at her lip, gasping, a sort of purr rumbling through Taqšuńi's chest, Beth bursting into giggles, light and breathless, hands tightening in her hair Beth pulled herself in to her lips again, her skin tingling, humming as one of Taqšuńi's hands gripped her arse, holding her in place—

It occurred to her that she and Taqšuńi were snogging out in the middle of the makeshift dance floor in what was normally a plain cafeteria, dozens, hundreds of people around — almost definitely including some of her subordinates. But the thought just passed through, like a bird flitting across the sky, she didn't care.

It also occurred to her, her heart throbbing in her throat and her teeth and between her legs, her skin crawling with Taqšuńi's touch, the soft fur against her skin, that it'd been a while.

Maybe it was just the drugs, but she felt so nice...

There was a lull in the music. Beth didn't think they'd really been dancing for a while, preoccupied, but the noise was somewhat less, she could better feel her pulse pounding in her ears, separated from the heavy rhythm of the alien music, breath rasping in her throat and hissing between Taqšuńi's teeth. Arms wrapping tight around her, Taqšuńi's head slipped against Beth's, fur warm and soft on her cheek, pressing her face in against her neck, mmmm...

In the quiet of the delay between songs, Taqšuńi muttered into her ear, a single word in Monatšeri: "Your quarters."

Beth hardly even hesitated a breath.

As crowded as the party was, it took a while to make their way out, Beth leading Taqšuńi along by the hand, weaving between people. Grinning all along the way, her chest warm and bubbly and her skin hot and crawling. She might have been nervous if she were sober at the moment — she'd never slept with a literal space alien before, she didn't really know what she was doing (were humans even compatible with tewari?) — but the unacimiś prevented her from feeling it, all light and floaty and giddy, hardly even seeing the party on their way out, flashes of shape and colour swimming in her eyes but not taking it in, focussing on the doors ahead, eagerness sizzling through her, buzzing in her ears and prickling over her skin...

(It'd been a while, and Taqšuńi felt nice. She was sure they'd figure it out.)

They finally slipped out of the cafeteria, and it was noticeably cooler out in the corridor, the air suddenly sharp on her sweaty skin, the environmental systems must be struggling to keep up with all the bodies in there. People had spilled out into the hall, gathered chatting or drinking or playing games in little bunches here and there. Beth paused for a moment, wavering on her toes — which way was the Kośalhath docked again? Before she could figure it out, Taqšuńi moved ahead, tugging at her hand, so Beth followed along, eyes trailing along her body.

Taqšuńi's fur was a pale golden colour, paler on her face and down her front and a darker honey brown mixed in the longer hairs from the top of her head trailing down her spine, which was normal for tewari. The dyed bits, little curling streaks here and there in red and purple and blue and black, weren't normal for tewari. She assumed it must be a subculture thing, like the piercings in her long elven ears, but space-faring societies were fucking huge — there were trillions of Monatšeri, simply too many for Beth to know everything about them. There were probably tiny minority subcultures with more people than there were on Earth put together...

One lift ride brought them closer to the outside of the station, and before long Taqšuńi had led them to the docking bridges connecting the Kośalhath to the station. They could walk the whole way, but it was far enough that that would take a while — luckily one of the personnel lifts had just landed to drop off a pack of people. Beth and Taqšuńi slipped inside, and it didn't seem like anyone was going their way, after a moment the door closed, they had the lift to themselves. It zipped into motion, repulsors cancelling out their momentum, Beth could only tell they were moving because after a blink the metal on the other sides of the windows fell away and their box was shooting through space, the systems guiding and propelling the lift long posts at the four corners but the rest open, showing the dull white station above their heads and the long silvery needle of the Kośalhath below their feet, tubes and bridges and cargo lifts zigzagging in a web all around them, but past all that countless pinpricks of light, stars like diamond dust scattered in all directions...

Without really meaning to, Beth found herself pressing against the glass (transparisteel) of the lift wall, her nose squishing a little, staring wide-eyed. She assumed she'd get used to how fucking cool space was at some point, but it hadn't happened yet. It probably helped that she was also high at the moment — she could hardly even breathe, her head spinning, heart heavy in her throat.

"You still with me, Potter?" Taqšuńi pronounced her name the way most people did in Minnisiät, patta...

"Mm, space is pretty. I'm not used to it yet."

"That's right, you're from a pre-flight planet, aren't you."

Beth rolled her eyes — they had planes, obviously, but Taqšuńi meant space-flight. "Mhmm. Didn't get up until the Law came...almost exactly a year ago, I think. Wow, it's been a whole year already..."

"You got pretty far away from home in a year."

She turned to give Taqšuńi a grin over her shoulder. "First Dimitran to leave the system." Along with the rest of the language team, but still. "I'm further from home right now than any of my people have ever been."

"I see," Taqšuńi grumbled, her voice low and rumbling. The tewari mouth was shaped differently, lips thick but narrower side to side — and their expressions didn't look the same, a crooked slant showing a glint of pointed teeth that Beth took to be a playful smirk. Sliding closer to her, a hand on Beth's arm gently turning her until her back was against the wall, Taqšuńi pressing closer, looming over her, leaning close, enough that Beth could feel the short super soft and nice fur on Taqšuńi's face against her skin. In a low hiss, "Quite the little explorer, aren't you." There was a curl on her voice, an edge of that almost purr-like sound she'd noticed earlier. Beth hadn't heard that from any tewari before, but she went out on a limb and guessed it was sexy voice.

Turning her face against Taqšuńi's neck, warm and soft, Beth let out a hum. "Guess so. Maybe it's the unacimiś," she muttered, her hands coming up to run through the fur on Taqšuńi's chest, her skin tingling and her heart throbbing in her throat, her head spinning, "but you feel so nice..."

There was a coughing rumble of some kind, breath puffing along her head, maybe a surprised laugh. "Think it might just be the drugs, do you?"

"Well, I dunno, it's not like I've gone walking up to any tewari and started petting them or anything. Thought that might be rude?"

Another low laugh, Taqšuńi said, "Well, you're not offending me." Her mouth following along the curve of Beth's ear, breath hot and hissing, making her shiver, little hot prickles sizzling down her spine, "You could stand to use more nails, though."

...Even if she did, Taqšuńi was hardly likely to feel it much. As soft and nice as the fur was, it offered a layer of protection before reaching the skin, and human fingernails were just too blunt to make much of an impact. (Tewari had much sharper nails, but Beth guessed that was what healing charms were for.) An idea came floating up out of the fuzzy warmth of her mind, "Ooh, how about this?" Pushing magic down her arms, she cast an illusion through her fingertips, running them across Taqšuńi's chest—

She jumped, lurching back a half step — not all the way back, one hand still holding Beth's arm and the other at her waist, clenched tightly enough Beth could feel her nails. Giving her a wide-eyed look Beth didn't know how to read, Taqšuńi hissed, "What was that?"

"Magic," she drawled, wiggling her fingers in the air. A sensory illusion, projecting a mild sharp hot pain, trying to imitate the feeling of claws she didn't have. She cast another illusion, this time a sort of cool tingly pleasure, Taqšuńi twitching a little as she walked her fingers up her chest to her shoulders, her golden-brownish eyes hard and burning on hers. With her hands on Taqšuńi's shoulders for balance, Beth cast a strong featherweight charm on herself, her stomach swooping, a little hop and she drifted up off the floor — unassisted flight was hard, but cancelling out her own weight was dead easy — buying her fingers in Taqšuńi's hair she dragged herself closer, much easier to reach up to Taqšuńi's lips when she was floating, tewari were tall...

Taqšuńi pressed her back against the transparent wall of the lift, her breath thick and rumbling, Beth brought her knees up around Taqšuńi's hips — slipping under and kind of pushing up the umaśi, oops, oh well, they were alone anyway — squirming as hands ran down to grip her bum, hard nails poking her through the fabric of her trousers and knickers, Taqšuńi pushing her harder against the wall, the way her middle curved out pressing with unexpected suddenness between her legs, her whole body thrummed, electric, Beth gasped for breath, clinging at Taqšuńi's shoulders—

Ah ah ah, teeth! Taqšuńi had snapped down to the side of her neck, and it hurt — tewari were evolved from carnivores, sharp teeth — but it also felt amazing, her pulse reverberating through her and her skin crawling, her legs clamping around Taqšuńi, her hands randomly scrabbled over Taqšuńi's shoulders and hair, until Taqšuńi leaned back for a second, snatched her arms by the wrist and pressed her hands against the wall, to either side at about Beth's head height, and then she was leaning in, her weight holding Beth against the wall (her featherweight charm had lapsed), attacking her neck again, at the hot sharp pain, her chest bubbling and her skin burning, she couldn't help a breathless giggle, her head spinning and throbbing with her heartbeat—

—her breath thick and hot in her throat, her skin tingling and crawling, Taqšuńi kept working at her neck, breath tickling and her teeth sharp and her tongue making Beth squirm, the pain hot and pounding and delicious, fur soft and sweet against the side of her face, rubbing her cheek against the side of Taqšuńi's head without really meaning to, pressed against the wall hard enough that she couldn't move, much, the pressure around her wrists almost hurt, but she could move her legs, clinging tight around Taqšuńi's body, rolling her hips, whimpering and shivering against her, more of those funny purring noises echoing through Beth's chest and sizzling in her ears (definitely sexy voice), the stars outside of the lift spinning in her eyes—

And then abruptly the view of space disappeared, hidden by solid metal walls, and the door wooshed open. Over Taqšuńi's shoulder, she saw an arc of people waiting for the lift, a dozen eyes finding them. "Aahhh," Taqšuńi breathed, face pulling away from Beth's neck to glance over their audience. "It seems we've arrived."

Beth probably should feel mortified — she'd just been rubbing herself against Taqšuńi — but instead she burst into helpless giggles.

The weight pressing her against the wall starting to lift away, Beth released her grip around Taqšuńi's middle, her feet tipping down to the floor. Her legs didn't seem to want to hold her weight, her knees going as soft and wiggly as pudding, she teetered against Taqšuńi, clinging at her for balance, still giggling. One hand absently smoothed down Taqšuńi's umaśi, and she managed to get her legs to cooperate after a few seconds, staggering toward the door, Taqšuńi staying close against her, breath in her hair, Beth hugging her arm. Her skin was burning, she was sure the flush was extremely obvious on her face, but she didn't care at the moment, feeling too light and giddy and eager, she just grinned at the people waiting, expressions a mix of amusement and surprise...as well as she could read them, anyway, nonhuman species did facial expressions differently, but that was her feeling.

Stepping out into the hall, she chirped, "Lift's all yours. My quarters!" The internal lift was over that way, tugging at Taqšuńi's arm, she heard a few laughs and mutters from the group as they passed...

Soon they were in another lift, this one absent anything to look at, just plain metal walls without any stars or anything. Nothing to look at besides Taqšuńi, anyway — Beth turned to face her, hands coming up to her shoulders, fur soft and warm under her hands, pulse throbbing in her throat and low between her— "You're bleeding," Taqšuńi said, tugging at the neck of her top.

"Hmm?" Beth tried to twist her neck to look, before realising that was pointless, cast a mirror charm with a snap of her fingers. She was bleeding, little trickles of red leaking from bite marks here and there along her neck. "Oh hey, look at that." It did sting a bit, she guessed she wasn't surprised. Her wand came to her hand with a flick of her wrist, she healed the marks and vanished the blood with two quick charms. "There, fixed."

"Sorry, I forgot how fragile humans are."

She shrugged. "It's fine, I got pretty good with basic healing spells." Leaning back into Taqšuńi, arms circling around her hips and face pressing into the fur covering her chest, she let out a long hum, smiling as she felt Taqšuńi's nails run down her back. "Take more than a little blood to scare me off."

There was a low rumble in Taqšuńi's chest, trialing off into another one of those funny purring noises, Beth could feel it vibrating through her skull. "You know, you get silly when you're high. It's cute."

"Mmmm." Grinning to herself, she rubbed her face against Taqšuńi's fur — it really was very soft, and nice, and mmm. She clung at Taqšuńi's hips through her trousers — the shape was obviously different from a human woman, feeling it out, following a curve of bone — fingernails running up and down her back, Beth shivered, her clothes feeling sharp and grating and tight, she wanted out of them, she wanted to feel Taqšuńi's fur all over, her skin burning and her heart throbbing in her lips and her head and between her legs, it almost hurt, the eager thrill so intense she felt her hair should be standing on end—

Taqšuńi just purred at her. Beth hadn't even known tewari could purr...

Finally the lift came to a stop, she pulled enough away form Taqšuńi for them to walk properly. There were a couple people waiting for the lift — Captain Yrmak and his wife, Beth was blanking on her name (she was posted on one of the other ships in their group) — but the important thing was that they were in the right spot, good. Beth lurched out into the corridor, her arm linked with Taqšuńi's, she waved at Yrmak as they passed. Her quarters were this way, they passed a couple other junior officers out in the hall along the way. Beth noticed they were getting double-takes, a few whispers after they passed — people tended to notice the scary superpowered sorceress, and she'd never brought someone back to her quarters before. She and Taqšuńi were very all over each other, walking close and hugging Taqšuńi's arm with both of hers, Taqšuńi was definitely smelling her hair, it should be very obvious what they were doing.

There was going to be gossip about them, but Beth was simply incapable of giving a fuck at the moment.

It was only a brief walk before they reached the right door. Reluctantly, Beth let go of Taqšuńi, so she could get her comm out of her pocket and open the door, the featureless metal swooshing out of the way to reveal the tiny little flat on the other side. Getting her own quarters was still new — the promotion that'd come with her transfer to this task force had put her up high enough in the ranks that she sometimes got her own space. (Some kolas-mansa had to share, it depended on the posting.) Not that it was particularly impressive, just a little two-room thing...or three rooms, if she counted the toilet? At the front was a sort of office-slash-meeting-room place, barely enough room for a desk and an armchair. When she had her NCOs in here, she'd conjure chairs for them all, but having permanent ones would make the space feel far too cramped. It was pretty plain, the floor black carpet, the walls steel grey with a red stripe partway up. She hadn't bothered doing much in the way of personal touches, the only obvious signs that she lived here a tea kettle on an enchanted hot plate on the desk — she had a bunch of jasmine tea in one of the drawers, picked up while she was in Vietnam during her last trip back home — her box with all her medals and shite on a shelf just there. (She wouldn't have bothered bringing them along, but she was supposed to wear some of them for formal stuff.) There was also a Harpies poster pinned up on the wall, which Sirius had gotten her as a joke shortly after she told him she was gay, which she'd brought with her mostly because the people out here found the animation fascinating. Not to mention the flying broomsticks, she guessed.

In fact, they were barely a few steps into the room before Taqšuńi hitched to a stop, giving the poster a double-take. "Is that paper?"

"Yep."

"How is it moving?"

"Magic. Come on..."

A narrow hall led back, only a couple metres long, a folding door on one side leading into the toilet. It wasn't exactly very impressive, just a toilet and a sink and a cupboard to stick some toiletries or whatever, but having her own was probably her favourite part of having private quarters. Past that was the bedroom, but there wasn't much to that either — a few shelves set into the wall for her things, and the bed itself, which took up probably over half the floor space. (It could be folded up into the wall to free up some space, though she couldn't imagine why she'd bother.) Of course, the bed was also an advantage of having her own room, since it was noticeably bigger than the bunk she'd been in before...and she thought it might be more comfortable too, though it was a pretty small difference. She didn't even know what this shite was made of, presumably some exotic futuristic material spun out of asteroid glass fibres or something, the stuff they had out here was wild sometimes.

Beth had already kicked off her shoes at the door, Taqšuńi had ditched her sash at some point, she hadn't noticed. "Right, um, before we..." She paused to pull her shirt over her head, along with the bra under it. (An alien one, also made out of some exotic futuristic material, it pulled on over her head and hugged around her like some kind of fucking gel, it was great.) Taqšuńi was undressing herself too, her umaśi bunched up and set on one of the shelves — Beth eyed the breasts low on her torso, the fur thinning before reaching what she guessed were nipples and areolae, four of them in a square two by two. They were pretty flat, barely any noticeable curve at all, which wasn't really a surprise. A lot of other species, their breasts didn't really blow up until their pregnancy, at least, what happened after that depended on who you were looking at. Shaking off her distraction, she moved to undo her trousers, saying, "I've never done this before. With a tewari, I mean."

"I haven't done a human either," Taqšuńi admitted. "Sotšuńalh, they're close, right?"

"Yeah, they're part of the human family." All of the other beings on Earth were all related if you went back far enough — except phoenixes, she guessed — and there were a bunch of other off-shoots out in space too, mostly from mutations they'd picked up in weird alien environments or from intentional genetic engineering. Sotšuńalh were one example, and so were Chiss. Pushing her trousers and her knickers down over her hips, she plopped down to sit on the edge of the bed so she could get them the rest of the way, peel off her socks while she was at it. "Um, I have been with other peoples before, but...nobody who wasn't born on Dimitra. And we're all in the human family too."

"Ah, I see." Taqšuńi had gotten out of her clothes too, sitting down next to Beth on the bed, close enough her fur tickled at her leg and her arm, her feet working, kicking to get stuff off from around her ankles. Turned halfway toward Beth, she grumbled, "You are a little explorer, aren't you."

It was very silly, but Beth felt very silly at the moment, hot and giddy, her head still spinning and her skin crawling and her fingers twitching, her chest bubbling and her whole body seeming to throb with her heartbeat, she completely failed to hold in a giggle. "I guess so." With a quick push (maybe cheating with magic a little), Beth spun up into Taqšuńi's lap, straddling her hips, Taqšuńi letting out a low hiss of surprise. Pressing a soft kiss on her lips, Beth pushed on her shoulders, Taqšuńi tipping back to lay down. Beth hummed as her weight settled on her, soft smooth warm fur rubbing against her skin, Taqšuńi's hands coming up to her hips, claws lightly dragging along...

Beth had been right, Taqšuńi's fur felt fucking amazing, like, warm pleasant skin-tingly good...

She kept the kiss up for a few seconds before pushing herself up a little. "Um, it, er... I don't think it should be too bad to figure out, since tewari have the same male–female split that humans do." That was very common in the galaxy for some reason — there were certain things that came up a lot, even in species that were completely unrelated, nobody was really sure why. There was variation, and even species that didn't do the basic two sexes at all, but in most cases it was close enough. Tewari were a little weird, in that the two sexes looked radically different — humans actually had wide sexual dimorphism by galactic standards, but male and female tewari looked like completely different species (the males didn't even have fur) — but she thought the reproduction strategy was basically the same? Except, "I don't remember, do tewari have, er, what do you call it, external sensory organs?" Clitoris would be too specific, she was pretty sure.

Taqšuńi let out a low huffing laugh, her hands tightening, nails digging into Beth's back and arse — she sucked in a little gasp, shifting against Taqšuńi without really meaning to, her breath coming out in a shiver. "You're being very silly, Potter."

"Beth."

"Hmm?"

"It's Beth, Potter's a surname. We're naked in my bed right now, you might as well use my given name."

Another low laugh, intercut with that funny purring noise, reverberating through Beth's chest. "You're being very silly, Beth." She didn't quite pronounce it right — Monatšeri didn't have a TH-sound — but close enough. "Yes, we have external sensory organs. You'll find them."

"Right, okay. And, um, this..." Leaning back, she grabbed one of Taqšuńi's hands by the wrist, brought it up by their heads. Tewari hands were a little interesting — the backs of their hands were covered in fur, like most of the rest of their bodies, but the palm and inside of their fingers were mostly hairless, if not quite human-shaped, Taqšuńi's showing rough calluses and old burn scars. Their nails were long, extending past the tips of their fingers a couple centimetres, thick and sturdy, an almost triangular shape tapering down to a point, made out of some black material, though Taqšuńi had coloured hers with delicate swirling patterns in red and blue. Fingering Taqšuńi's nails with her other hand, Beth said, "These are going to be a bit much. It's okay if you hurt me a little — that biting earlier actually felt really nice, and I can fix myself up with magic — but it will not be pleasant on sensitive places."

More purring, Taqšuńi's teeth showing in what she was sure was another playful smirk. "That won't be a problem."

"Oh?" Fingers were kind of important, and Taqšuńi couldn't really use hers at all. Beth could probably try a charm to block off her nails, she guessed, but—

Taqšuńi shoved up at her, and they were turning, Beth's head spinning (drugs), and suddenly she was lying on her back, Taqšuńi on top of her, pinning her hands against the bed by the wrist. And wow, Taqšuńi was heavier than Beth would have expected, her weight pressing down hard on her — she knew that tewari were denser than most beings, but that hadn't really sunk in until right this moment. Her voice thick with more of that funny purring, echoing through into Beth, Taqšuńi drawled, "I don't have only my hands to work with." Leaning close, she nudged at Beth's chin with her cheek, Beth turned her head so Taqšuńi could get at her neck, and...

...Taqšuńi licked her nedk, in one long slow line, starting from her clavicle and going all the way up to her ear. And she probably did it so slowly to make sure that Beth would be able to feel out that her tongue was making contact with most of the length of Beth's neck, all at once.

...

Somehow, Beth had forgotten that tewari had retractable, prehensile tongues. She'd been vaguely aware of that, but it'd, just...never come up.

So...yeah, she could see how Taqšuńi's nails being a bit much wouldn't be a problem.

While Beth just lay there, dazed at the reminder — her breath thick in her throat, her skin hot and tingling, her heart pounding in her throat and her skull and between her legs — Taqšuńi gave her another sharp smirk. And then she started moving, slinking downward, pressing soft kisses down Beth's chest, Beth helplessly grinning at the delicious feeling of Taqšuńi's soft smooth fur rubbing against her skin, her sharp nails running down her sides making Beth squirm, and—

Oh. Okay.

So Taqšuńi was doing that right now then.

As Taqšuńi's head passed under her waist, breath on her skin and clawed fingers gripping her hips, Beth burst into bright giddy giggles — she couldn't help it, the unacimiś made her silly...

Beth would discover that night that having a big damn fluffy person to snuggle up with made being woken up by the nightmares not quite so bad. Good to know.

So, Beth is having a fun time in the military, isn't she?

Anyway, gonna jump to CotG for a few chapters now.

Chapter Text

69:9:29 (24th February 2002)
— Zero Day plus 06.05.22

A light amplifying charm on her voice to get over the noise of the launch bay, Beth called, "Final weapons check — none of you sharp bastards better forget anything, because it's a one way trip. Corporals to me when you're green." The message delivered, the chatter and motion in their group spiked up as people asked one thing or another, running back and forth from the equipment lockers to retrieve things, twisting around to help each other secure their armour. Beth let them get to it, tipped up to sit on the edge of a charging station, worked at tugging on her gloves.

The word had come in a few days ago now that the wakali war party they'd been pursuing had finally been cornered. Their leave, resting from the horrifying ordeal that had been the liberation of Oxlapś, had been called to an end, and their detachment of the Seventh Expeditionary Fleet had been ordered to reinforce the elements running down the war party. There'd been several running skirmishes as they were mobilised, keeping close to the wakali but not engaging in an all-out assault, tracking them as they tried to flee and occasionally harrying them, attempting to wear down their equipment and personnel — not doing serious damage, but accumulating minor wear and preventing their people from properly resting — until the Law could move in overwhelming numbers to pin the war party down and destroy them. After multiple days of repeated engagements, the wakali had already been starting to flag, according to the reports Beth had been sent showing signs of worsening coordination as their people tired, some of their ships clearly running low on fuel, manoeuvres turned conservative in an effort to preserve what they had long enough to reach somewhere they could refuel and rearm.

The Kośalhath had jumped in during another skirmish with a couple dozen other ships — including interdictors, which would project a gravity shadow to prevent the wakali from fleeing to hyperspace. (Beth didn't entirely understand how that worked, but she knew it was extremely advanced technology and terribly energy-intensive, the interdictors the Law possessed swapped from fleet to fleet as needed because it simply wasn't economical to build and maintain more than a handful.) The plan, according to the briefing she'd been given nearly a full day and night ago now, was to annihilate the assault and support ships, the ones that didn't have the bubble armour populated by living slaves, and then to move in to carefully chip away at the bubble-cruisers, disabling as many systems as they could shooting around the captives. Once they were softened up, it would be time to send in the needles.

Beth and the rest of the soldiers had been huddled up in a nearby ready room ever since they'd jumped in, watching the battle progress on the viewscreens all around, listening to the radio chatter piped into the intercom speakers. As low as the wakali had been running on sleep, fuel, and munitions, trapped and outgunned, the battle had been heavily tilted in the Law's favour — but the war party was hardly small, and space battles could proceed deceptively slowly, the fight crawling on over the course of hours. They had taken casualties, Beth wincing every time one of their ships on the board winked out — some of those vessels had thousands of people on board — and on a number of occasions the Kośalhath itself had taken fire heavy enough to make the room shake around them, a couple times the electronics flickering as emergency power was shunted to the shields, the chatter in the room dropping to a tense hush. But the desperate chaos of the initial confrontation had passed before too long, the wakali fleet swiftly picked apart, leaving behind only the lumbering bubble-cruisers, settling into a slow, careful game of manoeuver and counter-manoeuver, the wakali attempting to keep their captives facing the Law's guns while the Law attempted to fire around them, the occasional indicator of a successful hit flashing on the screens, guns and engines blasted into debris, strings of melted and flash-cooled metals gathering around the vile ships like a glittering nebulae...

Until finally the bubble-cruiser the Kośalhath was picking away at had been deemed sufficiently softened up, and the Admiral had ordered the boarding action to proceed.

One of her NCOs came up to her after a moment — his face completely hidden behind his helmet, in the sharp black and red armour of the Law's foot soldiers — confirmed his team was ready to go. And then another, and another. There was a minor issue with a couple of armour seals, but temporary patches were slapped over them, that would hold for now, but other than that they were all good to go. (It shouldn't matter this time, they didn't expect to be exposed to vacuum at any point.) Once she'd counted off all of the teams going into her needle, she quick called in to the Major that they were loading up. Beth traded a quick glance with the tech standing at the hatch, got a nod back, waved forward the group of men and women turned bulky and angular in their armour, "Fill up by squads, back and up, go."

Like at ten other hatches along the wall of the launch bay, armed and armoured soldiers jogged right up to the hatch, planting their hands on the rim and vaulted over, 'falling' through the needle on the other side. They moved smoothly and confidently, having practised boarding a needle countless times in training and most of them having done boarding actions before. Beth nodding at every corporal as they passed, counting off heads and squads — five, ten, fifteen, she pulled on her helmet, the built-in electronics swiftly booting up, twenty...

As the ninth team fell in, followed by a couple medics, Beth gave their tech a final nod before hopping through the hatch herself. Her stomach churned as all sense of gravity abruptly vanished, rising in a swift wave from her feet up to her head — reminding her of that heady thrill as she tipped into a dive flying, but it didn't properly end, her stomach left floating where it shouldn't be. She caught on to a handhold shortly on the other side, jerking her to a halt. There were seven shock-couches in a ring around her, packed close enough that her momentum brought her legs swinging to bump into one of the soldiers already seated, armour clacking against armour, she could easily spread her arms and touch both sides of the tube. Beneath her, their heads just under this level's feet, was another ring of shock-couches, this one somewhat wider to fit ten people, a third level below that, ten shock-couches spread around with a gaps between them, to allow access to a second ring seating twenty, the little craft much longer nose to tip than it was wide (hence needle) and densely-packed, very little empty space, the soldiers could easily reach out their hands and touch the fingers of the people opposite them.

Beth spun around toward the only remaining empty shock-couch on the top ring, pushed herself to drift into it backwards. She felt a tingle of the Law's weird gravity not-magic, gently holding her in place. It should theoretically stop her from drifting, but she reached around for the straps anyway — not strictly necessary, but they'd stop her from being shaken loose on impact, or if there was a freak power failure. "Spear M., confirm secure by squad."

"Third M., secure."

"Fifth M., secure..."

She listened to the acknowledgements, double-checking her own restraints and glancing over the medics — they were actually picked from the diplomatic office, to better deal with helping the captives, they were likely to have less familiarity with the procedure, but they looked all right. A couple more squads confirmed they were ready, but then, "Second M., we have a rifle lock failure down here."

Beth grimaced — next to each shock-couch there was a little bay to stick equipment too bulky to keep on their person, where they'd be kept secure during the flight. Whoever the rifle belonged to could theoretically try to hold onto it, but if they got jostled too badly they could end up losing hold of it, and who the hell knew where it'd bounce off to in here. After a quick second of thought, she said, "Pass the loose rifle up here." Looking down between her knees, after a brief pause she saw the rifle drift out between a pair of shock-couches on the bottom level, someone grabbed onto it and passed it up to the middle level, where someone gave it a nudge upward, Beth leaned forward to snatch it out of the air. She turned to lock it into place in her own cubby, since it wasn't like she'd be using it anyway. "Second M., your spare rifle is up here by my seat, grab it on your way out."

"Copy that, Lieutenant."

There were only a couple more checks to go, and there, that was it. A flick to switch channels, and she said, "Captain, Spear M. is secure and ready to launch."

A brief pause, and the voice that responded wasn't Captain Yrmak, presumably someone with Control. "Copy, Spear M. Estimated launch window in two minutes — you may be short Spears O. and G. if they're not ready by then."

The full ten needles was probably overkill anyway, especially with Beth on board, but it wasn't out of the question a couple of them could be shot down during the flight to the bubble-cruisers. If they ended up light because a couple groups couldn't get their shite together, she was going to be annoyed. She didn't bother acknowledging — Control was probably busy coordinating this whole mess anyway — switched over to her group's channel. "I'm told we'll have a launch window in two minutes. When we punch through, secure the L.Z. and wait for directions. We're supposed to be on the bridge, but we might get revised orders if they put us in the wrong spot. Shoot to kill any wakali on board, but check your fire, there will be captives. I'll be doing weird magic shite, but I'll try not to startle you too badly."

There was a bit of chuckling and teasing at that, mixed in with a few proper acknowledgements from the more stiff NCOs. And then the inside of the needle went quiet, broken with only the occasional mutter or shuffle of motion, a clack of armour against armour or steel — the forty-five soldiers packed elbow-to-elbow inside steeling themselves for the battle to come, in whatever way made sense to them.

Which probably included a fair bit of praying, actually, no different than soldiers back home, during the war with the scabs. Beth had been a little bemused to learn that religion was relatively common in the Law, though she guessed she probably shouldn't be? After all, on Earth they'd had science to explain things for centuries by this point, and religion hadn't really gone away — become less prominent, sure, but it still existed, and seemed to be sticking around. The Law was a little unusual in galactic terms, in that they had a higher proportion of cultures which had been uncontacted by spacefaring society until the last few generations, but supposedly it was pretty common for people to have some kind of spiritual beliefs, even if they weren't formalised in the form of an organised religion as Beth would recognise one. Like, it was extremely common for people to believe in some big, universal, spiritual...presence, or whatever, which kind of sounded like just magic to her? Sort of like how some mages spoke of capital-M Magic back home, she assumed it was the same thing.

(This same universal magical thing was apparently where people like the old Monatšeri sorcerer-lords and the Jedi claimed to get their powers from, so that seemed very likely.)

The quiet continued until it was broken by the swish-clang of the hatch sliding closed, sudden and loud enough that Beth noticed a few people twitch with surprise. There was some humming of the needle's systems firing up, carrying through the metal shell surrounding them to vibrate through the air, little green lights on a panel next to the hatch flicking on one after another as things came online. Just as a voice in her ear said, "Spears are go for launch, begin firing sequence," strip lights around the hatch and the rim of each level and between each of the shock-couches suddenly lit up red, the tone of an alarm ringing through the needle. The alarm tone faded, followed by a pre-recorded voice saying, "Firing sequence initiated, ten seconds to separation...mark."

"Here we go," Beth said. "It's going to be a shaky ride, try not to lose your lunch." At least some of them would have done this before, but as long as the fight had dragged on, the space between the Kośalhath and the wakali ship was going to be scattered with debris, and they might have some weapons still in operation, so the flight was going to be twitchier than usual. Also, it was very possible the medics hadn't done this before, should be a fun experience for them.

There was a subtle jolt shivering through her bones as the needle separated from the Kośalhath, but she didn't actually feel the momentum of their movement at all. All spacecraft used artificial gravity to zero out the experience of movement from the inside — the way Hermione talked about it was as though the inside of the field was its own reference frame with respect to inertia, similar to how you didn't feel Earth flying through space — which was absolutely necessary to prevent people from being reduced to bloody splatters on the walls whenever they did basically anything at speed. Or jumped into hyperspace, fuck, the forces involved in that were ridiculous. The needles had their own internal gravity, or technically lack of gravity, even if they were on the surface of a planet they'd still be floating around in here, but then each of the shock-couches also generated their own gravity, giving everyone two layers of protection to absorb the hard stop of impact. But, while the gravity was zeroed out, the vibration generated from metal banging against metal still carried through all the little parts into Beth, just a little kick as they lurched into motion.

Another pre-recorded announcement rang through the inside of the needles, "Launch sequence initiated, ten seconds to ignition...mark." Beth couldn't see it, there weren't any windows or any display screens showing them what was happening, the artificial gravity preventing her from feeling the movement, but she knew the little fleet of needles would be spinning around to orient toward the bubble-cruiser, making a few little manoeuvers to open up some distance from the Kośalhath and aim in the right direction. Starting from the top by the hatch, green strip lights started turning yellow, the colour change dribbling down toward the bottom of the needle, where the big damn engine was — it should be timed to blast off as soon as all the green was gone.

Beth felt a cool prickling tingle as the shock-couch surged to life, drifting away from where she'd settled hitched up against the side to float precisely in the middle of the little oblong bowl, the second layer of inertial insulation put in place. The yellow wave racing down to the floor below, "All right, everyone, hold on to your tits!"

The last of the green vanished in favour of yellow, and then the strip lights all abruptly switched to red — they were flying. Beth didn't feel it, at all, between the artificial gravity of the needle and her shock-couch any sense of motion completely canceled out. She didn't even feel any vibration from the engines, thanks to the air gap enforced by the shock-couch. While she didn't feel it at all, she could hear it, a deep harsh buzz of the burn, something in here sharply rattling from the force. That noise did sound concerning, like something might be being shaken apart, but Beth knew from training in these things and a single live run against some pirates that it was perfectly normal.

And there was nothing to do now but cross her fingers and wait. The needles piloted themselves automatically, would jink around debris and try to keep up an unpredictable wiggle to prevent anyone from taking a shot at them. Either they would reach the bubble-cruiser in one piece, or they'd be blown out of the sky somewhere between here and there, and there was absolutely nothing Beth could do to sway their odds one way or another. She just had to wait.

Letting her eyes drift closed, listening to the hissing and whispers from the other men and women in here with her, she took a long, deep breath in...and then out...and then in...

There was a harsh jolt, Beth feeling a lurch to the side, her eyes snapping open to glance around. The needle was still intact, it must have just been an especially hard manoeuver — it could take an instant for the antigravity systems to adjust to increased power demands — nothing to worry about. And then there was another jolt, and another, Beth being yanked and jerked a few inches this way and that, she heard hissed curses and moans over the comm. A storm of pinging noises rang through the needle, like hail on a tin roof, they must have just flown through a debris cloud — energy weapons would superheat the materials they hit, making plumes of molten metal that would then refreeze into clouds of tiny little beads. Normally ships would have deflector fields to prevent that kind of impact, but these things didn't really, for obvious design reasons. There were a few more jolts, one hard enough Beth's leg bumped against the shock-couch, an intense irregular rattling shook through them, her bones seeming to vibrate, another jolt this way and then that, a funny swooping twisting feeling she thought might be a sharp last-second manoeuver, she heard the tell-tale sounds of someone on the line vomiting — poor bastard, sicking up in your helmet was fucking miserable — a few loud bangs and another hard jolt—

Beth felt a sudden flare in the magic being put out by the shock-couch, and then a hard shove of motion dragging at her — wanting to move up, but the magic holding her down, intense enough it hurt, her head spinning and her chest aching, even as her ears were stabbed through with the screaming cry of tearing metal—

—and she was thrown back down into the shock-couch as they came to a stop and the antigravity winked out an instant later (it could only hold that high-power state for a single second before literally burning out), she could hear noise inside the needle, voices, comments and questions and giddy nervous laughter all mixed together, carrying through from outside the claws digging them into place, the squealing of metal against metal, the muffled thrums and pops and hisses of the automated covering fire going off, Beth flicked one glove off with a quick wandless charm even as she tore at her restraints, a summoning charm drawing it back to tuck into her belt, she pushed off into the middle of the open space, getting nudged a little here and there as the soldiers in this ring started unstrapping themselves, reaching for their rifles secured next to them—

There was a blare of an alarm, the red strip lights changing to green again, a banishing charm against the floor below sent Beth flying up through the hatch even as it irised open. She felt the prickle of magic sweeping over her in a wave of as she passed from one artificial gravity environment into another, her stomach swooping and her head spinning, and suddenly she was falling upside down and at a slanted angle, a quick banishing charm before she hit the floor had her bouncing in a little hop, spinning, and then landing on the floor feet-first, teetering, falling to one knee.

Drawing her wand with a snap of her wrist, she quick glanced around — she was in a boxy corridor, made out of some brownish greyish metal, curling designs painted on in vivid dramatic colours, a few unidentifiable objects sitting on the floors here and there. The metal was scorched black in streaks from the automated clearing salvo, the spent casings of flash-bang grenades sitting here and there.

There were also several wakali around, some obviously dead, blackened and misshapen from the covering fire, others staggering, dazed from the flash-bangs. Squat thick little things, pinkish-yellowish skin, wearing colourful robes (the designs were particular to different clans, supposedly), the trait that stood out the most that they had two mouths for some fucking reason, one on either side of their face, the motion of their multi-part jaws just looked bloody weird to Beth. Of course, a lot of aliens looked weird sometimes, evolving on totally separate planets could be like that.

But she didn't pause to gawk at them, immediately started putting piercing curses in heads, splattering the floors with thick reddish-purplish blood. There was a high twittering alarm ringing through the hall, a smooth feminine voice (probably recorded) speaking in the odd wakali language — their two mouths meant they could do shite with multiple sounds at once in a way that human language simply couldn't, it sounded strangely jumbled to her ear. Of course, she had been around enough wakali by now, especially during the fighting on Oxlapś, that she'd started to pick up some of the language. She didn't understand every word, but it sounded like it was an announcement that the ship was being boarded, ordering everyone to prepare to fight and for...someone to secure the something, she didn't follow that part.

The repeating announcement ended with a sharp call to die with pride untarnished, because of course it did, fucking wakali...

The soldiers pouring out onto the deck behind her were landing somewhat more clumsily than Beth had — which was saying something, since her landing hadn't been exactly smooth either — but after the first few picked themselves off the floor the warning was passed along, those that followed hanging from the hatch by their elbows for a second to get their bearings before dropping down to their feet. Much smoother, they had a steady drip of people coming out now. The soldiers split themselves in half as they came out, moving to take positions sighting both directions down the corridor — Beth transfigured them some cover out of the material of the deck, some of them twitching with surprise but only hesitating a second, sweeping in to kneel behind the walls, rifles trained down the halls.

"Corporals, any injuries?"

"Korrashl is a little banged up — his couch was shook loose in the impact. The field held, but he's got some bruises, and his knee got fucked up."

The bruises weren't a big deal, but the strained knee could be. It did depend somewhat on the species — Beth didn't remember which Korrashl was off the top of her head (there'd been some shuffling around and new people brought in since Oxlapś) — but he might not be very mobile at the moment. "Which team are you?"

"Fifth."

"Revised orders, Fifth is holding the L.Z. with Seventh, Eighth will be taking over guard duty for—"

"Contact!" The shout was immediately followed by the screeching of blaster bolts tearing through the air, Beth ducked her head and threw up a shield charm just in case, whirled around to face the noise. She didn't actually see anything, gunshots splashing around a junction in the hallway some distance ahead — the wakali must have ducked into cover before she turned around. There was a brief pause, long enough for the blasterfire to peter out, and then a pack of somethings came spilling around the corner and charging in their direction. Long sleek black six-limbed creatures, with long jaws and big clawed paws, craggy growths of pale scab coral sprouting from their skin here and there, the things sprinting their way hard enough their claws screeched against the metal of the deck, viciously snarling—

"Wolves! Flamethrowers up!"

The word in Minnisiät that Beth would translate into English as wolf didn't literally refer to the wolves they had on Earth, obviously, though it could be used to refer to them and be understood by most speakers — it was used for any quick, medium-sized carnivore, especially ones that hunted in packs. (Different planets had different animals, obviously, but they often filled similar niches, so the same language could be used to refer to different species and be mostly understood just fine.) This particular attack animal the wakali used was frustratingly difficult to kill, their vital systems distributed through their bodies to prevent any spot offering a kill-shot, but fire worked against basically everything. While the soldiers fiddled with their equipment to get their flamethrowers running Beth tossed out a ball of Sunflame, lighting up half the breadth of the corridor, slowing the things down for a few seconds — it took a bit to get their flamethrowers out, the wolves had jumped out from too close.

"I'm jumping ahead, check blasterfire." Working from memory, Beth apparated to the other side of the circle of Sunflame, right where the corridor the wakali were attacking from met this one. They'd just begun running into their corridor, using the wolves as a distraction — Beth appearing out of nowhere took them completely by surprise, coming up short and shouting, weapons swinging up to aim at her. A blasting curse landed in the middle of the pack, tearing the formation up, and then she apparated over to their rear (just in case someone got a shot off), an overpowered compound slashing curse slicing through bodies three ranks deep before it ran out of power, she snapped off a couple quick piercing curses — one of the problems with fighting on spaceships was she couldn't rely on the big spells or else risk poking holes in the ship, even that compound slashing curse had been pushing it — a couple of the wakali had whirled around to bring rifles to bear, a movement charm yanked another between them, Beth ducked, the piercing white blasts burning into him, she apparated to the other side of the pack again, another burst of Sunflame lighting up the hallway, while the survivors flailed, attempting to beat the golden flames off of them she aimed some more piercing curses, punching holes in chests and heads...

And soon they were all dead, the hallway still again, save for the flickering of flames and purplish blood slowly spreading across the tile. Beth apparated again, appearing in the middle of their LZ — there were a few twitches of surprise, one of the medics lurching, nearly falling on his arse. "Clear?"

"Clear. We've got a couple scratches from the wolves, but they didn't penetrate armour."

"Good. Hold position for a moment, I'm checking the map." A couple blinks and taps at the panel on the inside of her wrist brought up the visual display. As expected, Beth had been sent a package from Control — she quick flipped through the material with swipes of her fingers on the empty air, the sensors on her bloody helmet picking up the input. She still didn't like wearing these things, but safety, biological agents, blah blah...

The wakali bubble-cruisers were peculiar things, a strategy taken with their internal design nobody could quite explain. There were parts that any ship this size needed, the various systems with all the maintenance access and such, as well as a central control area, the big long loop halls needed to access their vile bloody living armour, but the rest of the internal space was oddly segregated. There would be a big central hall, spreading across multiple levels, stocked with gardens and common living space, connected to it all the various amenities people would need, baths and dining halls and the like, all the living quarters and so forth...but there were multiple of these living areas, with no doors directly connecting any of them, instead corridors joining these blocks to the other features. Their assumption, from decorative elements they'd noticed in captured ships, was that each of these separate living spaces was reserved for separate clan groupings — they did know the wakali had some kind of complicated kinship system, but they didn't know much in the way of details — that these groupings might work together, but they didn't live together. A relic of the time before their people had been united, perhaps, brought together on these ships to prevent any of them from getting too isolated, but given their own space to prevent things from getting too tense.

From liberated slaves, they'd heard that the wakali emperor and the warlords under his command often had a hell of a time getting the different clans to cooperate with each other — presumably the system they had on their cruisers was some compromise a previous emperor had worked out to keep things working more or less smoothly. They really didn't know that much about the wakali though, given how stubbornly they refused relations with outsiders, so it was just guesswork.

The package she'd been sent included a full schematic of the ship, the internal layout mapped out with penetrating sensors of some kind — she didn't fully understand how that worked, but she didn't need to — the parts that were believed to be destroyed or exposed to vacuum shaded red, the different features and landing spots of the needles marked. Good, it looked like they were only down one needle — either destroyed in transit or just knocked off course, or they'd had launch issues, the package didn't say. That should be more than enough to take over the ship. The path Command wanted her group to take through the ship was marked, a couple points where she was supposed to leave teams behind to secure various chokepoints or systems, or contribute to taking the living area between their LZ and the bridge. Her group was tasked with actually taking control of the ship, but they wouldn't be expected to fly the bloody thing, they were just supposed to set it up to take commands remotely from the Kośalhath, she had a couple people with the equipment and training for that, should be a piece of cake.

"Okay, looks like they got us to the right spot, we're still on bridge duty. Fifth and Seventh, hold the L.Z., the rest of us are moving out. Docs, we're dropping you off near the captives on the way. Ready to move?" She got a few acknowledgements from the corporals, others just nodding at her or snapping off quick salutes. "The walls here should last another hour or so before the magic fades. Let's move, cover by squads, go..."

They advanced down the hall, turning the direction that pack of wakali had attacked them from — she noticed some helmeted heads swivel between Beth and the mess of mangled corpses, new people not used to Beth slaughtering entire squads on her own — leapfrogging by teams covering each other as they moved, Beth transfiguring physical barriers and then dispelling them so as to not provide cover for wakali who might come up behind them. They were attacked by another pack of wakali, a group of eight or so, a couple of their glaring white blaster bolts pinging off of armour, glancing hits, before their aim could adjust Beth had a shield charm up, gritting her teeth at the interference clawing at her skin as a rain of fire pummelled the barrier. It only lasted a couple seconds, though, return fire lancing out at the wakali — going right through her shield, she'd picked this particular one because it was only one-way — once the incoming fire tapered off Beth dropped the shield and tossed a blasting curse, scattering the wakali still standing, a squad rushed them with rifles spitting a stream of bolts, the wakali scrambling, while they were distracted the teams further back taking far more precise shots, knocking out the survivors in a matter of seconds. One of their people had a single mild burn, the amour tanking most of the hit but enough heat leaching through, Beth cast a couple quick healing and pain-suppressing charms, and they continued on.

Instead of proper lifts, the wakali tended to use something people in the Law called a "float tube", which was basically what it sounded like: you'd step out into an open tube, and anti-gravity would either lift you upward or let you fall at a controlled speed, handholds or guiderails or whatever every so often to maneuver yourself toward the door you wanted to leave through. There were some species who preferred float tubes for whatever reason, and they were common in certain poorly maintained space stations — they required fewer complicated moving parts to operate, so it wasn't unusual for stations that were running lean to tear out their lifts and convert them into float tubes. Beth had been in them before, but only a couple times, it wasn't something you saw very often. They had to go up three levels, and with thirty-two of them — they were leaving another team behind to hold the lift — the tube was going to be a little cramped. Beth transfigured some cover for the team they were leaving behind, and then they started up, one team stepping inside and floating out of view, and then a second...

Then there was a storm of surprised shouting over the channel, a screeching of metal. A couple of the third team leaning to look up the tube, Beth waited for the noise to die down before she asked, "Did they cut power to the tube?"

"Yeah, it's dead. We all clawed onto the walls before we could fall."

"Good. Looks like we're climbing, get your claws out."

There were multiple strategies to get around the environment of the ship besides just walking, especially useful in zero-g or in unusual situations — like being in a float tube without power, for example. Magnetised boots and gloves could work, but that had the obvious problem that not all metals were magnetic. A lot of materials commonly used in shipbuilding were, in fact, not magnetic, for what Beth felt like should be obvious reasons. One strategy was built into their armour: certain parts had spikes that, on contact with a surface, would stick out to pierce into it, holding the wearer in place. It could be slow, hard work climbing places, and of course it didn't work on all materials, but it was more consistently useful than magnets. It did leave some damage behind on whatever they'd been clawing on, of course, so it wasn't used often on their own ships, but obviously they didn't give a shite what happened to this fucking thing.

Beth waited for another team to lean around the door, latch on to the wall and begin climbing, a couple more smooth bastards running and jumping across to latch on to the opposite wall with a squealing of metal against metal. When it was her turn she just stepped out into the open air, a strong featherweight charm and a few light banishing charms aimed against the walls some metres below her enough to keep herself suspended. She actually could manage unassisted flight — it wasn't hard, just took a stupid amount of power to do it right — but the armour interfered with the magic. This strategy also worked, it was just a bit more finicky, and clumsy — she couldn't manage any fancy maneuvers with this, but floating straight up a tube was simple enough.

She saw helmets turn toward her, a few mutters on the comm — it wasn't every day you saw someone literally fly. She'd never needed to pull out unassisted flight yet, so this would be a new one even to the people more familiar with her by now.

They were all in the tube, slowly climbing up with a constant raucous of sharp snicking noises and the squelching of protesting metal, when there was a call of, "Stingers!" Another one of the living weapons the wakali used, hand-sized bug-looking things, multi-jointed limbs and segmented bodies, with a big damn stinger looking rather like a scorpion tail, and impossibly sharp, especially after being enhanced by the scabs, easily capable of stabbing through the composite mesh between armour panels, deadly poisonous, a dense swarm of the things pouring down the tube, obscuring the walls above, the air thrumming with the deep droning buzz of countless wings—

"Hold fire!" They couldn't shoot fast enough to knock them all out anyway, too many. Beth pushed hard against her banishing spells, rocketing her several metres up the tube, bright blue-white flame pouring out of her wand, she completely filled the tube all the way to the walls — she'd acted quickly enough, the highest of the soldiers just a couple metres below the fire — pouring magic into it to make it burn hotter, searing through her chest and arm, she pushed, sending the flames up in a wave...

By the time the fire burned out, there was nothing left of the stingers but ash, some body parts left behind still flickering with flames, drifting through the air in little fluttering twirls. And they continued climbing.

Eventually they reached the right level, Beth carefully tipping herself down to her feet along with the first few soldiers to exit, quick transfiguring up cover for them in case they were attacked. They were off the mechanical decks now, approaching somewhere more lived-in — there was a little sort of lobby area outside of the lift tubes, the plain metal surface of the ship partly hidden with tapestries along the walls, mosaics on the ceiling and the floor, colourful swirls and figures she couldn't make much sense of. She noticed one symbol repeated several times, she assumed some kind of clan sign. There were a few planters built into the floor, a round one at the centre and rectangular ones to the sides, the bodies of the plants oddly pale, yellowish, and the foliage an odd reddish-purple colour — not the same colour as wakali blood, which looked more red than purple, the leaf-looking things more purple than red. There was a subtle hint of smoke coiling along the ceiling, translucent, which Beth thought implied there must be some kind of damage to their ventilation systems. If there'd been smoke anywhere, she would have expected it to be around where they'd landed, which was nearer to the systems that the fleet had been targeting, that it was here kind of suggested their life support was going screwy.

About half of their group was out of the tube, Beth transfiguring a second rank of cover as more people stepped onto the floor, when she heard a clattering of boots and a chattering of wakali voices. A moment later a group of figures came pouring into the lobby from one of the corridors leading out, to the left. These ones were also wearing what looked like robes, but there was an odd texture to the cloth, black and silver and glimmering like polished metal — an exotic material the wakali used to defend against blaster bolts, Beth knew — odd oversized ceramic masks covering their heads, painted dramatic colours and with a lot of sharp lines suggesting claws and fangs — also protective, they looked decorative but were about as effective as the Law's helmets — all of them carrying rifles and with grenade belts slung over shoulders. She didn't think the wakali had expected their group to be up here already, they came up short for a blink — but then rifles were being brought into line, white and orange bolt slashing across the air—

—and slamming into silvery barrier Beth had cast, just in time. "Grenades, and down!" She heard a clatter as some soldiers hit the deck, a moment later the little round reddish shapes of incendiary grenades were arcing over her head — she checked their trajectory with a glance, gave them a little nudge to adjust their course a little. She'd only been holding the shield for a couple of heartbeats, but the stream of blasterfire was already sending shivering crackling interference across the surface, she grit her teeth against the hot pain lashing up her arm as she forced the charm to hold...until she heard the snap-fwoosh! of the grenades going off, let the spell fail as she dove to the floor (a few final bolts sizzling past to burn into the walls behind her) ending up laying on her side partly behind one of the little waist-high walls she'd transfigured up, a nearby soldier wordlessly hooking her elbow and dragging her properly into cover, gasping and shivering against the burning sharp clawing pain ripping through her arm and chest...

Just, fuck, forcing that shield to hold against that much focussed blasterfire was fucking brutal. Her vision had even greyed out for a second, her ears ringing, but soon she was back. One soldier had a hand on her shoulder, shaking her, someone else on the comm asking if she was hit, her hand must have gone numb for a second there, she'd dropped her—

"Grenade!"

Beth snapped up to sitting, startling the soldier jostling her, in time to make out three, four little black cylindrical shapes tumble toward their position, men and women diving for cover, some brave bastard picked up one that'd rolled deeper into their ranks and threw it straight back at the wakali, a piercing white shot burning across their chest in the next instant, sent spinning to the deck, a wave her hand, gritting her teeth against the hot spasming of pain through her chest, and the remaining grenades zipped away back the way they'd come—

—where they exploded with a heavy boom and a shivering of greenish fire, globs of some burning material splattering over the floor and one wall — as well as a group of wakali who'd been unlucky enough to be near them when they went off, flailing and screeching, trying to dislodge the liquid fires burning at them. Of course, they came out of cover doing so, chewed apart by blasterfire from their side, catching a few who'd looked out to see what was going on, Beth saw a lucky shot burn straight through the eye hole on a mask, the owner dropping like a puppet with its strings cut...

"You still with us, Lieutenant?"

"More or less." Gritting her teeth, she shoved over to lean against one of her transfigured walls — she couldn't see the wakali position from this angle, but she could hear the shooting, the high screaming of the wakali's weapons and the deeper thrumming of theirs, trading back and forth in bursts. "I pushed that shield spell too hard tanking all that fire, I need a couple minutes before doing any more big magic."

"Does tossing their grenades back at them count as big magic?"

"No, call it if they throw more."

"Lieutenant, I think this is yours." That wasn't...whichever corporal or sergeant she'd been talking to a second ago (hard to tell through the comm). One of the soldiers ducking behind the wall she was leaning against picked something up off the floor next to their knee, held out—

Oh, her wand. Reaching to take it — her bare hand looking small and delicate against the soldier's armoured, vacuum-safe glove — she said, "Yes, important, that. Thank you, soldier." The faceless black and red helmet just nodded back at her before turning back around to focus on the fighting.

By the time Beth was feeling solid enough to get moving again, the shooting was already pretty much done, the wakali that hadn't been killed retreating further down the hall. The rest of their group continued pouring out of the elevator — the ones already here hadn't been able to make room for them while the firefight was ongoing, they'd just had to hold onto the walls of the tube and wait — while they made a quick check of injuries, those who hadn't been hit checking their weapon charges and fiddling with their armour. They had four people who'd been hit in the firefight, one poor bastard three times — he was the only one who was seriously injured, the other three had burns but their armour had absorbed enough of the energy of the blasts that they could move on. The medics rushed to stabilise Enaskmarr — after a tense couple minutes, one told Beth that he would live, for now, but they had to get him back to the Kośalhath for proper treatment as soon as possible. They didn't see why a stasis charm should hurt, so she cast one on him, which should hopefully keep in stable condition for longer.

Once they had him bandaged up, Beth double-checked that it was safe to move him, before side-alonging him back to the LZ — the teams they'd left here jumped in surprise, whirling around to aim their rifles at her, before realising who she was and tipping them up to the ceiling — dropped him off and apparated back. Their target was this way, the opposite direction as the wakali had retreated in — she wanted one of the teams watching their back, Unasi volunteered for the job, waving her people over to that side of the group. And they started moving again, like before hopping forward bit by bit, Beth transfiguring cover as they went.

Casting magic did still hurt, a bit, but it wasn't that bad. She'd had worse, as long as she didn't push herself really hard like that again she'd be fine.

They rounded a corner from the lift lobby, coming into a part of the ship that seemed much more lived in. They passed through an area that seemed to be some kind of equipment storage, racks and rows of shelves and drawers and cupboards built into the walls and rising from the floors, things hanging from hooks or bars attached to the walls. It was obvious people had been in the middle of something when the attack came, some of the drawers and cupboards left open, things discarded on the floors, scattered around, either dropped in a rush or shaken loose during the battle — crumpled-up uniforms, datapads, little pieces of metal or ceramic somethings Beth couldn't identify, trays and bowls meant to carry something, various tools, a complete mess made of the place. This room didn't show any of the colour of the lobby, plain and grey and stark, and somewhat murky, not as brightly lit as other parts of the ship they'd seen so far. Though, she noticed one light panel in the ceiling was flickering, it was possible the power here had been affected by the damage the ship had taken.

Passing into the narrow, almost claustrophobic corridor on the other side, she realised she was half right. Maybe the damage to the ship had affected systems here, but it wouldn't have seemed very pleasant even in perfect condition — their path was bringing them through the slave quarters.

The corridor was only wide enough for two of them to pass at a time, plain and grey, and dim, maybe only a third of the light panels necessary to properly illuminate the space. The walls had doors on both sides one after the next after the next, so close together their frames were almost touching, the rooms on the other side must be terribly narrow — though, "door" was maybe the wrong word, because it didn't seem like there was anything in the frames, just gaps in the wall. Actually, she thought she saw rows of diodes inside the frames that were probably emitters, to project force fields that could hold people inside if necessary. Not that she imagined they did that very often, since having slaves didn't do the bastards much fucking good if they weren't actually working.

And it was immediately obvious that's what this place was, people standing out in the hall, or peeking out of the doors, dozens and dozens, "Hold fire, captives." An eclectic mix of species, Beth only recognised a few as peoples of the Law, the others either peoples she hadn't encountered yet or had been abducted from outside of their space. (At the moment they were outside of the Law's borders, even at their furthest extent before the wakali resurgence, so that wasn't implausible.) It was hard to tell with unfamiliar species, but they seemed rather scrawny and strained, marked up with bruises and scratches — and it was easy to tell, because every single one of them was completely naked. Beth was aware that the wakali didn't generally clothe their slaves, which did make her wonder what the uniforms back in the supply room had been for. More forward-facing, formal duties, maybe?

The sorry people startled at the presence of the big imposing figures stepping into the hall — bodies concealed with sharp-edged black and red armour, carrying what were easily recognisable as blaster rifles — some shouts, most of them in the hall diving through doors into cover. But after a moment there was a sudden burst of muttering, calls of It's the Law of Five! in Minnisiät, repeated in a smattering of other languages, people peeking out to watch, some stepping out to approach them—

A quick flick set the external speakers on her helmet to project her voice. She would rather just do that with magic — the speakers tended to flatten people's voices, made them sound a bit cold and robotic — but that'd require fumbling with her helmet both pulling it off and putting it back on, not worth it. "We're taking the ship, the wakali are still fighting. Sit tight for a little bit longer and someone will be by to get you out of here soon." Thankfully, the people who'd been approaching ducked out of the way, slipping back into their rooms to let the soldiers through, people watching from doorways, dozens and dozens...

As they went on, it became increasingly obvious that the people here weren't in great shape. No great surprise, that, the wakali weren't generally known for being kind to their captives — part of their whole we are superior beings, everyone else exists for our benefit thing they had going on. Most of the people Beth made out seemed somewhat scrawny, some with patches of missing hair/fur or discolouration on skin/scales, which she knew could be signs of malnutrition, and a lot of them were injured, marked with bruises or scrapes or cuts or burns, some recent enough there were still streaks of dried blood on their skin or matted into fur, some were visibly missing teeth, or fingers. Pretty normal for people who'd gone through wakali captivity, unfortunately, the vicious fucking monsters...

The quarters were also pretty gross, if she was being honest. Sullen and grey, underlit, she could barely see into the rooms with the low light and people crowded into the doorways, bunks stacked up to the ceiling with just enough room for a person to slip into each, the thin sheets streaked and blotted with stains of who even knew what. There were bunches of bowls or plates here and there, which were generally pretty clean — Beth guessed the captives weren't given much food, so every last bit was licked off of plates — with the exception of the ones that were clearly being used as chamber pots. Looking at the bowls, in some cases the vile slurry inside seemingly gathered from multiple species, they didn't look any different from the ones that had obviously once held food. She guessed this wasn't normally how things were done — the captives would have been restricted to quarters for a while, the normal toilets they used must be outside of this section, so they made do with what they had. During their walk, she noticed multiple places where refuse pots had sloshed over their rims, or had been knocked over, even a couple which had seemingly been dropped, smashed to release smears of shite and puddles of piss on the floors...

No, by the look of it she thought at least some of the messes were due to the ship being shaken up in the fighting. But between the improvised chamber pots and how generally dense and tight and ill-managed this place was, Beth was certain it smelled awful — she properly appreciated her helmet for maybe the first time ever, she normally hated having to wear this bloody thing.

How miserable this place was quickly had a hard knot of rage burning in her chest, like barely-contained flames licking at her ribs and prickling at her throat like smoke, pouring into her aura hot enough the air around her snapped and popped. (That wasn't just her imagination, occasionally someone would twitch, sending her looks.) And it only burned hotter as she made out the relief on faces, intense enough some people were crying, others grinning and laughing. There were cheers, people making a mix of gestures from doorways, many picking up a salute common in the Law — looking little different from just raising a hand to Beth, like children would in class, though with fingers splayed to show their palm — repeated cries of One Life, One Purpose, or Toward Liberation, or Abundance Through Fellowship. There were definitely Law citizens among the people here, since those were Law slogans, but there were obviously outsiders too, Beth heard several calls of Long Live the Five — assuming that the name of the Law of Five was referring to five founding planets, or perhaps even a council of five leaders who presumably ran the government, as she'd heard wasn't unusual among people less familiar with them — or Glory to Admiral Rroškuls (wrong fleet, Rroškuls commanded the Third), neither of which would be expected from a Law citizen...though maybe the latter had been started by a captive from the Law, Beth wasn't sure how likely outsiders would be to know the name of an admiral...

The shouts and cheers seeming to ring inside her helmet, the face of a little kharson boy swimming in the crowd, all bruised up around one eye — Beth thought his nose and part of the ridge around the eye might even have been broken, a brutal hit — grinning as he copied the salutes and calls from the adults, face bobbing up and down in her vision as though bouncing on the balls of his feet. And more faces, and more, and more, the slave quarters a filthy grey blur smearing behind them as they advanced, rounding a corner to find more, abused people of a mix of species and ages and sexes, bruised and bloody, exhausted and tearful and giddy...

—and then the cheers were abruptly replaced with screams, blaster bolts screeching through the air as wakali poured into the opposite end of the narrow corridor, scoring burning streaks through the walls and ceiling, punching bloody holes into a few unlucky captives, some whizzing into the pack of soldiers around Beth, pinging off of armour, a few cries over the comm as people were hit, they tried to drop or dive for cover, the tight quarters making that difficult, a chaotic confusing mess, return fire slicing back at the wakali — better aimed, thankfully, not hitting any of the captives in the crossfire — finding a few of them, the wakali diving into rooms, leaning back out holding bodies between them and the Law soldiers, firing—

The rage spilling through her, hot and harsh and cloying — the intensity of it making her aura burn, this part of the corridor suddenly bright, throwing wild shadows — Beth shouted, "Lunapacienti!"

Soft, cool, blue-silver light filling the corridor, the noise of fighting abruptly stopped, only seconds after it'd begun. There was silence, still and deep as the night, Beth could hardly even see anything, nothing but a thick uniform glow — as though the entire hallway were suddenly inside of a patronus. Despite the intense brightness, the light wasn't glaring at all, washing out all view of everything else but still feeling soft, soothing, serene.

After the initial pulse, the light began to fade, until Beth could see the vague outline of the corridor, and in time figures, resolving out of the silvery glow. The pacification spell was still working, every person and every surface seemingly limned with gentle silver light, the absence of shadows making the scene almost surreal, artificial. Everyone was standing still, eyes wide, faces blank, blinking in a daze. Nobody moved.

At some point in the very brief skirmish, Beth had dropped to a knee without really noticing — while everyone stood, still and silent, she pushed to her feet, and started crossing the gap between her soldiers and the wakali, nudging one of her people aside to let her through. Still feeding power to the spell, the corridor continuing to shine, like everything had been charmed to faintly glow, blue-silver light so similar to a patronus filling the air, smooth and soft and soothing, she took one step at a time, every eye in the corridor turning toward her, drawn to the only movement, faces absent any reaction, simply watching. She was still powering the spell, it took focus to keep it going, and if it dropped even for a second the wakali would start shooting.

So, as she neared — the squat wakali figures shrouded in robes and half-hidden by the naked slaves they'd dragged out to hide behind, eyes fixed on her through the holes in their colourful masks — she drew her sidearm. A flick of her thumb switched it on, a brief whir of electronics coming to life.

She approached the wakali furthest to the front, a scorch mark along one side of his robes, one arm loosely holding on to a captive of a feathered species Beth didn't recognise. Keeping the magic flowing into the spell through her wand hand, she lined the emitter of her blaster pistol up with one of the mask's eye holes. She squeezed the trigger — there was a brief flash of orange light, a screech of burning plasma, and the wakali fell like a puppet with its strings cut.

Her breath thick in her throat, the magic coursing through her chest and arm smooth and cool and numbing, she walked up to the next wakali — this one had grabbed a eluńalh girl, maybe twelve — and executed him too.

And while the entire corridor watched, compelled into calm stillness by the pacification spell, she executed another.

And another.

And another.

Seeing their fellows killed, the wakali tried to resist the magic, motivation beginning to leak through the calm enforced by the spell, little twitches in their fingers, rifles wavering up and down and up — so she leaned into it harder, the magic burning, her aura shivering and sparking. And she executed another, and another, and another.

Finally, she killed the last. She looked into the rooms along the corridor, just to be sure she hadn't missed any — the filthy rooms populated only with the naked figures of the captives, no wakali — before finally releasing the spell. The magic surging out of her, her head spun, the corridor tilting and wavering, she tipped against one of the doorframes and slid to the floor...

She seemed to black out for a moment, her limbs prickling numb and her vision going grey and her ears ringing, when she came to there were soldiers around her, a few of the captives peeking around armoured figures to watch, someone shaking her arm. They were speaking to her, the inside of her helmet ringing, it took a moment for her to get the Minnisiät to make sense. "I'm fine," she said, the words coming out a little slurred. "Dizzy, give me a second..."

"Lieutenant, that was..." The speaker — a kharson voice, but the name wasn't coming to her — trailed off, apparently not sure how to finish that sentence.

Which was fair enough — Beth had no clue what she'd just done either. She knew the spell she'd cast, of course, something she'd learned way back during the war with the scabs to help calm panicky civilians, but that was...not how it was supposed to work. It was supposed to be a single-target spell, like any other hex. After discussing techniques with a Vietnamese mage, she'd learned how to amplify it into a single burst of light, which could affect everyone within her direct line of sight all at once, useful to calm panicky crowds — but even that was only supposed to work in a single pulse. She'd never been able to teach it to anyone else, either, partly because the intent was finicky, and partly because the power draw was a little absurd, especially for something of such limited utility.

She had absolutely no idea how she'd just done that with it. She'd just...done it, without really thinking.

Not surprised she'd almost knocked herself the fuck out, what had she even done to that spell...

After a moment, her strength came back enough for her to stand up — though she nearly ended up tipping over right away, hitching up against one of the soldiers, gripping at the edges on each other's armour, her head spinning. "I'm okay," she insisted to the questions ringing through her helmet. "Just, I might have—" She cut herself off, releasing a sharp breath. Leaning away from the man (she was pretty sure), she teetered for a moment, but she managed to stay upright. "That was a big magic. I think I'm going to hang back, unless something comes up you really need my help for — another incident like that, and I'm going to end up stuck in medbay getting half the nerves in my arm replaced."

There was some muttering at that, helmets swivelling as people glanced at each other. Of course, alien muggles didn't know shite about magic — even less than most muggles back home these days, the average person had picked up at least a little — so they wouldn't have realised she was basically zapping the shite out of her nerves every time she did a big spell. Eventually, someone spoke, though she couldn't really tell who, the helmets hiding their features and her ears ringing too much to pick out the voice. One of the corporals, anyway. "We can take it from here, Lieutenant. If you'd prefer to hold back."

Beth shook her head. "No, I'm fine. At the very least I can take shots with my blaster and intervene in an emergency. It's fine. Anyway, report — injuries?"

They did have a few blaster grazes from that first round of shots before Beth stopped the shooting, one of them rather bad — one of the medics already had his armour torn away to get at the wound, rapidly moving to stabilise him. Only one of the medics, because the other one was working on one of the captives instead. The wakali had, unsurprisingly, hit a few in the initial wave, people who'd been leaning out of doorways watching the Law soldiers come by. Beth waved the former medic away, and cast a stasis charm on the injured soldier (grimacing against the burn of magic forcing its way through) — that would hold until he could get proper medical treatment — so he immediately picked up and joined his comrade stabilising the injured captives. Except, they had things to do, they couldn't stay here. They had a very brief conversation, triage, the medics asked Beth to put the ones with the most serious injuries into stasis, and to allow one of them to stay behind here to treat the others. All right, fine, but that meant only one of you got to continue into the main living area with the teams they were sending that way...just down the corridor right over there, actually — the wakali who'd just attacked them must have come from that direction.

After that was all done, one of the medics pulled off his helmet — red skin and black hair, sotšuńalh, so that would be Arrukša — and called out that he'd be staying behind to look after the injured, and that he was a doctor, if anyone needed help they should come forward. Armour was carefully fitted back over bandages, and their group pulled themselves back together after their brief stop. Beth moved more to the middle of the group this time, trying not to feel uncomfortable, her skin itching.

Maybe this was silly, but she always felt wrong not putting herself in the front, not doing whatever she could. She had defences the others didn't, was less likely to be cut down with a lucky shot, she had abilities they didn't, could more quickly deal with threats before they could hurt anyone. Not doing whatever she could was grating, made her feel...she didn't know, something. She hated giving orders from a distance, not directly involved — if she was putting people's lives at risk, she'd prefer that hers be in the balance as well, so she could actively tip that balance in her people's favour.

But that was a silly thing to be feeling right now. It wasn't like she was safely back in a command centre or something, and she'd already pushed herself badly a couple times. She'd already done plenty, she just had to...let her people carry them the rest of the way through. They could manage that, she was sure.

(And if another emergency popped up, well, she was sure she could pull out another trick if she had to. She'd rather get herself stuck in hospital than stand back and let any of her people die when she could have prevented it.)

Once everyone was back in place, ready, they continued on.

Beth flopped limply into bed face-down, and just laid there. She was still dressed, but she didn't think she had the energy to move, it didn't seem worth the bother.

Everything bloody well hurt.

Some of that was the throbbing of bruises and the heat of burns from blaster grazes — she'd hardly even noticed getting banged around or the near-misses at the time, but that was normal, she ended up with mysterious bruises after basically every fight she was in. And of course she was fucking exhausted, that was also normal, muscles in her limbs and her stomach and back aching and spanging with sharper stabs, constant. The worst of it, though, was the steady hard hot-cold prickly sizzly burn, deep in her chest and spreading out to her shoulder and all the way down her wand arm, her skin in her forearm down to her hand crawling, like pins and needles but a hundred times worse, like the flesh was trying to leap straight off her bones.

Whether magic or the Law's technology was superior depended on the particular thing you were looking at, but medicine was something that could be pretty mixed. Nerve damage in particular was something magic was kind of iffy at — nerves channelled magic. Saturating them as was necessary for healing to work properly made doing so far more energy-intensive, and of course healing something you couldn't directly see was always a fucking pain, but it was doable. Just flat-out growing new nerve cells was actually easier than repairing them, but then there were other problems that went with that, it was complicated. The Law's medicine was weirdly almost more miraculous than actual magic at this specific thing. Beth didn't really understand it, but the impression she got was that they could...basically revive dead nerve cells, somehow? As long as they hadn't been dead too long, and the damage wasn't too extensive, they could just give them a good zap — not electricity, but it felt like it — give the person some electrolytes and some meds to help along the healing process, and boom, there you go. She had pints of some special medicinal drink she was supposed to take over the next couple days, which she couldn't help thinking of as a potion despite being produced through an industrial process...sort of. There were bloody protists suspended in the stuff that'd assist with healing somehow? because spacefaring civilization just did shite like that?

Healing people by fucking zapping them with needles jabbed into their skin and speeding up the process by drinking microorganisms sounded absurd, like something mages would have come up with. Sometimes the Law's tech was just as ridiculous as magic...and that was when it wasn't literally magic, like their antigravity or FTL travel. It was easier to just not think about it too hard.

Basically switching them back on was a double-edged sword, though, because now she could feel all the damage she hadn't when her senses had been numbed by the nerve damage. Channelling a tonne of fucking magic burned other shite in there, not just her nerves, so of course that fucking hurt. And there was that weird pins-and-needles sensation of feeling coming back, like a limb that'd fallen asleep waking up, but it always lasted for fucking hours, and nothing helped lessen the feeling at all, pain killers didn't do shite, just had to wait it out...

It wasn't just the physical stuff, though, a hard knot in her throat, burning behind her eyes...

She'd been laying here for...a while, she wasn't sure. She might have drifted off for a moment, but not for long — she'd set an alarm to remind her to drink her medical protists in an hour, and it hadn't gone off yet. There was a soft tone, and then she heard her door click open. Letting out an involuntary groan, her head all soft and unfocussed — everything hurt, and she was fucking exhausted — she tried to think of who the hell would be coming in her room. There were a limited number of people who even could, she'd locked the thing so whoever it was would need an access code...

"You look like you've been through it," came the soft, rasping voice of a tewari woman, speaking in Monatšeri. A familiar voice even.

Beth groaned again. "Taqšuńi, what...?"

"I heard you were let out of medical, guessed you'd come straight here."

The thought fuzzy, something about that didn't feel quite right somehow. "Who told you?"

"Okay, I have a back door into security, and I set an agent to ping me when you got back."

She let out a little snort, muffled by her face pressed against the mattress. That sounded more like it.

"...Are you all right, Beth? I can't get into medical's records, but they did let you out." There was a grasp on her foot, she felt Taqšuńi tugging at the laces, the odd synthetic material loosening its grip. "You didn't even take your shoes off."

"Tired." She took a couple breaths, as Taqšuńi finished pulling off the ones shoe, moving to the other. That felt like...kind of a weird thing for Taqšuńi to be doing? But the feeling felt too distant right now, her brain too fuzzy, to quite process it, Beth just laying there. "Nerve damage, from... Pushing magic too hard."

Taqšuńi's hands paused, just for a second, before tugging off the second shoe. "Using your magic causes nerve damage?"

"Mhmm. Techs– Technically doing any magic stresses the nerves, just, you do too much and it hurts. They did the repairs, have to take—" Her comm began twittering, Beth let out a groan, her hand numbly grasping at her pocket. "Alarm, have to drink one now..."

"Hold on, I think I saw those in the other room." Beth managed to turn her alarm off after a bit of fumbling. She was sitting upright by the time Taqšuńi came back — she was still in her uniform, marked with burns here and there, streaks of stains from some kind of fluid, though Beth noticed her fur was clean. Washed off, but didn't get a change of clothes, for whatever reason. "One of these?" she asked, wiggling the white plastic-looking bottle of battakorisa. Beth nodded, Taqšuńi twisted the cap, there was crack-psh as the seal was broken, the self-warming elements triggering. Shaking the bottle back and forth to mix the contents up, Taqšuńi said, "I always hate having to take this stuff — it stick in my throat."

"It's not so bad. Potions are worse." Once she was done shaking it up, Taqšuńi handed the bottle to Beth. She tossed the cap aside and threw her head back, downing one gulp after another of the stuff, thick and grainy and green-tasting, a bit of weird citrussy-minty aftertaste clinging to the insides of her mouth and throat. Of course, the downside of this stuff compared to potions was that there was more of it — after downing about as much of it as she could stand in one go, peeling it away from her lips with a shudder, there was still over half of it left.

It might not be as bad as some potions, but it was still pretty gross, ugh...

While she was working up the nerve to take another crack at it, Taqšuńi's hands found their way to Beth's shirt, working at the buttons. She wasn't in her usual clothes, the simple loose trousers and top they'd given her in the medbay, the material crisp and starchy. For a few seconds, she blinked up at Taqšuńi, before finally muttering. "Um. No offence, but I'm really not in the mood. Tired."

Taqšuńi's lips curled and eyes quirked in an expression Beth was pretty sure was a smirk. "Yeah, I'm not so flush with energy myself. You know how much work it takes to keep a ship like this running during a proper battle? I've barely sat down for more than five minutes in the last thirty hours. I thought..." The last of the buttons undone, Beth's hospital jacket left hanging open down the front, Taqšuńi's hands retreated. A look crossed her face, maybe...hesitant? "I thought we'd just sleep. If you want."

"...Oh." She thought she might be able to guess why Taqšuńi was being so uncharacteristically cautious all of a sudden. In the last week or so, they had slept together a few times, but it'd been very much a casual sex thing so far. Sleeping together, in the literal sense, just because they were both sore and tired and sad and didn't want to be alone would be...different. More intimate than just screwing, in a way, Taqšuńi not sure if they were on the same page about that. But after a couple seconds of bemused staring, Beth said, "Okay. I think I'd like that. Thanks."

Taqšuńi just gave her a smile, before starting to work on her own clothes, standing back so Beth could drink more of her battakorisa. She still wasn't great at reading expressions on non-human faces, so she could be wrong — but she got the feeling there'd been something almost shy on that smile. Very unlike Taqšuńi, it was sticking out but she couldn't quite process it, brain too fuzzy at the moment.

Of course, it wasn't very long after they were in bed — Taqšuńi laying pressed against Beth's back, an arm wrapped around her middle, fur almost seeming to envelop her, smooth and soft and warm against her skin — that Beth started crying. She didn't see it coming, seemed to come out of nowhere, one moment nothing and then it was tearing at her throat, her eyes burning. Taqšuńi asked what was wrong, but Beth didn't manage to get out more than a few broken words, couldn't even quite express it to herself, didn't know how to explain.

The captives, the fucking miserable conditions they'd been kept in, the children...

She kept seeing them whenever she closed her eyes, that one kharson boy with his eye all smashed up, that eluńalh girl one of the wakali had taken as a human shield, one child of a species she hadn't recognised had been tiny, heartbreakingly delicate-looking...

She didn't know why. She just kept seeing them, whenever she closed her eyes, it hurt, she couldn't breathe.

But Taqšuńi didn't try to get her to explain, after the first couple abortive attempts just shushed her. She turned her around — Taqšuńi was physically stronger than her, by quite a bit, moving her wasn't a problem — Beth buried her face in Taqšuńi's chest, hands fisting in her fur, Taqšuńi's arms circling around her, tight and firm, breathing into Beth's hair, warm and soft and close...

Taqšuńi simply held Beth as she cried, until she drifted off to asleep in her arms.

Chapter Text

69:9:31 (26th February 2002)
— Peace of Sekot plus 04.09.31

Jacen's attempts to learn Dimitran magic had hit stumbling blocks in rather unexpected places. It seemed that, on a fundamental level, they simply did not approach their arts in a manner he was at all accustomed to.

The Jedi Order were, well, an order. The precise structure of the organisation had evolved somewhat over the millennia of its existence — though they knew much less about the Jedi of previous eras than they would like, Palpatine's purge of all available records had been shockingly thorough — but they had been centralized to greater or lesser degrees at the old Temple on Coruscant since at least the end of the Pius Dea Republic over ten thousand years ago now. There had been the occasional schism or regional divisions, but for the most part there was a single doctrinal authority, a leadership that all Jedi at least theoretically respected, and a set fashion through which one might petition the Order for assistance or seek out training.

If anything, the modern Jedi were more decentralized than had been typical in previous eras, but the set of expectations was still well set in stone. Any Jedi who'd finished their training could teach Force-sensitive students they might discover during the course of their duties who, by the simple act of being recognised by a Jedi and beginning their training, would be recognised as part of the Order by any other Jedi they encountered. As Luke's first batch of students had begun to spread through the galaxy, it'd become common for Jedi to not be familiar with other members of the Order, encountering each other entirely by chance — Master Saba and her students had been one such discovery, her comrades and Jacen's parents bumping into each other by happenstance while both attempting to rescue Master Eelysa. Younger prospective Jedi had often been sent to the Yavin Praxeum instead, since following a Knight or Master around on their duties could be risky for an untrained student; similarly, people whose talents had been discovered independently or who wished to be tested could freely apply to travel to the Praxeum, at any time. There'd been a constant trickle of hopefuls coming in to the offices on Coruscant or the Praxeum itself to be evaluated by the Masters, only some of whom had possessed any significant power whatsoever, but so rare was the talent that Luke had still considered it worthwhile to keep channels open.

Jacen was less familiar with how things worked now — the Yavin Praxeum had been destroyed by the Yuuzhan Vong, and he'd been out of contact for some time — but he assumed some substitute process must have been established. If anyone in the Republic who might have the talent wished to learn, they simply had to ask — and it was simple enough to do so, it only took a brief search on the 'net to find how.

The other Force-using traditions he'd encountered on his journey were somewhat more difficult to get into contact with, but they were equally eager to teach any student who came to them. Having been subject to a brutal Imperial occupation followed by an invasion by the Yuuzhan Vong, the people of Dathomir viciously protected their world — it was difficult for the average person to gain clearance to land on the surface under any circumstances, their space patrolled by a mix of Hapan warships and Dathomiri's own peculiar pirate navy. But it'd been trivial for Jacen specifically — most clans considered the Jedi to be friends, his mother in particular was all but universally respected for personally guaranteeing the planet its independence, and his friendship with Tenel Ka was an additional advantage on top of the rest — and once he'd landed the witches had been perfectly willing to teach him their arts. Even flattered, in a way, that a Jedi would consider them worthy of learning from at all. The Nightsisters had been somewhat more difficult to treat with, hiding at the edges of what passed for civilization on Dathomir and far more jealously guarding their secrets, but they hadn't been difficult to convince, with the right incentives. Even more vulnerable to flattery, in their own way.

The Theran Listeners had been almost obscenely straightforward. Upon landing on Nam Chorios, he'd begun his investigation to find if there was some means through which he should be contacting their order — he'd only been on the planet for a day or two before one of the Listeners had approached him, and offered to lead him directly to who he needed to speak to. It turned out the Tsils had noticed his arrival on the planet, and had read his intentions, and had already decided to teach him before Jacen could even plead his case. Convenient, that.

The Jensaarai had been simple enough — they were an official institution on Susevfi, Jacen had simply needed to show up at their library and ask to study with them. The Saarai-kaar had been skeptical, of course, but she couldn't ignore the potential coup that would be poaching Jacen Solo of all people from the Jedi. The Aing-Tii had been rather more difficult, in large part because the location of their homeworld was unknown, the parties of monks wandering about the Kathol region impossible to track. Instead of going to them, Jacen had endeavored to bring them to him, going to places they were known to frequent and performing various good deeds he'd believed they would approve of, and being very loud and obvious about it. It had worked, the monks who'd turned up seemingly approaching him more out of curiosity than anything, though convincing them to teach him had been more difficult. Jacen didn't know the details, but the impression he got was that the Aing-Tii had had issues with attempts at infiltration by outsiders in the past, or even former students using their knowledge to ill ends. The only way he'd made any progress at all had been in offering trades, given lessons in exchange for knowledge of events and places far from their rather isolated corner of the galaxy, the teachings and abilities of the Jedi and other traditions he'd already visited. Once the door had been opened, they'd been somewhat more forthcoming — convinced of his intent, perhaps — but they'd still been very private, proferring no invitations to their world (worlds?) and the heart of their order, the impression that there were limits to what they were teaching him quite clear.

Approaching the Baran Do had been nearly as simple as the witches of Dathomir or the Theran Listeners: he'd landed on Dorin, walked right into their temple complex at the heart of the capital city, and asked to be taught; after a brief discussion, the Masters had agreed. Simple.

Dimitra was not simple. He'd been here for nearly a month now, and he'd hardly made any progress.

The data Jacen had been able to find on the lost human homeworld — a claim he did truly believe, after seeing it for himself, though he found he now had more questions than he'd started with — had been somewhat limited, and so he had underestimated the complexity of their society. That had been rather foolish of him, in retrospect. It was a hardly a secret to anyone that advanced transportation and communications technology led inexorably to the homogenisation of even incredibly diverse populations, especially when these peoples were unified under a single government. He'd known, from what little information he had seen, that the Dimitrans had only managed efficient worldwide networking over the last couple generations, and of course had had no contact with galactic civilization whatsoever. (Or not since whoever had originally removed humans from the planet had last made contact, at least.) Jacen was familiar with the concept of the founder effect, surely their diffusion across Dimitra over tens, hundreds of thousands of years would have generated an endless array of peoples and languages and cultures and traditions, diversity which had simply not been put under the necessary pressures to fully fade away.

He might have known that, in general terms, but he had not been prepared for what it meant.

Jacen had been dropped off at a transportation hub in a city called Banāras (among a handful of other names). Nāgamaṇi had then teleported away — the technique seemed quite similar to Aing-Tii spatial manipulation, the woman disappearing with a flash of power and a soft pop noise — leaving Jacen to his own devices. His first mission had been to gain the lay of the land, to learn a little bit about where he was, pick up the language, before then approaching the mages. Banāras had turned out to be a fascinating place, a site of religious pilgrimage going back thousands of years, the banks of the river lined with temple after temple after temple built in a variety of styles dating to different eras, decorated with elaborate stonework and colorful painting. The river was clearly terribly polluted, and the city was bloated with refugee camps remaining from the war against the Yuuzhan Vong — they'd been transformed into permanent housing, better than nothing but arguably little better than slums — but still a cultural marvel, Jacen had spent hours walking its streets out of nothing more than simple curiosity. Eventually, he felt comfortable enough with the language to ask where he could go to speak with the mages

Which was when he encountered a problem: the locals didn't even understand his question. There were mages about, of course, but they were confused by his request to speak with the mages. When he asked to speak with their leader, perhaps — thinking he might be directed to something analogous to one of the clan Mothers on Dathomir, if not the leader of a centralised order like the Jedi or the Jensaarai or the Baran Do (he'd realised by then that that wasn't a realistic expectation) — he'd gotten an even more bemused reaction. One person he'd asked had been able to direct him to another city a short distance away, named Alhābas, which turned out to be the capital city of the polity he was in. Some more wandering about and asking questions, and he found himself in a conversation with who he later learned was the head of state of a nation of mages situated in this part of the world — a powerful political figure, yes, as he'd discover that his being from another world was a matter of curiosity to many.

And yet this leader of mages had been as bemused by his questions as anyone else. He wouldn't teach Jacen — he was a politician, and he had far too many other matters on his plate. (They were still dealing with the consequences of the war with the Yuuzhan Vong, and there were some complex politics to do with his country's relationship with the greater entity of Bhārat Gaṇrājya, which Jacen hadn't the background knowledge to understand.) But he had offered to have someone show him to the local academy, which had been helpful...but then it was Jacen's turn to be bemused when the official showing him around had asked what qualifications he had.

It was at that point that it'd begun to sink in how terribly out of his depth he was.

As shouldn't be a surprise if one simply thought about it logically, the peoples of Dimitra were divided into a long list of states and ethnic groupings, the borders of the former only sometimes aligning with the latter, the map an intricate patchwork of dozens of different polities. Except, the picture was even more complex than it seemed at first glance: the mages had their own states, the territory of which overlapped with those of their ungifted cousins but had entirely separate institutions and even cultural developments. It seemed that, some three hundred years ago, the mages had effectively isolated themselves from the rest of Dimitran society, and remained in hiding for generations, long enough to develop their own national identities and for the common population to come to believe magic was nothing but myth. The idea of Force-sensitives building a parallel society of their own seemed absurd to Jacen, but there were millions of them, it was more plausible on Dimitra than anywhere else he'd ever heard of. This state of affairs had only been upset by the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, mages coming out of hiding to work together to defend the planet — in the years since, the two societies had begun the process of reintegrating into a single whole, but this was further along in some regions of the world than others, some of the mages' states still sharply delineated from the rest of the population, others entirely dissolved, and in other places still existing in a fuzzy in-between.

Jacen tended to think of Force-sensitives as a kind apart — not in the sense of them being inherently superior to ordinary people, but as it being a... "Profession" wasn't quite the word he was looking for, too mundane. Perhaps a calling, similar to various religions orders throughout the galaxy whose clergy weren't so gifted. (The Jedi Order had, in fact, sprung forth from the priesthood of a long-vanished religion.) The precise role of the Jedi had evolved over time, but they had always had a role, a function they served in society. The Theran Listeners were healers and advisors. The Jensaarai were teachers and a sort of unofficial police force. The Aing-Tii, well, he knew so little of their society even now, but the monks he'd encountered, at the very least, he understood to be military officers of a kind. The Baran Do were priests of a sort of state religion, serving their society as scholars and teachers and advisors. The witches of Dathomir didn't quite fit the pattern, given the particular constraints their still largely primitive society existed under, but the tendency was for those gifted in their arts to be warriors, leaders.

It was not so on Dimitra. During their period in isolation, the mages had developed their own iteration of everything needed to build a functional society. There were mages who filled every role the Force-sensitives Jacen had met before might perform, but there were also mages who were businessmen, mages who were artists, mages who were bureaucrats, mages who were athletes, mages who were farmers. Even mages who'd once been slaves, before the demands of membership of the Empire of the Hand had required they all be freed. The Hand, as Jacen had learned from Jag during the war, absolutely forbid the institution of slavery within its borders — the only reason that many on Dimitra were now free, including mages.

And they'd built their own institutions as well, with all the standardisation and bureaucracy that one might expect in a modern society. Including, as it happened, in matters of education.

The Mages of Dimitra had regularized the teaching of their magic. Mage children attended schools, like any other, which taught to standardized curricula, a course of study which resulted in the conferment of certifications in different subject areas in multiple tiers. Primary schools, secondary schools, universities, there were academic journals, long histories of scholarly research and debate, an impossible volume of literature going back centuries. The method of instruction Jacen was familiar with, a master personally teaching a single student, this had been all but entirely phased out in the present day, almost everywhere in the world — it'd been retained for advanced study in certain specialized fields, or in limited cases among the wealthy or very particular social groups, but was virtually unheard of outside of those situations. And those masters who were taking apprentices, as Nāgamaṇi had told him in orbit, would expect their students to already be qualified in the prerequisite studies.

To the mages, for all his training going all the way back to when he was a child, Jacen appeared to be a complete novice. He was unqualified, in even the absolute basics.

He had to admit that, from a perspective, that impression was even correct. The woman helpfully showing him around that academy in Alhābas had offered to have him take a placement exam, as was regularly done with students from foreign institutions which might teach to a different standard. Jacen had taken a single glance at the exam paper — a written exam, like might be given at any common school in the galaxy (though done with ink on paper) — before deciding that there would be no point in doing so. The contents were simply nonsense to him, academic language he had no background for, testing knowledge he simply didn't possess.

Dimitran magic was...different, than he'd expected. It was academic, scientific, in a way he'd never seen before, from any of the Force-using traditions he'd learned of. He didn't quite know how to feel about that.

If he was being honest, he thought he might hate it.

It felt sterile. Taking all the deep wonder of the Force and chopping it up into discrete fields of study, cramming it into boxes which it did not belong in, stripping it of all its... Something. He didn't quite know how to put the feeling into words. But there was something about walking around that academy, listening to his guide rattle off the programs of study available, looking in on the classrooms — recognizable as such, though technologically limited and morphed to match the local culture — laboratories and the library, watching classes actually in session — the lecture far over his head, alien math equations scrawled over a board at the front — the longer he stayed there the more his creeping unease transformed into revulsion.

This, the way these mages approached the Force, something about it simply seemed...wrong, somehow. He couldn't quite put the feeling into words, but he knew he didn't like it.

Instead of immediately seeking instruction here or somewhere else — not that he would have much success, unless he wished to enter classes for small children so he could start from scratch — he decided to familiarize himself further with how mages thought of their own magic. Thankfully, he was granted access to the library here, after he moved on a few days later invited into another similar institution, and the one after that — visiting different nations, attempting to gather a wider pool of perspectives. What he discovered didn't make him feel any better. As the centuries had gone by, the mages had continually regularized their study of their magic, turned it into a science. On the one hand, by doing so they had managed to achieve incredible results, iterating on previous accomplishments to design more and more complex magics. That was evident simply looking around, even the furniture he sat on as he read, even the books themselves absolutely thrumming with power, woven into their very substance, the feats even ordinary mages could perform with but a wave of a wand, unimaginable. They were powerful, their arts versatile, that was undeniable. But their magic was sterile, practical, mathematical.

In turning their study of the Force into an academic one — a practical matter, a science — they had somehow stripped it of its very soul.

There were those whose arts had retained the more...spiritual approach Jacen was familiar with — treating such exploration with the dignity and respect it rightly deserved. But such an approach, to the Dimitrans, was inextricably linked with religion. Many Dimitrans were religious, including the mages, and magic was deeply tied to these beliefs and practices...but this sort of magic was solely tied to those practices. Jacen could theoretically pursue that sort of study, but that would effectively require conversion, or even joining some manner of priesthood, which was less than ideal for multiple reasons. For one, he could hardly bring himself to lie about the sincerity of his motivations, and he doubted these religious mages would accept his intrusion, and for another, the impression he had was that he was hardly likely to be taught the sort of magic he was curious about, what he'd seen in those recordings, very specialized in matters particular to their faith.

It seemed magic had been made secular, in a way that Jacen hadn't even realized it was possible for study of the Force to be. If he were asked, he wouldn't have claimed to be a religious person, but he suspected that the Mages of Dimitra would say he was, in the terms that they conceived of such things.

Given how strong his emotional reaction was to their approach to the Force, they might even be correct.

As he learned more about the development of the study of magic, he realized that the formalization of education was a recent phenomenon. Recent relatively speaking, of course — it might not seem so to the average mage, but Dimitra was truly a very young society, a few hundred years was the blink of an eye on galactic time scales. In most regions of the world, this had been a gradual development as their magic diversified and grew in complexity, but it'd been greatly accelerated when the mages had gone into hiding a few centuries ago. Before then, the sort of personal apprenticeship Jacen was more familiar with had predominated. Such an apprenticeship might have been limited to a particular subject area — in previous generations it'd been very common for mages to be specialized, educated toward a particular profession — but more generalized apprenticeships had existed as well.

And while the mainstream education in magic might have been academicized, professionalized, Jacen had read and heard of other traditions. Some more rumour than fact, things which would be difficult to track down, whispers of forbidden magics, Dark Arts. Perhaps something which might be truly vile, maybe — but perhaps they were simply spoken of such because they were circumscribed, an approach to their magic that had become socially deprecated as their art transformed into science...

The difficulty was that this approach to magic was not taught anywhere — obviously — and those who might be willing to accept a student did not advertize themselves as such. Which, again, was no surprise, given that these 'Dark Arts' were often explicitly illegal. And apprenticeships of the like had gone out of fashion, centuries ago now.

Luckily for him, especially long-lived mages were a known phenomenon. Mages in general lived longer than their ungifted cousins, as a small minority of the population were known to do — including Jedi in what had seemed to be a coincidence, but now Jacen suspected those other long-lived individuals had undiscovered Force potential — but there were some who lived far longer than the expected two centuries or so. Some were born with a gift that made them effectively immortal — an innate ability to transform their very bodies, an absurd feat of magic which was even heritable, Jacen had never heard of such a thing before. (A quirk peculiar to Dimitra, it seemed, like so many others.) It was also possible to extend one's life with magic, through various means. It wasn't unusual to hear of mages who were five centuries old — there were several such beings in the general area of Dimitra he'd been dropped off in — some who'd even endured well longer than a thousand.

A tiny handful were much older than that — a few were believed to be literally prehistoric, having lived as long as ten thousand years, older than even sedentary civilization on Dimitra. The eldest beings in all the galaxy might very well live on Dimitra, yet another detail which made the planet notable.

Such beings would obviously be unaffected by the modern culture around Dimitran magic.

The difficulty would be in getting their attention.

He quickly decided he would have no luck with the relatively young immortals common in the particular part of the world he'd been dropped off in — so far as such people were common at all, of course. These persons were either associated with religious cults, which would present him with the difficulties that he'd determined would come with infiltrating one of them, or were experts in particular fields of study, and would likely expect advanced qualifications of any potential students. (Rather like Nāgamaṇi in that way...in fact, he was coming to suspect Nāgamaṇi was truly one of these immortals, and he'd simply never realized at the time.) With them eliminated, the best prospects were the Twin Ladies of a land to the west, and the Mountain Sages of a land to the east. While the Ladies were known to run something of an academy of their own, the Sages were far more numerous, what sounded like an entire city of them — the more they were, the more likely it became that one would be willing to teach him.

The issue with that was that their city — it went by a variety of names, all of which were very poetical and didn't translate well into Basic — was hidden with powerful magic, and had been for literal millennia. It was said that these protections had been laid and were maintained by a figure referred to only as the Queen Mother, a mage so old (on the order of eight thousand years or older) and powerful that she'd been effectively deified, and were widely considered to be unassailable even by the most advanced methods available to Dimitran mages. There was a particular mountain range in the east of the largest landmass on the planet which was believed to contain the site of the city, somewhere, but nobody had any idea where...and even that was only a guess. The only way to reach the city was to be invited. Luckily for him, while the Sages did live in their secret city, they did not spend all their time there — they had been very isolated for a long time, but since the Yuuzhan Vong invasion had begun to far more liberally offer their services to Dimitra, toward various rebuilding and research projects. It was a relatively simple matter to find some of these projects, and attempt to make contact with one of the Sages there.

Jacen's first approach was on the fringes of a great desert at the heart of the continent, large swaths of which the mages were in the process of converting into fertile farmland to help feed their population in the wake of the invasion. In preparing for his approach, he'd read up some on the project, and been completely dumbfounded by what he discovered: the Yuuzhan Vong had released a plague of dwiibit on the world, the same fast-reproducing beetles they'd used to terraform countless worlds (and in the process suffocate any remaining resistance with toxic byproducts), and the Dimitrans had somehow reverse-engineered them. The mages had discovered how they functioned, somehow — as far as Jacen was aware, that was one mystery which had never been solved by scientists back home — and used that knowledge to stop their spread, and were now using them to terraform Dimitra. The same process the Yuuzhan Vong used to wrench a biosphere to their purposes turned to fertilizing soil, spreading spores of beneficial organisms, directly hydrating roots, fighting pests, even transforming sterile sands into useable soil...

That was just bizarre. Impressive, yes, but he never would have imagined...

In any case, Jacen managed to find a site where one of these mages was working — a middle-aged man in colourful trousers and jacket made of some gleaming fabric. Luckily for him, the Sage would occasionally take walks alone through the land they were reclaiming, seemingly observing the progress of their third-wave colonizers. Their process didn't allow jumping directly to major crops, instead building the soil up in waves, lichens and fungi and mosses, progressing to small, simple plants which grew voraciously but had also integrated symbiotes which released nutrients into the soil, helping to prepare for the next step. It was a simple matter to wait for the Sage to show himself, walking across the thick carpet of greenery, countless criss-crossing vines speckled with violet flowers, and for Jacen to approach.

The meeting seemed to be going more or less smoothly, at first. The man — looking perfectly unremarkable but all but burning with power, intense enough Jacen could feel it crackle on his skin and taste it on the roof of his mouth — was personable enough, answering some of his questions on the project here, listening to his story of what had brought him to Dimitra, asking a few polite questions about galactic society and other Force traditions he'd encountered.

When Jacen broached the subject of learning from the Sages, the man abruptly closed off — he flatly told Jacen that scholars were welcome at their city by invitation only. And then he left, without another word.

...How frustrating.

His second approach wasn't any more successful than the first. This time he'd scouted out a project far to the south, just outside of the planet's tropical belt, high enough in the mountains to force a more temperate climate. This land had been the site of one of the Yuuzhan Vong's major landing parties, and had been ground zero for a dwiibit release — the ecological damage had been overwhelming, a large multinational team attempting to resurrect the ruined environment with as much of its previous biological diversity intact as possible. While greening a desert might seem more impressive on the surface, recreating a natural environment was a much more complex endeavour, Jacen was certain Tekli and Tenel Ka and Master Cilghal would find it fascinating. He should try to copy some data for them as long as he was here...

This Sage, a woman, shot him down much more quickly than the first one had — he got the clear feeling the Sages had been warned — but she also didn't flee immediately, staying behind to explain that there would be no point in pursuing them any further. The Queen Mother had learned of his arrival on the planet immediately, and had already known he would attempt to seek lessons from them, and had already determined he would be denied — all this had happened on the very day he'd arrived, it seemed, the Queen Mother gifted enough in foresight to predict what he would do. The only way to reach the city was by invitation, yes, but they only invited notable scholars, who might contribute to their vast library of knowledge accumulated over millennia — they simply did not teach amateurs. If he wanted, they could help him enter practically any school of magic in the world, they would even pay his tuition, but they would not teach him themselves.

The woman made the offer, but Jacen could tell by the cool, detached feel of her mind that she knew he would not accept — he had no interest in their magic as an academic discipline, and simply hadn't the patience to attend classes alongside literal children. He supposed the Queen Mother had told her Sages that too.

That avenue exhausted, Jacen had travelled west to seek out these Twin Ladies. He took some time along the way to admire the Gates the Dimitrans used for public transportation, some manner of device which used the Force to unify the space between two archways thousands of kilometers apart, allowing one to walk straight through one and out the other, fascinating. The Dimitrans had made a whole world-spanning network out of them, large public buildings housing numerous Gates, the largest holding dozens, complete with immigration offices and food courts and shopping centres and attached hotels for long-distance travellers. Rather like spaceports, though at a smaller scale, without any need of the large landing pads, it was interesting.

And put together only in a short handful of years, since the mages revealed themselves — the Dimitrans acted quickly when they had a mind to, that was for certain.

After his difficulties with the Sages, it was shockingly easy to walk right into the academy run by the Twin Ladies. Situated on the shore of a lake off of a river that wound straight through Dimitra's largest desert, it was a quiet, tranquil sort of place, the compound far enough away from the nearest city of al-Fayyūm to achieve some isolation from the frantic bustle of mundane life. And after only maybe ten hours lingering around the place, he found himself in a meeting with one of the academy's immortal patrons, in person.

It'd been somewhat intimidating, if he was being honest. The Green One, as her name (or perhaps simply a title?) could be literally translated, looked to be an ordinary woman, perhaps thirty, hair black and skin bronzed by the sun, her eyes a vivid green — an unnatural colour in humans, Jacen assumed it'd been achieved through magic somehow. She wore a simple dress woven of natural fibres, bleached white to shine in the sun, embroidery in curling patterns done in green and blue and yellow. She did wear jewelry, featuring primarily gold and blue-green jade, but the craftsmanship was quite simple for such things, and hardly as ostentatious as one might expect of a woman who'd been literally worshipped as a goddess for millennia.

While she might look ordinary, she felt anything but — her presence in the Force was deep in a way Jacen had never felt on a person before. She was obscenely powerful, yes, but it wasn't just the power shining off of her as clear and intense as the sun, no, there was a weight to her, something that seemed to bend and warp the very fabric of the world around her, all potential in her vicinity drawn inside to vanish in her depths, unseen.

The Green One wasn't quite so ancient as the Queen Mother, perhaps seven thousand years against around nine. She might not be the most powerful being on this world but, sitting at a table across from her, sipping tea as they discussed what he wished to gain from his visit to Dimitra, he was keenly aware that she was undoubtedly the single most powerful being he had ever personally encountered.

Luckily, while the Green One might have once been worshipped as a goddess, she didn't have the pride of one — if she had, Jacen might have inadvertently offended her. He hadn't known when he began their conversation that the Green One was personally responsible for the development of the systematic study of their magic, a good five thousand years ago now. More than becoming irritated with him, the impression he'd gotten was that the Green One almost pitied him. She explained how she'd discovered, bit by bit over centuries, how the old rituals and wild spells used in the earliest days of their society — by the sound of it, arts more similar to those used by the Jedi and the Sith and other traditions he was familiar with — could be regularized to reliably reproduce particular effects. How these effects could be refined, how she could encode their elements into a written script, how she'd learned to make that writing itself project power to enchant objects and raise wards — and how others had iterated on her discoveries, generation after generation over the course of thousands of years, to produce all the magic they were capable of now, how they continued to refine their techniques to generate ever new achievements of magic...

The Green One looked at him, and saw Dimitran mages as they had been thousands of years before, back when the peoples of this world had first started gathering to form early petty kingdoms. It would be as though a primitive tribesman were to ask a modern hyperspace engineer how to build a simple wheeled cart.

The Green One heard him speak of all he'd learned from the Jedi, the witches of Dathomir, the Theran Listeners, the Aing-Tii, the Baran Do, and she was unimpressed — she found it sad, pitiable, that they had achieved so little.

By her measure, the Green One had personally discovered more of the Force than every tradition Jacen had ever even heard of put together. And she was sad for them.

Jacen had no idea how to feel about that.

As had occurred before, the obscenely powerful immortal offered to secure him entrance into the magical school of his choice. If it didn't happen to be here in her country, she had the connections to manage sending him pretty much anywhere he wanted. The Green One wouldn't teach him herself, which he had to admit was fair enough — she was preoccupied with the classes she was teaching, the assistance she was giving the local governments, and with her personal research projects. On top of that, she was so familiar with the way that mages viewed the Force (having practically invented it herself, thousands of years previously), was so accustomed to only teaching advanced students who already had a dozen years or more of formalized education under their belts, that she might have trouble explaining the basics to someone new to it. (She mentioned that the Red One might be better for this purpose, being a rather more wild character, but she was very busy with a mix of security and diplomatic projects.) Since Jacen was older than incoming students generally were, she was certain competent instructors could be convinced to give him an...accelerated course, of sorts. They couldn't expect people to drop everything they were doing and focus on him entirely — people did have jobs to do, and Dimitra was still occupied with rebuilding efforts, not to mention being properly integrated into galactic society — but there was no reason to expect him to advance through the subject matter at the same rate as children. Something could be arranged, she was certain.

Jacen asked to have time to think about it. There was something...

He didn't quite know how to describe the feeling. He'd been certain of the rightness of his position, that the Dimitran approach to the Force, how the very soul had been stripped out of it, nothing had quite driven home that he might be misguided in his aversion like feeling the Green One's pity. It'd made him think, just for a moment, that perhaps by the standards of the Dimitrans, he was no different from the primitive tribesman who looked up at the turning of the stars in the sky and imagined them as the playthings of gods. When it came to magic, perhaps the Dimitrans were the advanced civilization, and Jacen was the primitive doing the best he could with limited knowledge.

It'd been a...humbling moment, to say the least. But everything he'd been taught his whole life, everything he thought he'd known, everything he'd felt, it was difficult to simply let it all go and surrender himself to teachings that felt, to him, to be anathema to the very core of what the Force was. It was eye-opening, yes, it...

As impressive as Dimitran magic was, they could do so much that Jacen had never imagined... Perhaps they were simply correct about the nature of the Force, and he — not only he, but every Jedi, every practitioner of every Force tradition he was familiar with — was not. But he could not let go of everything he'd known, everything he was, quite so easily. Accepting the Dimitran approach to their magic would be a significant step, a significant challenge, in a way all of his other studies simply hadn't been. It was difficult, it was humiliating, it was unsettling.

He'd asked to think about it — that he needed time to come to terms with what he'd learned here on Dimitra already. The Green One had agreed, had him shown to a room here at the academy, allowed him free access to the library. Until it was time.

But he wasn't quite ready to give up. So when he learned of another immortal, far to the northwest, one whose history and character seemed somewhat more promising, he couldn't help but give it one last try. Most immortals were somehow associated with specific religious cults, or academicized professions, the Queen Mother and the Green One closely tied to magical scholarship — the Green One far more closely than he'd realized, it seemed. Despite their age, he supposed it should have been obvious that they might not quite provide what he was looking for. And they were involved in society, to one degree or another, they had other obligations, other concerns, of course they wouldn't have the time to dedicate to teaching him.

Such could not be said for the so-called Queen of Nightmares.

An island off the northwestern edge of the planet's primary landmass — at a northerly enough latitude that it should be quite frigid, but was kept mild and wet by favourable ocean currents — was said to be the home of the eldest known mage in existence. There was only one serious competitor for the title, a man living somewhere on the other major landmass, on the opposite side of the planet. (Jacen had noticed that female immortals seemed to outnumber the males, he wasn't certain if there was a reason for that or if it were simple coincidence.) Reliable records only went back a few centuries, perhaps a couple thousand years in very particular locales, so it wasn't unusual for long-lived immortals to have only guesses as to their own age, but the Queen of Nightmares was peculiar in that scholars had made estimates based on her memory of the ancient climate. It seemed Dimitra featured a slow oscillation between warm and cold periods, and her own statements as to her early life suggested she was born during the most recent cold period — implying she was at least twelve-thousand years old, and could well be a few thousand years older than that.

Which was honestly surreal to think about. He generally thought of Dimitran society as young, but here was a single woman who'd been born before the Pius Dea Republic, a historical period modern people considered dim ancient history. So far back into the past that most people had simply never even heard of it — and why should they have? It wasn't as though something so long ago had any impact on most people's daily lives. It was curious how Dimitra could feel primitive yet advanced, young yet old at the same time.

Most of the immortals Jacen had read of had seemed largely benevolent, if peculiar and inscrutable at times. Given the extreme power at their disposal, such that some of them had been literally worshipped as gods — and some, arguably, still were to this day — that might perhaps seem unusual, but he'd gotten the impression that this was no accident. Aggressive immortals, by their very nature, were likely to be drawn into more conflicts, exposed to more violence, increasing the likelihood of their own demise — those immortals of malevolent disposition led more violent, less stable lives, and simply didn't live as long. They might burn bright, doing much damage in their time, but that time quickly came to an end.

As might be suggested by the name she was popularly known by, the Queen of Nightmares was an exception. Thousands of years ago, so long in the past it was only half-remembered legend, she had ruled as an undying tyrant, unchallenged for generations, centuries. While her people might have had the strongest possible protection from outsiders, they had also been subject to her whims — and her whims had been bloody, sadistic, torturing people to death for the smallest of slights, even sacrificing them in grisly rituals. Even more disturbing, she was known to be a master in the manipulation of the mind, had known the thoughts and feelings of all people within her realm...and could shape them to her preference, the people under her rule little more than puppets helpless before her total domination.

Until, one day, she'd simply left. Nobody was certain why, and the few times scholars had had the occasion to ask she'd never given very satisfying answers — she claimed she'd simply tired of that life, and moved on. Over the course of generations, the memory of her despotic rule had faded into legend, though she'd never entirely left the minds of the people who lived in the region. Because, of course, she was still there, she'd simply taken a far less active role in the affairs of the island.

She'd shown herself only rarely in the millennia since, primarily in dreams. It seemed her powers over the mind had only increased, aware of what everyone for hundreds of kilometres around was thinking, even as that population had multiplied from bare tens of thousands to a hundred million. While she could directly manipulate people's minds if she wished, she'd seemingly lost the taste for the talent — instead, she would occasionally appear in people's dreams. Sometimes to pass on a warning, or advice, sometimes to make a threat.

Sometimes, with people who had displeased her for whatever reason, she would torture them in their sleep, subject them to horrors that a physical body could never endure, her victims protected by the simulated nature of their torment but yet intimately vulnerable, she'd come to them in their sleep, defenseless. There were stories of her visiting the same person nightly, tormenting them again and again, until they were driven insane by the mental strain. A select handful she would simply kill, snuffing out their minds as easily as Jacen might switch off a light.

Hence, Queen of Nightmares.

So overwhelmingly powerful as she was, she only rarely intervened in affairs on the island — and those times she did were seemingly random, her unpredictability only amplifying people's wariness of her. Thousands of years ago, in prehistory — after her ancient kingdom had already faded into legend, but before the written word had reached the region — the Celts had settled and replaced the original population, but she had not intervened. There were stories of her protecting certain people, of punishing particular tribes or kings, but the Celtic settlement at large had not been opposed. Some centuries later, the Romans had attempted to land on their shores, but their expeditions had been rebuffed, the Roman leadership threatened in dreams to leave the island alone. Over a millennium later, the English had conquered the island, and almost entirely replaced the Celts — the mages had gone into hiding early in the process, so they remained Celtic, but among the common people only tiny pockets of the language remained, the original culture virtually obliterated — but the Queen of Nightmares had not intervened against that invasion. None knew why the Celtic and English settlements had been tolerated, but not the Roman one.

The seeming randomness of her actions, sometimes defending the peoples of the island but sometimes not, now and again appearing out of nowhere to murder single kings or even annihilate entire clans, with no explanation, the people had become understandably superstitious, making ritual offerings in attempts to appease her, avoiding even speaking her name lest they attract her attention. Hence why she was only known by a variety of epithets, and never an ordinary name — it was known she'd had a name in the past, likely many over the course of millennia, but they'd all been forgotten in the ages sense. The mages had kept her memory, continuing in their superstition, but among the majority of the population, as magic fell into myth she'd come to be forgotten, conflated with broadly similar legendary figures from ancient religion, dismissed as fiction.

Until the Yuuzhan Vong had attacked. In their initial assault, the Yuuzhan Vong had bombed all the major cities of the entire planet from orbit — out of the reach of the technologically primitive Dimitrans, where they could not retaliate. This little, unremarkable-seeming island in the north hosted a single city that had been on the target list. Across the dozen bombing runs the Yuuzhan Vong fleet had made over Ireland, hundreds of bombs had been aimed at Dublin.

Out of those hundreds, zero had reached the ground. The Queen of Nightmares had intercepted every single one, singlehandedly.

Ireland was, perhaps, the only Dimitran nation of more than a couple million people or so which had passed through the invasion entirely unharmed. Not a single bomb, not a single saboteur concealed under uglith, nothing. They'd had to contend with resource shortages and famine, the collapse of the planetary economy hitting them the same as everyone else, they'd been flooded with refugees drawn to the miraculous aura of safety that seemed to guard the island, this one place more than anywhere in all the world. But for all the economic and political struggle they'd had to endure, the war itself had never touched Irish soil.

Needless to say, veneration of the unspeakably ancient Dark Lady had flourished into new life in the aftermath. He'd heard the institutional religion dominant on the island had been doing whatever they could to suppress it — given that he'd once spotted a shrine to her directly outside a church, close enough to certainly be on church property, they weren't having much success with that.

Jacen found he could hardly blame the locals. The vast majority of them had little knowledge of magic, had believed it was fictional not even seven years ago, and it was hard not to have sympathy for this sort of superstition developed around a figure of such age and power.

She was not a goddess, in the literal sense — but she was, perhaps, as near to becoming such a thing as was possible for any being.

And she was old, having lived long before the regular, academic study of magic. Twice the age of such practices, perhaps even three times! The magic she practiced dated to an older, wilder time, when Dimitran arts had been more similar to what Jacen was accustomed to. It was observed that, in the few reliable appearances they had record of, she'd never even been observed to use a wand, or any similar device Dimitrans might use to focus their magic. And yet she performed feats most mages would never believe possible without one, or never believe possible at all, odd, alien, terrifying magic, ancient and wild.

Perhaps, Dimitran magic as it had been before the soul had been stripped from it, some character retained that had been lost in the taming the Green One had pioneered.

And so Jacen attempted to seek her out.

This would seem difficult to do, on the surface — after all, none knew practically anything about the Queen of Nightmares. She was one of those shape-shifting mages, her features constantly changing, could look like anyone she pleased. More than that, she was known to be able to take the form of animals, so she might not even look human, could smoothly blend into the wildlife. She had no public presence whatsoever, there was no official way to get into contact with her.

But he had methods that were not available to others.

It would have been difficult to track down the hidden city of the Queen Mother, yes, but that was because there would be nothing to track. The Queen of Nightmares, she was a different matter. It was said that her presence suffused the entirety of Ireland — perhaps even further, to reach the smaller islands off its shores...or perhaps even further, to see threats as they approached. As vast and as powerful as she was, she permeated every inch for kilometres around, she was effectively a part of the environment, inseparable from the air they all breathed. Jacen could understand that the mages, given how their devices gathered energy from the environment, might have trouble distinguishing what was natural from what was her.

Jacen only needed a brief meditation before he found her. Leaning on techniques he'd learned from the Baran Do to feel the air, on the Listeners to feel for meaning, to separate the faint thread of being against the background hum of the Force — it was subtle, as powerful as she was yet faint from this distance. But he was certain that was her. It could hardly be anyone else, he couldn't imagine the sheer scale of such a consciousness, and with the legend of the Queen of Nightmares springing from this region, well. It had to be her.

Not only was he certain he'd found her, he was certain she'd noticed. Subtle, the faintest and briefest moment, but he felt the recognition, like eyes locking for but a second from opposite ends of a crowded hall.

He held on to that feeling, and he followed it.

The faint hint of her presence on the air was leading him west. The city he'd landed in, the largest on the island, was on the eastern shore, the feeling guiding him toward its centre. Travel was frustratingly slow, as he needed to keep a hold of her presence the entire way — given the state of transportation available on Dimitra, he was practically forced to travel on foot. Of course, he could move quite quickly if the situation called for it, but neither did he wish to draw attention to himself, flying across the ground at speed until he felt a town approaching, slow to a walk, wait until he was out of sight before again jolting into a sprint...

She was watching him. He could feel it. Not constantly, but once and again he felt that faint recognition, eyes on the back of his neck — that odd feeling of being observed, but without any sense of where that feeling was coming from. He couldn't feel her thoughts, too far away, whatever magic she was using to watch him not permitting him to watch her in return. But he knew she was there.

That night, he dreamed of Vergere, chasing after her through the twisted surreal biomechanical maze of occupied Coruscant, her riddles ringing in his ears, confused and frustrated — and then Vergere was gone, in her place an unfamiliar Dimitran bird, silky black feathers and burning blue eyes, staring hard and sharp through his, and then the ground was crumbling under his feet and he was falling, the tentacles of a yammosk grasping at him, drawing him toward the maw, hot breath ruffling his hair and teeth dragging at his skin, the piercing cry of an alien animal ringing through his skull—

—and then he woke up, his heart pounding, prickling with cold sweat.

If she wished to deter him, she would have to try harder than that.

After another day of travel, he was nearing the western coast — she was close, he could feel it. But it would be rude to intrude upon her home in the middle of the night, so he found somewhere to pass until morning.

He had no peculiar dreams this time. Perhaps she had decided to allow him to approach.

Early in the morning he came upon another town, again slowed as he approached, to avoid drawing undue attention. Like many of the settlements he'd seen in Ireland, this one was a visible contrast of old and new — a heart formed of diverse structures in a mix of materials and styles, perhaps dating to a spread of time periods, a ring around the edge more uniform, sharper and newer. The recent construction also tended to be larger, denser, residential blocks with attached amenities. He assumed these were public housing for refugees, or perhaps, as he hadn't seen them everywhere he'd been, housing for original residents who'd relocated for whatever reason. There was industry of a kind here — much of it now using magical techniques, which could be built by the hands of people with no power of their own, by means he didn't understand as yet — presumably the towns with more housing blocks had more available work than the towns without such additions. This was an especially small town, there was only a single sizeable block on the fringes, nearby a similarly recent building he suspected was some sort of power or communications station, the town a single dense central square surrounded by a few wandering streets.

She didn't live here in this town, but she was close, he could feel it. He'd reached the western shore now, the sea just to the west of the little town — she was that way, somewhere a bit further along the coast, not far now.

Jacen walked into the town, heading toward the square at the centre. It was quiet, hardly anyone about. He wasn't sure if that was simply because this was a very small place, in a rural part of the island, or if it were too early in the morning for people to be out yet. Or perhaps it was simply the weather that had them shut up in their homes — the sky was overcast, rolling clouds thick and gray, holding a threat of rain. He'd learned that these particular islands were known for their miserable weather, cool and dark and wet almost regardless of the season, kept to a very consistent level of depressing thanks to the sea all around. It was the end of winter now, but supposedly even in the height of summer it wouldn't even become that much warmer, though at least there'd be more sun.

(It sort of reminded him of the half-forgotten stories of his grandfather's homeworld Dad had told him, though Tralus was much less wet than Ireland.)

As he passed through the square at the town's heart, ringed with shops and a pointed structure he'd learned indicated a church, Jacen was struck by a sudden cold flash, lurched to a halt. The skin at the back of his neck crawling, his stomach twisting, he scanned around the square, both with his eyes and reaching out with his thoughts...but he was practically alone. There was a single woman walking by, heading to open up one of the offices around the square, he could feel a few living presences further afield, but nothing nearby. Nobody was paying him any particular attention, he couldn't even feel the Queen of Nightmares watching him at the moment.

But still the feeling of alarm thrummed through him unabated, his hair standing on end and his pulse throbbing in his ears, his hand unthinkingly moved to hover over the hilt of his lightsaber. He was in danger...but he couldn't tell from what.

Then, a hand clamped onto his arm, and the mind of a being exploded into his awareness — a mage, their presence in the Force dark and frigid and intense, loud and crackling in his ears like lightning and slithering over his skin like greedy tentacles, like so many other mages wrapped up in dense static power held close to their skin. (Enchanted clothing and other artefacts, he realized now, much of what he'd felt of Nāgamaṇi had been not the power of her own person but the empowered objects she carried on her.) He jumped, started to move, but before he could hardly react there was a pulse of energy flaring over him, which then clenched and twisted—

—the square around him disappeared, he felt himself being yanked away, some hard cold something pressing hard against his skin, squeezing, but retaining some sense of motion, Jacen being dragged along by the power held tight around him and the hand gripping his arm, meaningless colors and shapes blooming in his vision as the pressure squeezed at his eyes, his ears popping—

—his boots clacked against hard wooden tile as the world came snapping back into existence. His head spinning and his stomach churning, he staggered, gasping for breath. It was hard to make his eyes focus, but his perception of his surroundings through the Force wasn't doing him much better, everything too bright, magic, the place he was in was thoroughly magical, woven through the very substance of every object all around, even the floor under his feet, leaving him disoriented, as though blinking against glare from the sun...

"Now, just what sort of mischief are you up to?" said a voice from nearby, speaking in Minnisiät — as she spoke, the dark frigid slithering presence reaching toward him, tendrils worming their way into his mind—

He firmed himself up, throwing off the intrusion, spun around to face her, the hilt of his lightsaber jumping into his palm with an audible slapping noise, the blade surging to life with the familiar snap-hiss-humm. Whatever place this was, it was lit with firelight — not unusual in mages' dwellings in this part of the world, he'd learned — dim enough for the glow of his lightsaber to play off the human woman's face, casting eerie green-tinted shadows. If she recognized the weapon at all, she showed little sign of it, simply giving the blade a curious raised eyebrow.

The pale length of a wand was in her hand before he hardly noticed, a violet spell jumping toward him — the ball of light dense and bright in the Force, yet cold and dark all at once, the power contained within it unusually rigid, a complex interlocking geometric form. Moving without thinking, he batted the spell back at her. If he had been thinking, he might not have tried it, as he'd never tested if a lightsaber could deflect Dimitran spells, but it did work, the purple blob of light reversing course, but the woman's hand came up and slapped it aside before it could reach her, sending it sailing over her shoulder. He had no idea what that spell did, but it was undoubtedly a hostile act, Jacen levitated a nearby chair off the ground, sending it flying in at the back of the woman's head, but it transformed into a cloud of feathers before it could reach her, parting around before reforming into the chair right on the other side, and then zooming straight at him, a wide slash of his lightsaber split it in two, a quick push splitting the two halves enough to pass to either side, and another spell was coming in at him, this time a wide arc, he jumped above it, turning sideways in mid-air to pull his legs out of the way, moving closer to the woman, sparks dancing between the fingers of his free hand before lancing out in a wide cone of electricity, but they were caught by a large steel shield that had just appeared out of nowhere, in a blink, his feet touched back down on the ground and—

—the curved steel disc whipped around almost faster than he could follow and buried itself in his gut, edge first. The force bending him over, his breath whooshing out of his lungs, he tipped back a couple of steps, staggering. He felt another spell coming, alarm prickling like a wave of static over his skin, his arm moving of its own accord, his lightsaber moved into line—

The blade shattered, loose wisps of greenish plasma scattering to dissolve away into the air. The spell, glowing an angry vivid orange, continued on without slowing to strike him in the chest.

Pain.

Jacen was no stranger to pain, at this point. Jedi training could be a bit rough on a body at times, and the war against the Yuuzhan Vong had been brutal — and he'd even survived captivity. He'd spent days trapped in a torture device they called the Embrace of Pain, a living construct that twisted one's body into unnatural postures, such to strain tendons and joints to draw out whatever agony it can, sensors built into it to ensure the subject is experiencing as unpleasant of a time as physically possible. And he'd been so confined, for days. On multiple occasions, even, so raw and exhausted and delirious from continuous pain and associated lack of sleep that he'd been certain he would simply die.

But that pain had been physical, achieved by the contortion of the body, something external.

Whatever magic this was seemed to light his very nerves aflame. Every pain it was possible to feel, slashing and piercing and crushing and burning and freezing, all of them all wrapped up at once and turned up to the absolute highest intensity, enough all sense of the world around him simply fell away, and all he could feel was the thought-obliterating wall of perfect agony, unbending and unyielding, he instinctively tried to cringe away but it was not an external assault that could be escaped, it was inside him, he couldn't even think enough to do anything about it, everything falling away, nothing but the agony screaming through him until he couldn't even feel his body at all, the position of his limbs and his orientation in space and even the distinction between his fingers, nothing, tearing through him like—

And then it was gone, and he was left curled up on the hard wooden floor, shivering and gasping for breath, his throat raw. He still hurt, an echo of the absolute agony still ringing throw him, hard and hot like the lingering soreness after a day of intense exercise, his breath thin and ragged, it was hard to focus, thoughts scattered and unfocussed...

Scattered enough that it took him a moment to realise he wasn't alone in his head — there was an alien presence in here with him, deftly rifling through his memories.

"Welcome back, Jacen Solo." The words swam into his ears, almost as though heard from underwater, his senses not quite returned to normal from the disorientation induced by...whatever that was. "That was the cruciātus — an extreme measure, perhaps, but I was uncertain what degree of threat you presented. Given the circumstances, I believed the caution was warranted." There were some twitters of power, something being done, Jacen still too scattered to feel it out. "Drink. The phial holds a healing potion, which will help with the after-effects. The water is to wash out the taste, which is quite unpleasant, I'm afraid."

His limbs shaking, weak and numb, after a moment he managed to push himself up to a seat. A short distance away, set within reach on the wooden floor, were a small glass vial holding a greenish-purplish liquid, and a thick-bottomed tumbler filled nearly to the brim with water. He gave the vial a wary look, before glancing up, following the voice, his dim awareness of the woman's presence.

While he'd been...indisposed, the woman had taken a seat in an armchair. They were in some manner of sitting room, a wood-burning hearth set into a wall not far away, nearly every inch of the rest of the walls taken up with bookshelves, hundreds and hundreds of bound volumes — both the hearth and the books would be eccentric indulgences back home, but were perfectly ordinary here. The mage — a woman of perhaps thirty, her hair smooth black falling in soft curls, skin sun-bronzed and spotted with freckles, eyes a pale ice blue — was watching him, sitting at ease, her legs crossed at the knee.

His lightsaber was sitting on the arm of her chair, polished metal glimmering in the firelight.

As he hesitated, there was a twitter from her mind, some feeling he didn't have the focus at the moment to read properly. "It isn't poison. If I wished you dead, Solo, you would be already."

...That, at least, he believed — he'd been completely helpless for however long the...episode induced by that spell had lasted. His hand shaking, grimacing against the sparks of pain still shooting through him, he grasped the vial, tipped the thick, viscous substance into his mouth. The taste was, in fact, very unpleasant, harsh and green and musty and sour, the substance oily and grainy. But only seconds after he'd swallowed, he felt a tingly pulse rush through him, and the pain and stiffness lingering from the woman's spell was abruptly gone. He let out a thin shaky sigh, even as he grimaced against the vile medicine still clinging to the inside of his mouth. Snatching up the glass, he took a gulp of water, swished it around in his mouth before swallowing — his throat protested, body rebelling at the thought of taking in any more of the medicine, but he forced it down anyway — taking another gulp to fully cleanse away the taste. His voice breathy, hoarse, he muttered, "Thank you, that is better."

A cold flash of amusement from the woman, she drawled, "So now you find your manners."

As dazed as he still was by the magical torture, Jacen still managed an irritated glare. He wasn't the one that'd snatched someone off the street, teleported them away, and then proceeded to use...some kind of magic on them, he had no idea what that had been. Some magic firmly of the Dark Side, clearly, but beyond that...

The woman let out a thin sigh, her eyes tipping up to the ceiling for a blink. "Make yourself comfortable, Solo," she said, nodding behind him to the left. There was an armchair sitting a short distance away...the same armchair he'd cut in two during their brief fight, he thought, seeming entirely unharmed. Magic, clearly. "Then we may discuss what brought you here to Dimitra."

...There was really no point in doing anything besides play along. He had no idea where he was — she could have teleported him away to the opposite side of the planet, for all he knew — and she'd demonstrated that, while she was not above harming him, she hadn't any wish to murder him. He might need to make an escape attempt in future, but there didn't seem to be any further danger in simply talking, for the time being.

(Besides, he had a feeling that, as hostile as an introduction as this had been, he was about to be handed exactly what he'd been looking for.)

He groaned as he made to stand, the pain reduced by the magical medicine but still feeling stiff and sore. Once he'd made it up to his feet, the woman grasped his lightsaber, he tensed — but then she tossed it his direction, his hand moving to catch it almost on autopilot. He frowned at her, blinking.

A faint curl of a smirk on her lips, the woman said, flat and casual, "You are no threat to me. It makes no difference whether you hold your weapon or not."

"Perhaps. Perhaps I would do better in a second duel, now that I know some of your spells can't be deflected."

The woman's smile grew wider. Her mind reached out to him, cold (Dark), cool and slithering, he firmed up to hold her off — but, somehow, she slipped straight through him, like water seeping through cloth, numb pins and needles swept over him in a wave—

Oh, that felt very weird. His body moved, entirely outside of his control, turning to take a couple steps toward the chair, sinking into a seat, reclining back with his elbows on the chair's arms and his fingers laced in his lap, legs folded at the knee. And then, with another wave of tingles, the woman's mind retreated, and he was in control again.

"As I said," the woman drawled, her mind cool and amused, "you are no threat to me."

"...I see. I suppose I should thank you for meeting with me at all, and not simply murdering me from a distance."

A sudden twittering burst of laughter ringing through the woman's presence in the Force, intense enough he could feel it fluttering against his skin, her face broke into a bright grin, her pale eyes seeming to sparkle. "A charmer like your father, I see."

"Excuse me?"

"I am not the Queen of Nightmares, Solo. I understand you are new to Dimitra, but I imagine you can see why some might find the comparison flattering."

"Ah, I see. I had assumed — I have read of the legends of her ability to...puppeteer the bodies of other beings and, given the circumstances..." He had been near her home when he'd been abducted, and he knew she was aware of his approach. Though, now that he was paying closer attention, this woman's presence didn't have nearly the depth of the Green One's, and he would expect the Queen of Nightmares would feel even heavier, as she was twice or even thrice the other immortal's age...

"Understandable, I suppose." The woman still felt amused, the smile not quite having left her face. "That was, ah...corporal possession, I believe I would call it — I'm not accustomed to discussing magic in Minnisiät, but that translation will do. Any mind mage is theoretically capable of it, but few have had much practice with the trick. It's an especial talent of mine."

"I haven't heard of that magic yet." Jacen was aware that only certain mages were capable of performing any manipulation of the mind, what he considered a basic expression of Force ability. The mages did have spells that could replicate the effects, cast with a wand, but it was not something they could do unaided — that was limited to only particular, gifted mages. He'd thought such ability was common to all Force-sensitives, had been rather taken aback when he'd learned how rare it was here...but, when he thought about it, the manipulation of the mind was rare on Dathomir, and entirely absent among the Baran Do. (He hadn't seen any Aing-Tii perform any, but they hadn't commented on the subject, so he didn't know if they practiced it one way or the other.) It was possible that the ability to manipulate other minds was a secondary gift on top of underlying Force-sensitivity, but the talents co-occurred so frequently in the known galaxy that the Jedi had simply never noticed. The question then would be why the gift was so rare in particular places like Dorin and Dimitra. "Well, since you've gone trawling through my mind, it seems you have me at something of a disadvantage."

The woman chuckled under her breath for a moment, amused at the understatement. "I suppose I do at that. My name is Phoebe Ramsey. I'm a Major in the military of the United Kingdom — that is the country you are in presently, by the way, I took you off Ireland — and I'm to be an inaugural Lieutenant Colonel in the Cooperative Interplanetary Defence Forces of the United Nations of Dimitra, though that is not quite official as of yet. We are still in the process of formalising the creation of a common military — it is a deeply political matter, as you might imagine. Also, I'm uncertain whether those ranks translate correctly, the military hierarchy used by the Law is quite different from ours."

Even if she'd gotten off by a few steps, he still understood that he was speaking to a senior military officer, which was enough. "Jacen Solo, Jedi Knight. But of course you know that already."

Smirking a little again, Ramsey drawled, "Quite. I do apologise for the...less than friendly introduction. Last night, the Queen of Nightmares came to me in a dream, and demanded that I intercept you before you could reach her home. You've been thorough enough with your research to understand that, when one is visited by her, it would be foolish not to take the missive anything but deadly serious. I was forced to consider the possibility that you were a physical threat to her, and not merely a social one — and so I teleported you straight to my home, where my wards would intervene should any confrontation turn ill for me, and quickly resorted to curses such as the cruciātus. Out of an abundance of caution, you understand."

"...Yes, I suppose I do." Ramsey did not spell out that she'd had no choice but to do as the Queen of Nightmares commanded, but Jacen understood that well enough too — as powerful as she was, as superstitious as the mages understandably were about immortals such as her, refusing would not have seemed an option. Could not be an option, without leaving oneself open to reprisal from one of the most dangerous individuals on the entire planet, who could strike in one's sleep, from a distance. Yes, as...galling as it was that Ramsey had him so badly overpowered, he had to admit he understood her reasoning. "She did come to me the night before that, but it was... Given the stories I'd read, if she truly wished to dissuade me, I would have expected something more severe than that."

"You shouldn't believe everything you hear," Ramsey said, a lilt on her voice he wasn't certain how to interpret. "To a degree, she has become soft in her old age. But then, she can afford to be — her reputation has become so firmly rooted that even the mildest of visitations may terrify one into desperate action, lest she feel the need to turn...unfriendly. I imagine it has been quite some time since she has needed to use any true force to coerce anyone into doing her will."

That also made perfect sense, frustratingly enough. Sagging in his chair a little, Jacen bit out a sigh. "If she didn't wish to teach me, she could have used that dream to simply tell me so, directly."

"You cannot fool me, Solo," Ramsey said, her voice flat, a sharp sort of look in her eyes, "but you shouldn't attempt to fool yourself, either. You would not have taken no for an answer, not until you were rebuffed enough times for it to sink in she would never change her mind."

"I am—"

Interrupting him, her voice a low drawl, "Please. Looking through your memories a moment ago, I saw how you attempted to approach the Queen Mother, how you approached our world in the first place — and before you came here, how you endeavoured to attract the attention of those wandering warrior-monks, how you dealt with those clannish witches. And she would have seen that too, the moment you stepped foot on her island she already knew you better than you know yourself. She knew, just as I do now, that you would never have ceased attempting to acquire the teacher you feel a man of your unparalleled wisdom and skill is entitled to until you have been firmly convinced there is no such teacher available. If anything, you were encouraged by her attempt to turn you away! No, you believe you are entitled to the time and attention of we Dimitran mages — and all those other magical peoples you've dealth with — even a being so ancient and so powerful that you are little more than a flea to her, and would have gone on believing it until you have had your face rubbed into your own insignificance.

"You may believe the pretty little self-serving lies you tell yourself, Jacen Solo, but I am not convinced."

He opened his mouth to respond, and then just— What did he say to that?

He had to admit that Ramsey had a point about the Queen of Nightmares — if she had openly told him she wasn't interested, he probably would have tried again. At least to have a conversation in person, where he could attempt to press his case, to feel out whether there was any chance of talking her around. He'd come all this way, he'd been searching for approaching a month now, it... Well, he wasn't going to simply give up, not until he was certain all options had been exhausted. The way that Ramsey characterized his persistence was...it was...

Well, it was insulting, was what it was. But taking offense would sort of be playing into her framing of his character, so he couldn't argue the facts, but he couldn't argue the narrative either, and that was, just, unbelievably frustrating...

Ramsey was well aware of the trap she'd set for him too, openly smirking, her mind cool and tingly and bubbling with amusement. After a moment of staring back at him, almost challengingly, her eyes flicked away, looking somewhere behind him. "Ah good. Come on in, Sam," she said — in English now, the local language — gracefully swishing up to her feet, "bring that here."

Abruptly, another mind appeared in the room with them — close, he jumped with surprise. He hadn't felt them a moment ago, the wards Ramsey mentioned must be limiting his awareness. Turning to look over the back of the chair, he found a young man, perhaps Jacen's age or a little older, wreathed in power from the enchanted clothing the mages preferred but otherwise seeming unremarkable. The newcomer was carrying a tea tray, he walked toward where Ramsey was waiting, giving Jacen a curious look. Despite himself, he let out a little snort of laughter. "A moment ago you were torturing me, but now you're serving me tea?"

"I believe I already apologised for that misunderstanding." Ramsey conjured a little side table with a flick of her wand, the newcomer, Sam, set down the tea tray. She thanked the young man, he gave her a little bow of the head in return. Sam shot Jacen another curious look — he knew Ramsey had been on an errand for the Queen of Nightmares, but little besides that — before turning and walking out again, vanishing behind the concealing barrier of the wards. Beginning to pour the tea, Ramsey said, "I'm not familiar with the culture on your side of the Rift, but I imagine you have a similar tradition around hospitality as many others. I do regret that I...overreacted. I have had only one previous encounter with the Queen of Nightmares, and, well, it is quite unnerving, I'm certain you realise. Our meeting might have started on a hostile note, but I wish to end it on a more civilised one, observing such pleasantries as serving you tea. Unless you would rather hold a grudge, which I would understand."

"No, I think we can... What is it you say in English?" he asked, switching to the language in question. "Let bygones be bygones? I realize now I was...overstepping, in how I was approaching her. We can go ahead and call that hostile note we started on a rather more firm warning from the Queen of Nightmares to leave her be." Honestly, even if he wasn't willing to let it go — which he was, that curse had been unpleasant but the potion had mostly alleviated the after-effects — he'd likely play along for the time being regardless. He was very much aware of the fact that he was at Ramsey's mercy. At the very least, he could play at diplomacy long enough to get himself out of her presence.

Her lips curling with a cool smile, she said, "Yes, that was the other matter I wished to discuss." A quirk of a finger, and a cup on a saucer began floating over to Jacen — he let them gently coast into his grasp, feeling rather bemused at the frivolous use of magic. "Do you have any allergies? There is a nut in the biscuits which is a common allergen here on Earth. I'm uncertain if similar nuts exist off-world, but if one is sensitive to any allergens one is more likely to have a poor reaction to others."

"Not to my knowledge, no."

"Good — help yourself, then. Sam also brought cream and sugar, but I don't feel this blend calls for any. It's on the tray if you want it, regardless." Holding her own cup in one hand and a cookie in the other, Ramsey retreated back to her chair, sank down to a seat. "Your efforts to find a teacher to your liking may have been thoroughly frustrated. And I'm not surprised it has been — I'm certain you realise by now that the study of magic here on Earth has left behind certain...archaic modes of instruction. The relationship between master and apprentice which you are familiar with has become deprecated here, in the modern era. However, I have experience in such methods, both as the apprentice and as the master. If you are not so determined to escape my presence, of course."

It took a few seconds for the implication to click into place. He thought he could be forgiven for being a little slow on the uptake — this woman had abducted him, and then overpowered him in a brief, lightning-fast duel, then healed him of the injuries he'd sustained, and was now serving him tea. This whole incident had been...disorienting, to say the least. That she was now, out of nowhere, offering to give him what he'd been searching for, for weeks now... He'd already nearly lost hope of finding a suitable master even before leaving to search for the Queen of Nightmares, that had been a final attempt, he'd fully intended to return to Egypt to study at the Green One's academy if he failed once again. He'd resigned himself to failure already, had only intended to sit through a reasonably polite talk with the woman who'd so thoroughly humiliated him long enough to extricate himself... Well, it was understandable that he might be a little taken aback, he thought.

(He'd had a vague feeling, a moment ago, but having it so directly confirmed, casually and matter-of-factly, was still unexpected.)

He felt a simmering of amusement from Ramsey, shooting him a coy sort of smirk through the steam coiling up from her tea. The abrupt subject change might, at least in part, be because she was playing with him.

The tea, in fact, did not need to be adulterated with anything, sharp and earthy but also sour and sweet — it also suited well as a stalling tactic while he tried to regain command of his voice. "I suppose, if we truly are putting that hostile note behind us, I have no urgent need to escape." He put a disdainful drawl on the word, signaling his displeasure with Ramsey's not-so-subtle mockery, but she just kept smirking at him, still amused. "But you said yourself, the approach to the Force I'm used to has fallen out of favour here. How can you be so confident you'll be a suitable teacher?"

There was a flutter of disdain while he was speaking, but he didn't know why until Ramsey muttered the Force over her cup, rolling her eyes. Which, as irritating as that was, Jacen had to admit was fair enough — most Jedi would have a similar reaction to the Dimitrans' use of the word magic. "As I said, Solo, I have experience in the old ways. I've studied under multiple masters of the Dark Arts, and I have been master to several mages in turn. Such practices may be deprecated in the modern day, yes, but they have not fully died out. One simply must know where to look. It is true that I have never taught a beginner, but I'm certain we will work that out together. That you've acquired English through your Listening will help."

He was temporarily surprised that a Dimitran knew of the Theran Listeners, before remembering Ramsey must have learned of them while looking through his memories. "I find it hard to believe that you've learned from and taught so many already."

"I'm older than I look," Ramsey drawled, a curl to the corner of her lips. "I am immortal myself, though still young by such measures — I've not yet lived longer than a normal human lifespan. I turned seventy-six a couple months ago."

...So she was, in fact, older than she looked. Jacen would have guessed...twenty-five to thirty? Since she was a mage, and they all aged slowly, she could easily be fifty, but certainly not any older than that. Using how long the training of an adult Jedi student generally took, he would believe a woman in her seventies could have learned under and taught multiple other mages, that was far more realistic.

"As to what I would have to teach you, well, I am more suited to the role than almost anyone else you might find. I spent over a decade travelling the world, finding whatever old magics I could discover, learning from anyone who would deign to teach me. Scholars, priests, mystics. When I returned home, I took up the character of a religious visionary of a sort, drew a cult to myself — and when my following reached a critical mass, prosecuted an insurrection against the magical government over these isles. Not so long ago, I was a Dark Lord so feared the mages here were terrified even to speak my name, lest they draw my ire."

As dubious as all that sounded, it didn't feel like a lie — granted, she was far more talented in the mind arts than he was, so it was possible she was concealing any sign of deception from him. Somehow, he doubted it. But he couldn't help but ask, "Dark Lord?" Mages used the title in a similar fashion to the Sith, but the English word Ramsey used was gendered.

With a little dismissive flip of her hand, she said, "Politics, never you mind that. I did say it was a character — Voldemort's movement was always intended to fail, and to bring down the most hidebound, reactionary forces in British magical society with him. Unfortunately, I was killed in a fluke trap before it could implode as planned."

"...You were killed?"

Ramsey grinned, her mind cool and bright and bubbling with amusement. "I came back, of course. I was in the process of planning out a new strategy to reform British society by force when Earth was invaded by literal bloody space aliens, and my plotting became obsolete in an instant."

"You realize that sounds entirely insane, of course." He didn't doubt it, honestly — he still didn't feel any deception, and her history did make his seemingly effortless defeat sting rather less badly — but it did sound absurd. The only cases of Force-sensitives returning from death that he'd ever heard of involved...well, ancient Sith sorcerers. Given that she had called herself a Dark Lord, he supposed that tracked. "If you were such a feared insurrectionist, how have you ended up in the position you're in now? a senior officer in the legitimate military?"

"As I said, Solo: it was a character. That I was Voldemort is not widely known."

"And yet you are telling me now."

"Good luck convincing anyone of it," she said, smooth and unconcerned. "I'm respectable these days — far more well-regarded by any figures of authority on Earth or in the Law than you would be. To be blunt, between the two of us, my word is more likely to be trusted."

...That was fair. Not that he had any intention of attempting to alert the authorities to her past — the internal politics of Dimitra were not his concern — it was simply curious she was admitting as much to him. "And what would you be teaching me, exactly? I'm sure you realise that I hardly have any plans to raise a cult to start an insurrection against the government. And do you even have the time to dedicate it? I imagine your obligations keep you busy."

"Ah, yes, that is a difficulty — I'm still involved in the organisation and training of mixed units, which will pull me away on the regular. However, I'm certain we'll still be able to make time for your instruction. There will be plenty of reading and practice which you may work on alone, and a couple of my previous apprentices may be willing to help with certain topics. My direct involvement may be needed for the more...esoteric matters, but when it comes to general knowledge, there is no need for that to be imparted by anyone in particular.

"And general knowledge is not optional, Solo," she said, voice low and insistent, anticipating his objection before he could make it. "It is true that there is wisdom in the old ways that has been lost in the modern day, that there are still feats that may be achieved through witchcraft, through the Dark Arts, that cannot be replicated with modern arithmantic magic. But the Green Lady was not simply motivated by pride when she told you that the new magics have their uses. Conjuring that table there, for example," nodding at the table she'd drawn into being from nothingness, "would be all but impossible without modern wizardry. A fully-rounded mage must learn both — witchcraft, both the academic arts in their regularised expression as well as the wilder, more expressive Dark Arts, but common arithmantic wizardry as well. There will be no need to deeply study the arithmancy itself — I imagine that would have little use to you — but you should at least practise the spells to competency, out of practical concerns if for no other reason. As strong of an objection as you have to such an approach, I imagine personalised lessons will still be more to your liking than a classroom setting."

"Yes, it would be. You may have a point, about learning modern magic." After all, it was seeing recordings of what could be accomplished with wizardry, the magics they performed with their wands, which had drawn him to Dimitra in the first place. He hadn't been aware of the philosophy behind it at the time, but... Well, Ramsey was correct: he should learn it because it was useful, not necessarily because he agreed with the philosophy. And how she spoke of the lessons she was offering made it clear that he didn't need to view it as they did, which had generally been the expectation when learning from other Force traditions. Honestly, that made the prospect rather less...offensive.

And the more they talked about it, the more serendipitous this seemed. Ramsey was, in some ways, exactly what he had been looking for, even if he hadn't realized it at the time — someone who had learned their old, traditional magics, but was not so deeply tied to the religion that normal came with them that she wasn't unwilling to share their arts with an outsider; someone who could teach their more modern magics, but was not so deeply invested in their scientific approach to the Force that she expected him to adopt her way of thinking. Her experience with the "old ways", as she called them, meant she was more equipped than most to engage in the sort of personalized instruction he was accustomed to, demanding less of an adjustment on his part. Even her rather...colourful history should lend to a more critical view of their magic and their society which would better suit his interests. She was more likely to tell him the truth of the matter, and not simply the ideology they were taught, and less likely to hesitate to share the more powerful magics with someone who might one day prove an enemy.

By now, Jacen was well aware that the Empire of the Hand had a...skeptical view, toward the Republic. He wasn't certain how likely it was that there would be war between them — in large part because there was very little contact between their societies at all, so such flash points which might spark off a war were few — but given the Republic's expansionist history it was not an irrationally fear. Especially as many of the Hand's people had spent uncounted generations being battered back and forth between competing powers, no, he understood their caution. They were outnumbered, terribly so, and they had no counter to the Jedi — or they hadn't, until now. As new as they were to the wider galaxy, the mages might not yet be aware of the complicated politics between the Hand and the Republic, but they were certainly aware of their potential value to their new allies. He'd suspected the greatest of their arts might well be withheld from him, much as the Aing-Tii had done, but with Ramsey...

She might have prevented him from reaching the Queen of Nightmares, and their first interaction might have been confrontational, but he couldn't help seeing the hand of fate guiding events. That he had been brought here, now — having landed halfway around the world, his attempts to find a teacher bringing him across Asia and to Egypt and finally to this dark cold corner of the world, a suitable teacher brought to him, instead of needing to seek her out...

It had the look of serendipity to it, exactly what he'd wanted falling into his lap, by happenstance. As unnerving as the obvious power she had over him was, as much as her insults stung, he couldn't help but feel, increasingly by the second, that he was precisely where he was meant to be.

He took a slow sip of tea, as much to buy time to gather his thoughts as to actually savor it. "I may be interested. Though it occurs to me, I'm not sure what you might want in exchange. With the other traditions I've learned from, they have a prior relationship with the Jedi, or they believed they had something to gain in teaching me — some advantage they might get over their rivals, or some favour from the Republic or my family. I'm not sure what use any of that would be to you. And I certainly can't pay you, not in any currency that would be accepted out here." The Hand didn't take Republic credits, as it turned out.

"I need little enough in exchange," Ramsey said, with a casual little shrug. "I am curious about life beyond our little world — I have been reading as much as I can about society on this side of the Rift, but I know next to nothing about anything beyond it. Whatever you might see fit to teach me of the magics of your Jedi, and other traditions you've visited, that would be appreciated, but even just of the people. The places and the history, anything of note. It is an entirely new frontier to me, and I am curious."

Jacen nodded. "We can do a trade — my knowledge for yours."

"Good. But as to the rest, I wouldn't say a favour from the Republic or your family, but..." Trailing off, she gave him a wry sort of smile, a shimmer from her mind. "Our sides of the galaxy will come into closer contact, soon. I have little enough hope that this contact will be friendly."

"Do you know something I don't? We've remained separated for so long, and given our focus is on reconstruction after the invasion for now, I don't see that changing any time soon."

"Nothing specific, no, but it is the pattern of such things. I would not ask for a favour, but simply for the hostile note our acquaintanceship began on to be forgotten. I wouldn't wish to gain the enmity of the Solos and the Skywalkers before we even meet, and thereby unknowingly poison future diplomatic relationship between our respective governments."

Smirking back at her, Jacen said, "That should be easy enough — my parents don't even know where I am. They don't have to know about any of this." Not that he thought there would be any danger of serious consequences even if they did. Last he'd checked, his mother didn't have any official government position of any kind any longer, and was hardly the sort to interfere with peaceful diplomatic relations even if she could. His father might, but he simply didn't have the capacity to. Luke would be far more understanding about it than either of them, Jacen was sure, and Aunt Mara would...well, she'd probably call him foolish in very similar terms as Ramsey had a few minutes ago...

"Very good. Do we have an agreement, then?"

"I'm interested, at the very least." With a little twitch of his fingers, Jacen reached toward the tea tray, levitated one of the cookies over to his hand. It seemed that such frivolous uses of the Force was the fashion here, so he might as well play along. "What sort of magics would this apprenticeship include, exactly...?"

Chapter Text

17th March 2002 (69:10:10)
— Zero Day plus 06.06.15

Hermione's least favourite part of her job might be needing to do presentations.

She wasn't quite sure how this had become a thing she was expected to participate in with some regularity. How she'd ended up in a somewhat senior position at the ICCD was at least somewhat understandable, since her name had been attached to the initial development of PCR tech — she was often credited with more responsibility for the invention than she thought she truly deserved, but that was sort of beside the point. But she would hardly consider herself anything like a good public speaker or even that competent at communicating with laymen. It took a certain skill to translate extremely technical information into a format someone who wasn't a specialist could understand, and to do so in a way to address the concerns and interests of the specific audience one was talking to, and that was not a skill Hermione had. When she was included in this sort of event, she'd end up awkwardly standing toward the back, blurting out a somewhat unfocussed answer when she was directly asked a question (that would often need to be translated into normal person by someone else), but otherwise just...trying to stay out of the way.

Honestly, she suspected the reason she kept being included in this sort of thing had less to do with her being any good at it, and more to do with her person. Her name had been attached to the development of PCR tech, which likely helped, but she wouldn't be surprised if, in the early days, her presence had been memorable out of proportion with her actual contribution — after all, it wasn't often one saw sixteen-year-old girls in this sort of setting. She was still rather younger than expected for someone in her position — most of her assistants were older than her, sometimes by more than a decade — but less obviously so, so she probably wasn't as notable as she used to be, but she suspected she was trotted out for these things sometimes just because people expected to see her. Which was quite irritating, honestly, she'd much rather be back at the lab. They were making important steps in the translation of the Law's data architecture into something PCR tech could read, they were in the process of reverse-engineering an actual bloody hyperdrive, it was frustrating being pulled away when things were happening...

This presentation would be somewhat novel, at least: she'd done this with various important civilian and military figures before, but this was the first demonstration Hermione had ever participated in that would be made before representatives from the Law. She could count the number of aliens she'd met in person on one hand and have fingers left over, and that wasn't something she'd be able to say anymore in...fifteen minutes.

Also, she'd been able to use the occasion as an opportunity to spend more time with Beth than she would have been able to otherwise. Hermione didn't understand how it worked precisely, but she was told that there was some kind of system where, if military personnel were involved in a certain number of incidents — there was a point system, different events valued differently and added together — they were given a period of mandatory leave. Beth had hit that threshold during the war currently proceeding with the wakali, and so had been sent back to Earth on rather short notice. Of course, since this was Beth, she'd volunteered to step back in as a test pilot, because that woman seriously did not know how to take a break, even when she could certainly use one. She'd been tapped to participate in this demonstration, since she was the single highest-ranking Earth-native officer in the Law's military and conveniently at home — it didn't hurt that she also spoke Minnisiät, automatic translation wasn't perfect.

Hermione had made sure to arrange in the schedule, after setting everything up but before their guests arrived, for her and Beth to spend some time together. They'd jumped over to Urmia — the testing site they'd picked was situated in an isolated location near the three-way border between Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, Urmia was the nearest significant city — wandered about the absolutely ancient magical district for a bit, stopped by a restaurant for dinner. They did send regular messages back and forth, but they still spent hours catching up, Hermione talking about her research, teased into a few mentions of her...romantic entanglements (for lack of a better word), Beth talking about some of the more interesting things she'd learned about the rest of the galaxy, the other peoples of the Law, alien technology, a couple stories about the war, the absolutely horror that'd been the liberation of an occupied planet...

Beth had mentioned Taqšuńi, her...girlfriend? Hermione wasn't certain that was quite the right word. They were sleeping together, but she didn't know what to call their relationship, exactly, and Beth herself wasn't using any specific language that could help clear that up. She'd mentioned her a few times in messages, but now that they were in person she had pictures on her alien phone she could show Hermione — and yeah, definitely not human. Hermione had known that, of course, but it was one thing to know that Beth's latest companion(?) was a literal space alien and another to actually see her, the proportions of her body and face obviously inhuman, clawed hands, covered in fur she'd dyed in colourful strips. (A similar cultural affectation to punks and the like dyeing their hair in flashy colours, she assumed, she gathered from a few things Beth said that Taqšuńi participated in some kind of Monatšeri counter-culture.) It was a little bizarre to think that Beth was having sex with a woman from an alien planet, a species that had evolved completely separately from their own, but she supposed that wasn't really her business. Taqšuńi sounded nice, if a little peculiar, and Beth seemed perfectly satisfied with their relationship, and that was what mattered.

(Some very intrusive questions about, er, their compatibility did occur to Hermione, but she kept those to herself.)

She was a little unnerved by some of the stories Beth told — the war sounded fucking horrifying, Beth had somehow neglected to mention the "baby bombs" in her messages! But, while Beth might seem a little strained talking about some things, now and then Hermione swore the temperature of the air around ticked up several degrees and she could hear the snapping of flames, she still seemed...well, like Beth? Hermione didn't think it'd traumatised her any worse than she honestly had been already. Being forced to take a break every once in a while was probably good for her, though Beth herself would disagree with that, because this woman just could not relax...

Some of the vitriol Beth had for the wakali sounded...unnervingly genocidal, but Hermione kept that thought to herself too. Besides, there were reasons frontline soldiers weren't consulted about certain kinds of decisions.

The morning of the demonstration, they arrived at the installation early, the various people actually involved in the presentation and all the technicians and assistants actually necessary to make the whole thing work double-checking that they were good to go. Hermione wouldn't have had much time to talk to Beth, busy with her own work, but even if she had she wouldn't have been able to — Beth had taken off to 'test' the vehicle, probably just to avoid having to make smalltalk with anyone. Though, that might be uncharitable — Beth did just enjoy flying, she didn't really need an excuse — but thanks to her exploits in the invasion and then her participation in diplomatic contact with the Law she'd become about as recognisable on most of the planet as she had been in magical Britain when they'd been younger. It hadn't gotten to the point that she never needed to introduce herself to someone new but, well, Hermione wouldn't be surprised if she'd felt the need to escape.

At least when strangers approached Hermione, it was mostly to talk about technical matters — the only people who recognised her were colleagues. She was hardly any better at frivolous smalltalk than Beth was.

The presentation was prepared with only a few minor hiccoughs. There was an issue with the demonstration model of the main gun — serious enough of one that they were considering just having Beth use the bike for that part of the presentation, until one of the technicians jury-rigged a reasonably stable solution at the last second — and they were told that properly clearing the big loop was taking a little longer than expected. Nothing nefarious, by the sound of it someone's livestock had just wandered into their path. Even if they didn't manage to clear them out it wasn't a big deal, the things would just be terrified when Beth burned by, but Hermione understood the military types could be a bit paranoid about security...even though it didn't matter that much, it wasn't as though anything going on here was particularly secret...

They were more or less ready, the viewing room finished setting up and the techs in the process of finishing their work on the gun, when they got the call that the VIPs were on the way to the site. There was some final rushing around to get everything squared away, someone called Beth to get her arse back here, Hermione stood more or less unbothered in a corner, scrolling over her notes on her phone. She would certainly be called on to speak at some point — her team had been involved in the design of the computer system, she fully expected to be asked to explain how the targeting worked — so she should make sure to have all the relevant information front of mind. Some of these were software matters, which weren't truly her area of expertise, but also she'd moved on to the hyperdrive project and the work to iterate on their various designs up to something that could control an entire large, complex spacecraft, she'd finished with most of this work months ago.

The room had gone quiet around her, the group of specialists and assistants awaiting their VIPs with various degrees of nervousness. She'd been left alone for some minutes, enough that she was startled when someone nudged her — she jumped, hard enough she nearly dropped her phone, scrabbling to hold onto it. Smirking over at her, Beth drawled, "Squeezing in some last-minute revising there, Maïa?"

"Something like that, I suppose. I hate doing this sort of thing, I'd much rather be back in the lab."

"Wow, Hermione Granger would rather be shut up with a bunch of science dorks doing science than have to explain shite to some normal people, colour me shocked."

She pouted — the sarcasm wasn't really necessary, Beth...

As the time approached, the VIPs arriving at the installation, Beth and a few of the assistants were shuffled out of the room. The demonstration would be taking place outdoors, obviously, most of the loop observed through displays, she didn't actually need to be in here. (In retrospect, she'd probably just dropped by to check in with Hermione.) There was a brief conversation, going back over the whole outline, checking everyone had everything they needed, technicians confirming the demo gun and the bike were in good shape, checking that the translation programme on the Law-issued computer carried by one of the remaining assistants was working — Beth confirmed over the radio that it was properly translating into Minnisiät, since she was the only person present who spoke it fluently. Hermione had been studying it a little in her spare time, but she hadn't made enough progress to be certain it was the right dialect, or that it wasn't making obvious mistakes. They were pretty sure they were good to go, the VIPs only minutes away.

Letting out a long hissing breath, Hermione snatched a canapé off of one of the trays sitting around, mostly to have something to do with her hands, bobbing nervously on her toes. She hated doing these damn things.

The waiting abruptly came to an end with the click of the door opening, Sydykov stepping into the room and a bit to the side, waving a group of people to enter ahead of him. Besides the President of the ICCD, there was only one other Earth official in the group, someone with the UN whose name and position Hermione had since forgotten — the rest of the group were all from the Law. They were accompanied by a few assistants, who'd be taking notes and the like, but they'd been sent the names of the VIPs ahead of time. There was Akhtsûna Thuriqšalh, who Hermione understood was some kind of procurement officer in the military; Unkåṗa is̃ Kurska̤l (which Hermione could not pronounce), a member of the Law's elected parliament, who was on some kind of civilian oversight committee; Iminsala Umikanos, who was from some research institution somewhere — the name of the institution and his title were meaningless to Hermione, but she understood he was the academic of the bunch, the technical expert they'd brought along; and Jagged Fel, a captain in the Exploratory Command — in the sense of a naval or air force captain, so a senior officer. They were all different species, the Commodore was kharson, who were somewhat familiar by this point, while Professor Iminsala and Representative Unkåṗa were of rarer peoples who were entirely new to Hermione.

Fel, interestingly, was human. It was still somewhat peculiar that there were other humans out in the galaxy at all, though they were rare in the Law — they were far more common Beyond the Rift, most of those in the Law had come across as part of Mítth-räw-nuruodo's fleet. The Fel family was somewhat famous, Hermione had learned looking up their guests ahead of time. His father was General Soontir Fel, one of the most important general officers in the Law largely responsible for the training regimen of their fighter pilots. The family had gained a lot of sympathy during the war with the jusannu due to the deaths of two of General Fel's sons and one of his daughters. After the fighting had calmed down on this side of the Rift, Captain Fel had led an Expedition — a tradition in the Law's military (adapted from the Monatšeri) where an officer of sufficient rank could call for volunteers to help with a mission beyond their borders, something only rarely done since the initial expansion of the Law decades ago now — across to aid the flagging Republic there, with whom they'd fought for years, all the way up to the ultimate defeat of the jusannu. Jagged Fel's Expedition Beyond the Rift was famous these days, partly due to the small party's unexpected success while drastically outnumbered, but also for the diplomatic contacts they'd made, that they'd travelled to parts of the galaxy and met peoples most in the Law had never even heard of before.

There were films dramatising the events and everything, it was slightly absurd. Captain Fel might not be the most highly-ranked individual in their small group of guests, but he was certainly the most notable one — sort of like how Beth had notoriety and influence far out of proportion with her political or military authority. (Not that Beth actually used her influence and social connections, but she certainly could if she wanted to.) Given how Fel had pursued the jusannu across the Rift even as the fighting within the Law had started to cool off, Hermione had kind of gotten the impression they were even somewhat similar people...that impression only heightened when she'd learned that Fel had a reputation for sneaking around to avoid being seen in public.

Introductions went around then, Sydykov naming their guests for anyone in the team who might have forgotten, pointing out all of the researchers and explaining their particular area of expertise for the aliens. It was a somewhat slow and awkward process, since they had to briefly pause after every statement to allow the French to be translated into Minnisiät, or vice versa. The translation programme produced audio in a simulation of the speaker's voice, which was still slightly unsettling to Hermione — Beth claimed it even did a decent job of preserving the intended tone and emphasis, which was just bizarre. Convenient, of course, but still.

Once all the names were passed around, one of the staff people quick double-checked that none of their guests were allergic to anything — they didn't think anything here should be poisonous for anyone (they'd had someone check), but other species could have allergic reactions to certain things the same as humans. Eventually they decided that Iminsala's allergy to certain mushroom-like things cultivated on various worlds in his region of the Law should overlap with human shellfish allergies, right, he was going to want to avoid anything on this tray or this tray. The drinks should be fine, though? There were some species which were sensitive to alcohol, but they didn't think that included anyone here. Good, they were good then.

While the drinks were passed around — Unkåṗa stared at the golden-white wine in her glass with her big bulbous eyes, smooth bald oblong head tilting, seemingly curious — they began an explanation of how modern magic-assisted engineering and PCR tech worked. They were very much aware that all of this would be entirely new to people from the Law, so they essentially started from the beginning, with the very basics of what alchemy and enchantment were. In very general terms, of course, just to have a basis to understand what they were talking about. The distinction between the different categories of magic would be necessary to understand some of the important details of what they'd be talking about later, so, just get it out of the way.

Iminsala was clearly fascinated by the very idea of magic, or at least how they did it here on Earth (they did have magic on other worlds), and went off on a rapid-fire flurry of questions. He quickly cut himself off in what sounded like mid-sentence though, giving the Commodore a dip of the head and an apology Hermione was pretty sure was supposed to be sheepish. Stefan suggested they should make time to talk about it later — they would be staying on Earth for a couple days, there might be opportunity to address some of Iminsala's questions.

Now that all that was out of the way, they could get to the thing they were actually here to show off. A few swipes at Stefan's phone, and the lights were dimmed somewhat, an illusion of the bike they'd been working on appearing in the air. It was ultimately a development of the super-brooms they'd developed in the years after the jusannu invasion, testing the limits of enchanting for this sort of project, though they'd also incorporated elements of the aliens' hoverbikes to bring them more in line with what was expected of such vehicles. It was long and narrow, somewhat boxier at the back and coming to a blunt point at the front, the surfaces sleek and angular. The seat for the pilot was tilted enough to bring them almost lying flat — originally this had been due to the project using racing brooms as a base, but after a bit of testing it'd become clear that the positioning made the design of some of the enchantments involved simpler, and their test pilots had found it more comfortable anyway. It also let them narrow the profile of the bike even further, the end result significantly sleeker than the hoverbikes already used by the military, presenting a smaller target to anyone who might be shooting at them.

Beth also claimed it was faster and more manoeuvrable than the hoverbikes she'd ridden in a handful of battles already, though they just had to take her word on that — they hadn't been able to do any direct testing to get good data.

The frame was constructed of alchemical ceramic, highly resistant to impacts and especially heat. When designing the mix, they'd prioritised resistance to heat, since most modern weaponry did most of its damage by imparting heat energy into the target. (Not all of it, the particles themselves also hit with an impact and imparted significant sheer force, but it was primarily just heat.) The raw materials necessary for the formulation could be gathered from essentially any rock, and could theoretically be automated, they were still working on designing the equipment for that. It would likely require a mage to initialise it — though once the foundry was set up, it could run more or less indefinitely — they were hoping to refine it down to something that only required programme cards, but the design was very finicky. Once the mix was set, it was effectively impossible to melt it down again, so it was necessary to shape the parts at the point of production — the entire vehicle could be manufactured from raw materials at a single location, with the exception of the thruster, they'd get to that later.

The assurance that the magical components of the bike could be manufactured without the active involvement of mages was an important part of the presentation: Earth simply didn't have the capacity to scale up production very far, at least not while they were still occupied with rebuilding and development projects. But if it only took a few specialists to set it up, then the Law could set up factories wherever they wanted, at whatever scale they wanted. Hermione thought trading their expertise for whatever supplies or favours they might want from their new allies seemed like a good deal, though working out the particulars of that sort of arrangement wasn't her job.

Talking about the ceramic brought them to their first demonstration of the day. Their attention was directed outside, through the floor to ceiling glass wall looking down onto the testing grounds. Over there was an arc of the ceramic, the same thickness as the bike's armour, hooked up with sensors to read the temperature — as Harith spoke, Stefan poked at his phone, and an illusion was projected displaying a metre marked in both centigrade and the Law's units. (A very similar interval to centigrade, as it turned out, but with a different zero point.) At the go ahead from Harith, a man holding an alien blaster rifle waved at the observation room, and then fired a single bolt at the armour, zipping from one to the other in a flash of red-orange light too quick to follow. Much slower than light speed — the packets fired by blasters were magnetically-cohered plasma, not lasers — but still very fast, much quicker than any spellglow, or even most bullets.

(Hermione had been dumbfounded when Beth said that she could deflect blaster bolts with her bare hand, that should not be possible.)

The bolt struck the armour, to no visible effect — the temperature metre jolted up, but then dropped back to equilibrium with the air temperature in a blink. The man waited a moment, and then fired a steady stream of shots, one after another with roughly a half second between each, all of them striking at more or less the same spot in the centre. Each time a bolt struck, the temperature would jolt up and then immediately drop again, the metre rapidly bouncing up and down. As the shots kept coming, it did slowly start to trend upward, the shots close enough together that the material couldn't disperse all the heat in time — but even by the time the man had been firing for about a minute, the spikes were still only in the 700s, well within the safe range. Once the minute was up, the man walked up to the suspended ceramic, and reached up to touch it with his bare hand, demonstrating that it'd already bled off enough heat to safely touch.

Harith thought that was a good enough demonstration to prove that the armour on the bike was entirely immune to personal weaponry, the blasters soldiers were likely to be carrying on their person. Larger blasters like might be attached to vehicles or used as artillery were more of a problem. Anything short of the turbolasers on military cruisers was unlikely to damage the bike, but the heat being shrugged off had to go somewhere — at a certain intensity, that somewhere was increasingly likely to become the rider. As small as the bike was, there unfortunately wasn't anything they could do to prevent that, though he understood the bikes the Law used already were vulnerable to those weapons regardless. And besides, the heat didn't become a problem if the bolt never landed in the first place, but they'd get to that later.

Yes, this same ceramic could be used on larger-scale vehicles as well — as the size increased, there was a larger surface area, and more places for the heat to go, so the issue with the rider's vulnerability could be avoided. They had so far equipped a single private freighter with enough ceramic to form a hull as a test — not the same formulation, actually, but a similar one — it'd successfully managed an unshielded airbrake reentry with no visible damage. The owner of the freighter was keeping them updated, but they had no information as yet as to how it stood up to turbolaser fire. The pilot had managed to get himself into at least one fight already — because of course he had, the owner of this private freighter happened to be Sirius — but none of the shots had penetrated the shields. Their own tests suggested vessels armoured with this formulation should be able to withstand multiple hits even with military-grade turbolasers, though its ability to shed heat would eventually be overwhelmed with sustained fire. There were ways to mitigate that, to increase the ship's ability to disperse heat — the greatest impediment at the moment was the low density of space itself — they were still working on designs.

The majority of the interior of the bike was taken up with the computer system. This was Hermione's part of the project, so Harith handed it off to her, grimacing a little as she stepped up from the rear of the group. Right, so, they'd incorporated some of the Law's technology, but most of the bike's systems were Earth-native PCR tech. (Even the things that they had adopted were powered with enchanting.) Programmable Crystalline Resonance, that was — the translator didn't like acronyms — the technology used in communications and computer equipment here on Earth. It was still a young technology, it'd only been invented, oh, a bit over six years ago now, they were still working on refining it. In this particular case, they'd made a couple innovations when it came to miniaturisation, so as to avoid using expanded space at all.

This was for a very simple reason: ambient magic did not exist in space, so any enchantment would fail after it spent too long outside of the living environment of Earth. Most PCR-based devices used magic to expand their internal space — they were bigger on the inside than the outside, basically — but that expanded space would collapse once the power in the enchantment was drained away. Yes, that was as bad as it sounded — what exactly that would look like depended on the context, but it was always very destructive. Given how sturdy the bike's frame was, Hermione didn't think it would explode or anything, but it would definitely stop working.

No wait, the base of the thruster was inside the frame — so the thruster would explode at least, that probably wouldn't be good.

Hermione's understanding was that most situations the hoverbikes they had now were used in occurred inside biospheres anyway, but that wouldn't solve the problem of transporting the bikes between worlds. If there was enough magic in the environment, the problem could be avoided — they'd seen instances of people carrying their PCR-based phones off-world, and those continued running just fine (though being removed from Earth cut them off from the network), the magic given off by their bodies enough to sustain the enchantments — but there were no practical means by which to sustain an entire fleet of these bikes in deep space. They'd considered putting them into stasis somehow, but that left them vulnerable to even a minor mistake destroying the entire set. The best solution they'd been able to come up with had been to simply make the computer system compact enough that it didn't need to use expanded space at all.

At that point, she gave a very brief explanation of how PCR tech worked...or at least she tried to. One of the assistants rolled over a cart, which held an early version of a cell and a stack of far more modern programme cards. Hermione cracked open the cell, waved the aliens over to take a closer look at the internal mechanism. Those little stones were diamonds — the technical term was reservoir, though programmers often referred to them (or more accurately the data stored on them) as cils — they were wired together into sheets of 128 reservoirs, and this cell had eight sectors in it. If you look closely, there were little symbols carved into all the interior surfaces, and even on the wires connecting the reservoirs together — these were necessary to control the internal environment, identify and direct operations to the correct reservoir, as well as perform some basic operations right here in the cell, off-loading some processing duties from the control block. This whole thing, with a total of 1024 reservoirs and all associated components, was called a cell, or a kilocil in programming parlance.

Now, one of these programme cards — Hermione picked one of them up, about the length and width of her hand, roughly one and a half centimetres thick — holds four kilocils. This was achieved by grinding diamonds down to grains and working out very thin metal fibres, and then using magic to expand them out to many times their natural size; these components were then assembled and enchanted in their expanded state, once finished allowed to shrink back again. They were suspended inside an alchemical medium which kept anything from touching and insulated the components against any bleed-over. This was close to as dense as they could possibly make PCR tech without using space expansion — they'd made a couple innovations since this model was manufactured, though they were mostly focussed on making the peripheral architecture more efficient, not further miniaturising the reservoirs themselves. The computer on the bike was running at about this scale.

Given the data density available with the Law's computer technology, this might not seem so impressive, but it was important to remember that their computer architecture was not directly comparable — a reservoir was not equivalent to a bit. (The Law's computers didn't use digital bits, exactly, but the translator would get what she meant.) Each reservoir could hold a single piece of information, whatever that was, from something as simple as a single number to as complex as an entire three-dimensional image, like a full-colour hologram. PCR-based processors had a far lower cycle rate than the Law's computers, or even Earth-native digital computers, but the different ways that they processed information, some ways they could even use divination to just plain cheat...

No, Hermione wouldn't say they were superior, precisely — the computer technology available to the Law was obscenely powerful by Earth standards. They had different advantages and disadvantages. It might be optimal in the long run to have both technologies available, so one or the other could be used to fit the particular circumstances. The point that she was getting at was that, despite being made by hand through a comparatively primitive process, the computer they'd fit into the bike was very proficient at what it was designed to do. That was often the case, honestly, their computers tended to be designed with a particular use case in mind, generalised systems were far more difficult to optimise.

Anyway, there were no displays built into the structure, instead everything was done with projected illusions, the same phenomenon as these images used in the presentation so far. Yes, those were magic, not holograms — there are no holographic emitters in this room, Earth doesn't even really have access to that technology yet. Technically it's a form of mind magic — the spell impresses a sense image directly into the target's mind — though the exact mechanics could differ between— Hermione had no idea what a mind trick was. Oh, it's Jedi magic? They didn't really know much about Jedi.

...That sounded like mind magic, yes. No, only some mages could do mind magic, it was a special talent people were born with — something like one in two to five hundred, she wasn't certain exactly. They were getting very off-topic now, though, Fel acknowledging the point with a smooth nod.

She was suddenly getting the impression Fel was here as the group's magic expert, which was kind of funny. His 'expertise' was just that he'd spent a fair amount of time around Jedi when he'd been fighting the jusannu on the other side of the Rift — Hermione obviously didn't know much about it, but she didn't think Jedi were very much like Earth mages at all. But that wasn't important just now.

There was also an integrated PCR radio, but that was only for programming purposes. Her understanding was that the riders would have radios in their helmets? Right, good, the bikes could be programmed with...mission data or whatever, a map of the area the riders could reference, locations for the portkey, that sort of thing. They would need a PCR-based computer to do that, that would be part of the maintenance package that would need to be included with every set — they didn't yet have a precise design for that, if the project was taken up they'd work out exactly what was necessary for the Law's needs. None of them had been in a bloody military spaceship before, or knew exactly what would need to be included in that kind of programming, so, didn't have a lot to work on.

And that was her part of the explanation, she just had a few questions to answer. PCR tech was entirely immune to electromagnetic shocks, any ion weaponry wouldn't effect the computer system at all. The system was modular, damaged pieces could just be removed and a fresh replacement slipped in — and many of them were interchangeable (she brought up the schematic of the bike again), these blocks were all identical, slip any replacement block into any slot and it'd be fine. It would continue to operate if blocks were damaged, though how well would depend on what data was lost...unless the control block was damaged, then it would just go dead. No, the bike would still fly without the computer, actually, but the thruster wouldn't work, or the displays, and some of the finer controls on the weapon would be disabled. Yes, the bike would still fly and the gun would still fire if the computer was out...oh, and the shields would still work too. Yes, it had shields, but that wasn't Hermione's part of the presentation.

Thankfully, they were done with the conversation about the computer, and Hermione didn't have to talk anymore. Now that that was out of the way, there was a discussion about how the thing actually flew. The aliens were extremely bemused by the very serious discussion about flying broomsticks. It turned out that they were familiar with the concept — they'd been recorded in the early visits, where shuttles had been guided down to their landing spot by a team on broomsticks — they just found the whole topic very strange. (Which was fair enough, Hermione had had the same feeling when she'd first learned they were real.) The enchantments that governed their flight didn't have to be done on a broom, that was just what they'd started off with, though something long and narrow was ideal for complicated reasons — the profile of the bike worked with the enchantments just fine. The tricky part had been altering the enchantments so that muggles — that was, people without magic of their own — could use them, but they'd figured that out a few years ago now. It was very easy to fly, children normally got a feel for it in the space of an afternoon, you just point it in the direction you want to go, very simple.

Hermione chose not to interject that she still wasn't comfortable flying a broom. Honestly, she suspected that was just nerves, or vertigo or something — she felt unsafe, even when she knew rationally that she wasn't. That could happen sometimes, but she assumed people who had that problem wouldn't be picked to fly hoverbikes into battle in the first place.

In addition to the broom flight spells, there was the thruster attached to the back — that was Law technology, though they had made some alterations. For one, it didn't require any fuel whatsoever: the bike automatically collected air from the environment and alchemised it into fuel for the fusion reactor. Yes, really, it ran on almost literally nothing. It didn't draw in enough air to really be a serious drain on any atmosphere, but even so, several hours after the spent fuel pellet was expelled it would revert back to the gasses it'd started as in the first place. Magic, that was how, don't think about it too hard.

This time, Hermione did jump in. The energy came from magic, that was where. Seriously, don't think about it too hard, you'll just give yourself a headache if you try to get magic to make physical sense.

Technically, this was the second time they'd invented unlimited free energy — the vast majority of electricity generation on Earth was done with magic now. There were issues with scaling it up, and, again, there were serious limits with what you could do in space, this only worked because the bikes would be running within biospheres anyway. They were working on that.

They didn't really get into how the thrusters would interact with the flight enchantments, but that was difficult to explain, and was really just something the pilots would have to feel out themselves. From there, another team leader stepped up to talk about the offensive and defensive systems. The shields were basically just a shield charm, but far stronger than a mage could actually cast, thanks to being mediated through enchantments — if the enchantments detected an incoming spell envelope, the shields would blink on to intercept it, only long enough to block the attack so it didn't accumulate interference.

Right, he'd misspoken, obviously he meant a blaster bolt and not a spell envelope. For most purposes, blaster bolts read to magic as equivalent to spell envelopes. They could be blocked with shield spells, and they could even be deflected, though they moved faster and hit rather heavier than most curses, so the average mage could still get themselves in trouble pretty easily. Yes, they had confirmed this, they'd done tests themselves, and they had testimony from Beth Potter that shield spells worked against blasters even in battlefield conditions.

Their alien guests had heard of Beth, it turned out. Hermione guessed she'd probably been in the reading they'd done ahead of the trip.

They'd get a demonstration of the shields in a minute, yes, when their test pilot ran the course. Now, the gun was an interesting little project they'd been working on. It had multiple different firing modes...consider them to be different kinds of ammunition, he guessed. One conjured a metal pellet and accelerated it at the target — yes, just conjured it out of nothing, you could do that with magic. They would only last a couple seconds before vanishing into nothing, but that was more than long enough to hit something. This was what most of the length of the barrel was for, since the other modes didn't require anything like that at all — the internal surface down the entire length was covered in enchantments to further accelerate the pellet, they could get it going pretty fast. Supersonic, definitely faster than blaster bolts, or at least the slower ones. They'd intended to simply use curses, but it'd occurred to them during the design process that they didn't have anything that was good for hitting other vehicles, or gun emplacements or the like, this mode was good for that.

Once they had the explanation out of the way, they waved their guests to look back out through the window. Since the test of the armour, an old internal-combustion car had been rolled out into the testing range, a good fifty metres away from where the gun was set up, turned nose-on to the gun. There was a brief explanation of what the car was made of. They told the technicians fiddling about with the demonstration model to fire — one of the men gave them a thumbs up. A programme card was slipped into place — a safety cut-off, it wouldn't fire if the card wasn't present — and then he took a couple taps at illusory displays that no one else could see.

There was a subtle whirr-thump, hardly even audible, and then a high whistling immediately followed by an ear-piercing scream of ripping metal — a divot was torn through the grill of the car, the whole front third buckling in around it, the vehicle lurching back several metres, a cone of debris punched out through the rear.

A second later — while the car was still rocking on its axles, clattering as fragments settled into place and glass bounced to the ground, the windows shattered from the sheer force of the impact— the pellet thumped to the dry soil, another thirty metres or so behind the car, at the wardline. The pellet would have been a perfect disc when it'd been fired, now a mangled oblong blob, but it had penetrated all the way through the car — at that angle, it'd probably even punched through the engine block. A second after it'd settled, it dissolved away as the transfiguration failed, leaving behind a few fragments of scrap the projectile had picked up on its way through the vehicle.

While their guests either stared in surprise or muttered among themselves, someone levitated the car out of the way — a bunch of debris was left scattered over the testing range, but they could take care of that later. The same rack that the ceramic armour had been suspended on before was moved into place, this time with a panel of plasteel armour about six centimetres thick strapped into place, the same material most vehicles or stationary artillery would be made of. Once the technicians were out of the way, safely behind the wardline, they called in to fire again. The man by the gun gave them another thumbs up, slotted the programme card back in — he'd taken it out while there'd been people on the firing range — poked at the empty air.

It fired with another whirr-thump, and then there was a sound like shattering glass, but much deeper, ringing through Hermione's chest. (It would be louder than that, the illusion enchantments that were carrying the sound into the room were designed to cut off noises loud enough to damage hearing.) Once again, a cone of debris was blasted out the back of the armour panel, though thinner this time — there was a hole punched through the middle of the panel, but the force had also caused it to shatter, big cracks run through it and splinters scattered across the ground, some pinging off the wards before dropping.

See, since most everyone in interstellar civilisation used energy weapons, most armour was primarily designed to disperse heat — they were resistant enough to impacts to shield against small arms, in case someone happened to have a 'primitive' pistol or something, but a pellet that big, accelerated that fast? They simply weren't designed to deal with that kind of force. Just a few shots would tear most small vehicles or gun emplacements or missile launchers to pieces. The gun could only fire once every second and a half or so — accelerating the pellet to those speeds took an absurd amount of energy, the enchantments needed time to recharge — but for another speeder you'd probably only need one shot anyway.

It was hard to say, given that three of their guests were alien species that Hermione wasn't exactly very familiar with. But she thought they might be impressed.

The other two firing modes were less dramatic, though they took rather more explaining, with more questions from their guests. They were somewhat difficult questions to get through as well, since explaining magic in a way that made sense to the uninformed could be complicated — especially when speaking through an automatic translator, which might or might not be interpreting what they were saying consistently. The other two firing modes were both spells — automatically 'cast' by the enchantments in the gun, which had also been difficult to figure out how to make work for non-mages — one a compound piercing curse and the other an area-effect stunner.

To demonstrate the piercing curse, another piece of armour was strapped into the rack — alchemical ceramic this time, they didn't have that much plasteel sitting around — a mannequin conjured behind it. The technicians shouted back and forth for a moment, making sure the the mannequin was properly lined up with the barrel, and then everyone ducked back behind the wards. This time, a blueish spellglow zipped away from the tip of the gun and struck the armour — the spellglow paused on the surface for a blink, and then shifted from blue to a bright white-yellow, transmitted through the armour to continue on to the mannequin, the curse punching a fist-sized hole through its chest. Hermione was tapped again to explain spell envelopes, and how one could fit a spell envelope inside another spell envelope to form compound or complex spells. In simpler forms, one could design spells which would bounce off surfaces, allowing one to shoot around cover, but a nastier trick was to get a curse to transmit through shields or obstructions, allowing one to curse someone regardless of any defences they had up.

That spell would go through shields as well as armour, yes. The maximum thickness it could transmit through was...three to eight centimetres? It depended on the resistance of the medium to magic — metal actually had a low resistance, especially if it was ferromagnetic, it'd have a harder time getting through living things, or wood, or graphite or something like that. If the outer envelope didn't detect a valid target, it would simply collapse, and release the curse it contained. That piercing curse would probably punch a hole through pretty much anything anyway, but how large and how deep very much depended on what the material was. Yes, it could shoot people through walls, they would see what that looked like in a later demonstration.

For the area-effect stunner, a handful of technicians stepped out into the range to volunteer — one stood in the direct path of the gun, another three spread out a couple metres from him in opposite directions. They checked and double-checked that the gun was on the non-lethal setting, before the operator gave them a thumbs up again. This shot was a purple-ish red orb, noticeably slower than the piercing curse, it still reached them in a blink and struck the man in the centre, bursting with a flash of deep red light. All four technicians dropped to the dirt, limp, unconscious the instant the light touched them.

Their guests had never seen a stunning charm before — or, actually Beth had used them in some kind of demonstration, all of them had seen video of it — so naturally they had questions about how exactly that worked. While a mage walked onto the testing range to revive the unconscious technicians, Hermione tried to explain the basics of how mind-targetting charms worked. It was similar to those mind tricks they'd talked about earlier, but all it did was push the target into unconsciousness. There was also an element that would linger on the target, to keep them unconscious — the charm effect would gradually degrade with time, without a mage to awaken them it'd last a maximum of maybe two hours. It would affect any mind within that flare of light, there was no maximum number of targets, so long as they were in the area of effect. No, it wasn't blocked by armour, as long as they were in the area of effect it would work. Shielding would probably block it, and there were certain magically-conductive materials which would turn it aside as well but, as far as they were aware, nothing that was being used as personal armour would do the trick — and even if it did, the visor of the helmet would be permeable enough to let the spell in.

They biggest problem with the stunner was that they weren't entirely certain of its effectiveness. Obviously, they'd only ever needed to design magic to affect Earth-native live, and the only other aliens they'd had the opportunity to test magic against were the jusannu — who, they now realised, reacted to magic strangely, so couldn't be used as a basis of comparison. (Hermione had read that the common wisdom in the galaxy was that the jusannu were immune to magic, which wasn't strictly true, but in a peculiar inversion magic was underdeveloped everywhere else relative to Earth. They were only immune to some magic, which happened to include most magics aliens had at their disposal.) This stunner would affect any being or animal on Earth, with some minor exceptions — primarily small invertebrates with minds too simple to register as targets, a few cases of organisms with distributed nervous systems — but it was difficult to say whether the elements by which the spell recognised a mind would always register life that was too far removed from humans, or any of their cousins native to this world. It wouldn't have worked on jusannu, for example, but that was just because of their weird magic resistance — stunners had worked just fine on their reptilian thralls. They couldn't promise there wouldn't be cases where a being's mind didn't trigger the spell for whatever reason, though that should be very rare, should only come up in cases of beings with especially exotic physiology.

No no no, it wouldn't hurt anyone — this spell was absolutely safe. It was just like going to sleep, very low-impact. When they said they didn't know for certain how this spell would affect aliens, they meant they weren't sure whether it would work at all. If it worked, the person would just drop unconscious, the same as humans; if it didn't work, the spell wouldn't be able to latch on to them, and nothing would happen.

After a bit trying to explain it, Hermione came up with an analogy comparing it to viral infections. A virus latched onto certain proteins in cell walls, so they infected different species differently, since the walls of their cells were composed of different materials. Like a virus, the spell tried to detect an element that signaled the presence of a conscious mind, and would latch onto that and affect a being through that connection. If it couldn't find that element, it simply didn't do anything at all, fizzled out to no effect — just like their conversation earlier, about spell envelopes detecting a valid target. They were mostly certain that any conscious mind should be recognised by the spell as a valid target, but they weren't one hundred per cent confident of that, they were simply trying to be clear about the limits of their knowledge.

It might sound a little peculiar, given how destructive the two other modes could be, but Hermione thought their guests were actually most interested in the group stunner. The reason why became clear pretty quickly in the discussion of possible complications of the spell: the non-lethal measures the Law already had available were... Well, she supposed the proper term was less lethal — they weren't designed to kill, but they did still do physical damage, and could unintentionally kill people in certain circumstances. The preferred strategy was the so-called stun bolt, since it did the least physical damage, but there were still serious potential complications. It could exacerbate certain health conditions, there was a chance of inducing an epileptic episode that could range anywhere between one in 5000 and one in twenty — it varied by species and population group — and when used on pregnant people it was very likely to induce a spontaneous miscarriage — though, again, the exact odds varied by species and population group. There were some nonhuman beings who were almost entirely immune to stun bolts, and others whose neural physiology made them especially vulnerable, to whom stun bolts were effectively as good as lethal. Soldiers and security officers and the like were taught all these things, so they knew who they really shouldn't use stun bolts with, but it was impossible to know whether the target had a medical condition which put them at risk — unless the target's medical history was known to the shooter, using a stun bolt was always rolling the dice.

That was a risk they could entirely eliminate with the adoption of stunning charms. One of the first questions they were asked was if they could design a device to cast stunning charms which could easily be carried by a single person, like a pistol or something — the specialists with some understanding of enchanting glanced at each other, silently wondering how to answer that. It was maybe possible? It was definitely doable if the wielder was a mage, but designing one that could be used by muggles was more difficult. Something as small as a pistol might be pushing it, but they could probably do a rifle? Sydykov would get someone on that when they got back, all right then...

The final element they wanted to discuss independently was the portkey — the bike contained a reusable, reprogrammable portkey, which could be used to instantly teleport bike and pilot anywhere in an instant...as long as it was on the same planet, obviously. That could be programmed from the computer they mentioned before, it could be triggered by the pilot or remotely, or could be set to retrieve bike and pilot if they were damaged/injured. Yes, it could be reprogrammed in-mission, teleport them to where they were needed and then set it to retrieve them in an emergency — as long as they were in range of the central computer, that would work just fine.

At this point, they thought they were ready for a demonstration of the bike in action. A live-fire demonstration, actually, though all the 'opponents' would be simulated, with the exception of the ones meant to be targeted by the stunner — and the pilot herself, of course. If there were no further questions, they could begin right away. Right, they'd just call the pilot to come out then, one moment...

A handful of breaths after the call went out, Beth stepped into view in the testing range, walking alongside the completed bike, smoothly hovering along within arm's reach. She'd decided to wear her Law uniform for the test — it hadn't particularly mattered for the test itself, since the bike included an enchantment to bend wind and debris around it, she'd chosen it with their audience in mind — looking sharp and dramatic in deep black and vivid red against the pale tan dirt of the testing range. Yes, that was Beth Potter, she was home on leave at the moment and had volunteered to step in for the demonstration. An illusory display came up, showing a zoomed-in image of Beth next to the bike — so they could clearly see Beth pull out her phone, tap at the display a few times, and then slip it back to her pocket. Her lips moved, Hermione assumed double-checking with the technicians running the test that everything was—

She twitched as Beth's voice was suddenly projected into the room. "Can you hear me?" she asked — in Arabic, unexpectedly. Harith replied in the same language — Hermione didn't understand every word, but he was saying they could — and then Beth switched smoothly into Minnisiät. By the sound of it, she was halfway through a second sentence before she suddenly stopped, caught by the translator repeating what she'd said in French. Introducing herself to the Law delegates, by the sound of it, and offering her personal opinion that they should seriously consider taking up a contract, if only because of the safety features — she claimed that almost every single one of the soldiers under her command that she'd lost while flying hoverbikes would have lived if they'd been on one of these instead. Thuriqšalh answered for their group, saying he understood Beth's interest in the matter — leaving unspoken that landing any sort of industrial contract so early after their admittance to the Law would be very good for Earth's economic prospects, though honestly Hermione doubted Beth was even thinking about that — but they would like to see the bike in action themselves, thank you.

The display catching her wry, sheepish sort of smile, Beth gave the observation room a quick salute (in the style of the Law), before jumping up astride the bike. There was a brief delay, before another illusion appeared in the room with them — a reproduction of the displays on the bike, showing them what Beth was seeing. (They'd needed to make a last-minute tweak to the radio system to get that to work, just for the test, belatedly realising that their guests wouldn't be able to see the targeting system work.) They watched Beth sync up the on-board computer to her phone and the installation's computer systems, which would be managing the test. A map of the course appeared, with flashing indicators where the different scenarios were located. Aware she was being watched, Beth tapped at each one in turn, scrolling through the boxes that popped up with diagrammes and very simple descriptions of what she was supposed to be doing — it was all in French, so obviously their guests wouldn't be able to read any of it, but they'd understand that pilots could easily review mission data and whatever intelligence was on hand at any time. Beth picked a random spot on the map, blowing it up to show a valley, rocky hills covered with grass and brush, the 'turbolasers' 'defending' the approach highlighted in flashing red. The image was a bit fuzzy, but the point was to get across how much detail the programme could incorporate, Beth picking another random spot on the map to show another valley, to suggest the entire route had been mapped in the same detail.

Which, of course, it had been — they'd used a divination programme to remotely map the entire course from a distance, and then used that to design the package uploaded to the bike. (Edited down a bit to better work with the bike's systems, but that was mostly just to keep it running as smooth and flashy as possible while the VIPs were watching.) There were some questions about that, which was fair enough, Hermione realised they'd just said something a bit absurd. This was a computer thing, so unfortunately it fell into her area of expertise, so she spent a couple minutes attempting to explain how PCR-mediated divination worked. They could see everything going on, everywhere on the planet, from anywhere, at any time. There were exceptions — the magic could be blocked with wards, the image got a little fuzzy near tectonic activity, and they couldn't see under the oceans at all (though they could use a different spell for that, it'd never been relevant) — and continually running a programme surveilling the entire world would take up absurd resources, but it was very useful for getting accurate mapping data, planning for construction projects and laying out agricultural fields, that sort of thing. Or, say, keeping an eye on enemy forces during a battle, if it came to it — they had done that with the jusannu during the invasion, though the technology hadn't been developed to a useful state until the second invasion.

It didn't require any peripherals like camera drones or whatever, no, the programme was simply run on a computer equipped with a device that did the divination part. They had one such computer here at the installation, in fact — that was how this illusion focussed on Beth was captured, and all the rest they'd be observing her with. It had the same limitations as a many other forms of magic, meaning it only worked within the biosphere of a single planet. Unkåṗa still thought that sounded extremely useful for ground operations, as well as surveying efforts on newly-explored planets. The more she thought about it, she could think of several different civilian applications it might be great for, they might have to talk about adaptations of that system independently of the bike. Ah, of course, PCR data infrastructure wasn't compatible with the Law's computers, she'd forgotten about that detail — they were working on a method to translate between the two, until that was developed enough to be practical she supposed they'd need to hold off on that...

Finally, they'd run through their questions enough to actually start the test. Beth leaned over into the proper flight position, lying nearly face-down, there was a last confirmation that everything was ready to go, and the countdown started.

When it hit zero, Beth zipped off with a blur of motion, disappearing out of the testing ground in a blink. Displays winked into life, one programmed to follow above and behind Beth from only a few metres away, the other showing a bird's eye view, the little sliver of the bike smaller than Hermione's hand. Elsewhere, metres appeared showing the elevation and the speed she was flying at, as well as the volume of noise the flight was generating — all of those were in the Law's units, which Hermione didn't intuitively understand as yet, but she already knew what figures would be normal. Beth had moved into the closed loop, a track running through a series of narrow rocky valleys around the installation, the entire course only a few kilometres long. She flew low to the ground, bobbing up and down to follow the undulating jagged geography, visibly leaning into the curves and sharper corners that made up the loop.

She was flying terrifyingly fast, of course, Hermione didn't understand how she could do that.

Take note of the noise, her flight was practically silent — most of that noise was just her jacket flapping, the whistle of the wind passing over the surface of the bike when she took turns. She was currently flying solely using the enchantments that would go into old broomsticks, which didn't require any traditional propulsion, and so was very quiet. The maximum speed you could get off that was nearly three hundred kilometres an hour (however much that was in the Law's units), but given how uneven the course was Beth wouldn't actually be reaching anywhere near that fast. The bike accelerated very fast up to about a hundred, but the enchantments got diminishing returns, she had to manoeuvre too much to get close to top speed.

Once they got through that part of the discussion, they called to Beth that she could move into the second phase. On the display, Hermione could see Beth square herself up, sinking even lower against the bike — and then the thruster on the back snapped into life, burning bright blue from plasma exhaust, and the bike jolted forward, the speed indicator rapidly climbing. She leaned hard into a curve — Hermione cringed and grit her teeth as rocks flashed by far too close to Beth's elbow, she could probably reach out and touch the ground, mad — before righting again, the ground turning into a blur as the bike accelerated terrifyingly fast, then abruptly slowed as she came to a tighter corner, gracefully swishing through the turn, and then jumping into an absurd acceleration again, the blue glow of the thruster visible on the overhead view...

Boosted by the thruster, the bike could obviously get much faster — pushing three times the speed of sound on a good day, more than that in a dive. Oh, you could get more speed in a dive due to the particulars of how the broom flight spells worked, it was difficult to explain. The bike and the pilot were protected from the inertial forces that would come with these manoeuvres with magic similar to the Law's anti-gravity tech, though the forces weren't entirely eliminated. They could see that Beth was leaning into turns, their own test pilots had observed that allowing them to experience at least a small fraction of the inertial forces made the flight feel more natural, helped them get a better sense of how they were moving through space, intuitively. Whether this was the case or not, they thought it felt safer, made them feel more confident of what they were doing. Their test pilots claimed it would lead to fewer accidents, but they didn't have good data on—

Oh, the Law had studied the same thing! They did have good data on it, and apparently their pilots' intuition was correct, that was good to know. Designing an enchantment that would only partly cancel out the acceleration, and a variable fraction of it dependent on the magnitude, had been obscenely difficult — Hermione was honestly relieved that the time spent on it hadn't been wasted.

Once that part of the conversation was done, Beth still zipping around the course at a terrifyingly fast speed — Hermione's skin prickling and her stomach swooping the whole time, she did not like watching this — they called over the radio for Beth to "take a dive". Apparently the translator got the idiom to make sense in Minnisiät, because all of their guests turned to give Laurent double-takes — and so they almost entirely missed the event. Thankfully they turned back in time to catch it, Hermione would hate to have to watch Beth do it again.

She knew, rationally, that it was perfectly safe, that Beth wasn't actually in any danger, but it still about gave her a heart attack seeing it happen.

Beth 'messed up' a turn, the bike angling to slam into a rock sticking out of the ground, but the instant before contact the bike was suddenly flung up, bouncing dozens of metres in the air and flipping end over end as it went. The display following over her shoulder was caught up in the motion, it was very disorienting, a dizzying flash of of ground sky ground sky ground sky — Hermione wasn't even there in person, and it was still making her a little nauseated. After a few seconds the spinning slowed, the bike levelling off as Beth got control of it again. She didn't start flying right away, floating there, the detail of the display over her shoulder good enough to catch her shoulders rising and falling as she took deep breaths. Dizzy, Hermione would guess, from a shock like that it was honestly kind of surprising that she hadn't lost her lunch. (Some of their test pilots had, and that was a mess, sick got sprayed all over the place flipping around like that.) And then she leaned forward, jolting ahead as the thruster flared back into life, and she was zipping through the course again, like nothing had happened.

Magic, obviously — when the enchantments on the bike detected a collision, they flared the power going into the spells neutralising the pilot's experience of inertia and holding them in place, and then pushed hard at the obstruction with a banishing charm. A banishing charm was a simple spell — it was part of the standard set that children learned in school — that created a repulsive force between the target and the caster. The most common variant included an anchoring element, which held the caster in place, to ensure that the object would be pushed away; if the caster was in mid-air at the time, that element would fail to resolve, so caster and target were repelled from each other. Naturally, the entire planet was far more massive than the bike, so a charm technically meant to push objects away had resulted in the bike being flung aside, the angle of attack resulting in that uncontrolled tumbling.

The bike wasn't entirely immune to collisions. It took about ten seconds for the enchantments powering the banishing charm to recharge after a hard push — it would trigger before that time, but with a weaker effect — so multiple collisions in quick succession could easily overwhelm it. If the obstruction was too large — say, a tall cliff face — and if the thruster were activated at the time, Beth could easily have been sent flipping up and still crashed into the cliff anyway. Also, the extra energy sent into the inertial mitigation would only last a few seconds, so even if the banishing spells were recharged enough to protect the bike from a secondary collision, the pilot might end up being thrown anyway. So, the mechanism had its limits, but it was better than nothing — they were under the impression that the hoverbikes the Law were using at the moment had no protection against collisions at all. Right, an emergency anti-gravity field to help protect the pilot against shocks, but that was it? Theirs was definitely better, then.

That was the last thing they had for this part. They answered a couple questions, and then told Beth to continue on to the last part of the demonstration.

A live-fire demonstration, with real weapons actually firing at her. Hermione grit her teeth, nerves prickling over her shoulders, forced herself to relax. She was well familiar with the shielding enchantments, she'd seen tests before — she knew it was perfectly safe. She just wasn't looking forward to Beth being shot at, that was all.

Beth continued around the inner loop for a moment, until she got to a spot in the course where she could turn over into the outer loop — though the course they'd staked out was more like a shallow spiral, curving around the installation before extending out toward the lowlands. Of course, she took the turn at reckless speed, jagged rock features zipping by to both sides, settling into another rough valley, grasses and brush reduced to smears from sheer speed. There was a slapdash turret at the end of the valley — looking rather ramshackle, a short tower with a swivelling top, shielded with somewhat sloopily arranged conjured plasteel armour (only the gun itself was real, provided by the Law for testing purposes) — there was a bright orange flash of light as it fired, Hermione winced, though the shot missed Beth by a few metres. (Close enough Beth would have been able to feel a hot blast of wind rush by, but not intense enough to burn.) The valley was narrow, the computer automating the turret only needed to adjust slightly before shooting, this bolt with perfect aim.

It splashed against a shimmering blue barrier a couple metres ahead of the tip of the nose, the plasma contained within the bolt swiftly dissolving away into nothing. There was some murmuring from their guests, yes, the bike did have shielding that worked against the energy weapons common in the galaxy. Beth fired back at the turret, the accelerated conjured pellet tearing a hole through the tower, spraying debris across the hillside. The tower began to tilt, some structural element damaged, but it still managed to get off another shot, this one going wide, the computer failing to compensate for the gun swaying as the tower failed. Apparently Beth thought it could use a second shot, to make sure it was done — this one pulverised the gun housing, some part of the machinery inside bursting with a flash of crackling electricity and a gout of flames with an odd greenish tint — and then she was zipping past, continuing along the course.

Apparently putting shielding on something as small as a hoverbike was basically impossible with the Law's technology — it could be done, but either it would use too much power to be practical or it would short out the bike's power systems after taking a few shots...probably both. The power requirements weren't a big deal for the magical version, the more serious issue was the interference accumulated with each hit, which they'd mitigated by having the shield blink in and out as it intercepted each shot. There were limits, but that would be a longer conversation involving some explanation about how shield charms worked, they could answer questions about that when Beth wasn't in the middle of the course.

She was coming up on the next obstacle even now. Beth was coming out of the craggy valleys the installation was in and moving toward the flatlands, transitioning into the Iraqi desert. (It was a pretty significant distance she was travelling, but this bike did fly very fast.) This valley was a bit flatter and wider, and there were two turrets ahead, already swivelling around to aim at her — Beth jolted to the side, making the first shots go wide, the shield flared twice in quick succession as she lined up her shot on one of the turrets. This time, she hit the gun housing with the first shot, bursting and sizzling as the mechanism was destroyed.

Because of course Beth had to actually break them. Their previous test pilots had intentionally aimed for the towers, to save the guns — they didn't exactly have a lot of access to this kind of modern alien equipment. They hadn't discussed it ahead of time, but she supposed proving that the bike's gun could effectively be used against the sort of weapons used out in the galaxy was the whole bloody point, so Hermione decided it wasn't a big deal. Besides, they only needed them for this test, they'd already done all the analysis they needed to design countermeasures, it didn't matter if Beth destroyed them now.

As a pair of drones rose out of concealment and started firing at Beth — their bolts smaller and more reddish than the ones fired by the turrets, lower-powered variants that might be used on hoverbikes and the like — she did a decent job of pretending she hadn't known they were there, breaking off her attack and swaying and jittering in an attempt to avoid being hit. The shield flared again and again, the drones swooping in to hit her from multiple angles, the bike tipped up vertical and the thruster burst bright blue-white, leaving a long trail of ionised exhaust behind her, the ground shrinking as Beth rocketed into the sky...

Hermione sighed, rolling her eyes, as the bike climbed up up up up, swiftly leaving the drones behind, ascending far higher than the turret could aim. The drones were modified hovercars they'd been gifted by the Law, the repulsors on them had a maximum elevation — the antigravity systems needed something to push off against, the low-power models used in most hovercraft had a pretty limited range. A hundred metres would be a high range, but civilian craft might only manage a couple dozen, while some hobbyist or military craft could reach as high as a kilometre or two. This bike, they explained as Beth continued climbing — at the speed she was going, as small as the ground had become in the overhead view (zooming out to keep up with her), she had to be kilometres in the air already — had no such limitations. Magic grew increasingly thin high in the atmosphere, and there would come a point when the enchantments would begin to fail, but that was very high — a little under fifty kilometres, maybe? Much higher than most atmospheric hovercraft, high enough they essentially didn't have to worry about it.

Eventually the thruster cut off, the bike slowly tipping over upside down, when the front came back around to point toward the ground Beth kicked on the truster again — by the brightness of the circle of blue-white light in the overhead view, she must have put it on full blast — accelerating to absolutely absurd speeds, the metre on one of the displays flipping through numbers in a blink and continuing to increase as she dove, fast enough the spells shielding the pilot began to fail, Beth's jacket audibly snapping in the wind through the radio...

...but not enough to cover the low burble of Beth chuckling, breathless with glee. Covering her face with both hands, Hermione resisted the urge to groan. She should have guessed Beth would do something completely mad and suggested they close the channel, but it was too late now.

Beth came rocketing back down toward the valley, one drone was blasted apart with a piercing curse, the second one hit an instant later — she'd leaned on the bike's targeting systems to do that, Hermione made a mental note to point it out later, their guests too busy watching the ground rapidly grow larger in the display following over Beth's shoulder to notice. Gritting her teeth, she watched as Beth raced toward the ground at terrifying speeds — had to be a few times the speed of sound, after a dive like that — and then pulled up at the last second, zooming along the valley, the second turret torn apart with a pellet as she flashed by.

Completely mad, honestly...

Ah, yes, she could do that because of how broom flight spells worked. The bike flew in the direction the nose was pointed. When she'd pulled up, all the energy of her motion had been redirected into forward motion — she didn't have to worry about her momentum sending her crashing into the ground making a turn like that, because that momentum was redirected forward instead. It was magic, that was how.

Most of the group seemed very bemused, but Hermione noticed Fel was watching Beth fly, his head tilted. Curious, maybe?

The environment around Beth changed as she came flying out of the highlands, coming out into a flatter, drier plain, the ground grainy yellowish-red, scraggly brush clinging to the thin soil here and there. She was still some distance away from the austere flats of the desert proper — the folding of the tectonic plates which had formed the mountains still evident in the ridges of hills to either side, but further apart now, forming a wide shallow valley — but the quality of the soil and the sad-looking scrub flashing past made it clear it was rather drier here. The few people who lived around here were mostly pastoralists, tending flocks of livestock that grazed at the hardy plants clinging to the hills, simply too stark and arid for much else. And so it suited just fine as a testing site, as long as the locals were nudged away while they were actively working on something.

They'd set up a complex of little buildings, simulating a military base or an occupied town or something — with conjuration, it was faster and the place didn't need to last. Patrolling the place were several automatons — vaguely person-shaped mannequins that had been enchanted to move, these models given rather more complex commands than was ordinarily possible due to built-in PCR computers — along with a dozen or so human soldiers, all carrying blaster rifles. The soldiers were volunteered for the demonstration by Iraq, whose territory Beth was well inside now. Hermione had just found out yesterday that, by some unlikely coincidence, Beth had actually met one of them before — apparently they'd fought together in Vietnam, during the initial jusannu invasion. Sometimes it felt like Beth knew people everywhere, somehow.

She must still be flying faster than the speed of sound, because the human soldiers didn't turn at her approach. The automatons, though, did notice her coming, the blocky ceramic figures turning and raising their weapons tipping the soldiers off, scrambling into cover under the eaves of buildings or inside the decorative fountain in the courtyard at the centre. As she passed into range, the automatons started firing, flashes of light blooming at the nose of the bike as the shield intercepted shots — brilliant aim, hitting a target moving at Beth's speed from that range, the sort of precision humans simply weren't capable of. The automatons were a prototype of a concept intended to be used for certain dangerous forms of labour, especially mining but also dealing with toxic substances. There were also thoughts of using them for emergency repairs in their spaceships, once they got around to making those — a common problem that came up on spacecraft was managing repairs in parts of the ship that were on fire, superheated from weapons fire, flooded with coolant or whatever, or simply exposed to vacuum — but at this point they simply weren't advanced enough for that kind of work. Perhaps if technicians were puppeteering them manually, that could be useful, but they simply weren't 'smart' enough for the sort of improvisation often needed in that kind of work. Performing certain dangerous mining or construction jobs, that they could probably do in the near future, but their computers simply weren't good enough to do anything more complex than following directions.

(Hermione had had a thought about adapting the spells used to simulate people's personalities in magical portraits, but that would raise other issues.)

They were complex enough to do something as simple as point a gun at a pre-identified target, though. Beth started jittering around as the first shots came in, her speed starting to drop — and then the human soldiers joined in a moment later, the air filled with the burning glow of dozens of blaster bolts. As narrow as the bike was, Beth constantly jolting back and forth and up and down, most of the shots missed, but enough struck the shield that the display following behind Beth's shoulder was filled with the blue and red flashes of light, almost entirely hiding the town. Hermione couldn't help grimacing at the sight as Beth approached the site — she could barely see through that mess — but Beth managed to tear through the little complex without hitting anything. She must still have been over the sound barrier too, because an instant after she flashed by the human soldiers staggered, hands clapping over their heads, presumably reeling from the shock wave.

The human soldiers were disoriented by Beth zooming past them and getting hit with the shock wave an instant later, but the automatons weren't affected, spinning around to track the bike. Automatons hidden inside the cover of a few of the buildings leaned rocket launchers out of windows, fired — the projectiles zipped almost straight up into the air for a time, and then looped around to chase after Beth. She'd continued past the complex, tapping at the bike's control panel, interrupted by a red flash along the edges of the display, a message popping up. See that, just there, the bike's systems had alerted her that she was being targeted by homing rockets. With an audible groan, Beth swiped aside the panel she had been working at, and tapped something else. Circling around the complex — varying her speed and the angle she was turning at so the shots aimed at her went wide (though an occasional shot from an automaton still managed to find her) — she waited until the trio of rockets were gathered up behind her, gaining rapidly. They were still several seconds away from impact when she tapped a button. There was a flash, and two bright yellow-orange spellglows detached from the rear of the bike — they spun off in different directions, spinning in little twirls as they went. Two of the rockets followed one and one followed the other, chasing the spellglows down as they spiralled well away from Beth before dropping down to the ground, the rockets expending themselves against the sandy soil an instant later.

That was a spell, yes — the countermeasures projected an electromagnetic and gravitational image that mimicked the rider and pilot, which should fool most tracking systems the Law was familiar with. Yes, gravitational too, they'd initially started developing the concept while still fighting the jusannu, whose detection methods worked through gravity somehow. When the countermeasures were triggered, a spell was simultaneously thrown up over the bike which concealed its own image for just a few seconds, which was long enough to confuse the sensors on rockets or whatever else, forcing them to lock on to one of the spellglows instead. They couldn't say with complete confidence that it'd work against any system the Law was likely to encounter, but their tests did suggest it was very effective.

As they were finishing that explanation, Beth was swooping back through the complex again. She zipped by in a blink, moving fast enough that most of the shots aimed at her went wide, tapping at something on the display. The automatons hidden in the houses fired another round of rockets, Beth doubled the display with a few swipes of her fingers, the controls for the countermeasures on one panel and on the other a box with a progress wheel ticking its way around. Around the time the second round of rockets were sent spinning into the dirt, the second display bloomed into a three-dimensional model of the complex — there was very little in the way of detail, but it was easy enough to make out the blocky models of the buildings, the human soldiers glowing red blobs, the automatons outlined in yellow.

That map was produced by the on-board systems, yes. It'd happened very fast, so Hermione wasn't surprised if they'd missed it, but as she was passing through the complex Beth triggered a pulse of... Well, she supposed one could think of it as sonar — the bike released a burst of noise and mapped its surroundings based on the reflected signal it received. It wasn't sonar, since the pulse was a form of magic instead of sound waves, but it worked on similar principles. (The technique had been adapted from geomantic sounding spells used in ward-crafting way back during the war with the Communalists, getting it to play nice with PCR tech had only required minor adjustments.) The bike's limited computer systems couldn't render the image in much detail, and could only hold one map at a time, but it was enough to get the lay of the land.

And it could be used to do things like this: Beth pressed a few buttons, and tapped at a spot on the map, right in the middle of a clump of soldiers, a blue circle appearing on the map around them. She then pressed another button, and then drew red Xs over the automatons hidden inside of buildings. By this point she was coming back around to the complex, staying low to the ground, hidden behind the buildings. She tipped the nose up to the sky, curving up along the building, when she was nearing the top the large red spellglow of the stunning spell was spat out of the tip of the gun — it flew in an arc, rising a little further along Beth's motion of travel before curving down, ultimately landing right in the middle of a group of soldiers. The magic was released in a flash of light, the whole group falling unconscious in a blink. Beth's own arc brought her down into the courtyard, the bike turning in place. As the nose scrolled by the buildings, an occasional spellglow was released, the two-stage piercing curse striking walls and transmitting through, the second-stage continuing on to smash apart one hidden automaton, and then another. Shots were flashing against the bike's shields, Beth shot another area-affect stunner at a group of soldiers — they tried to jump out of the way, but they were too slow, dropping limp as the light touched them — the fire hitting the shield increasing the longer she stayed there, she didn't have long enough to hit the third hidden automaton, zipping off again instead. A rocket was shot after her again, Beth letting out a sigh loud enough that the radio picked it up, reached to prepare countermeasures again.

The computer system could be used to mark targets, the precise aiming and timing and taken over by the bike...sort of. How exactly spells were aimed was somewhat complicated. One might assume that a spell travelled on a path determined by the point of the caster's wand, but that wasn't precisely true — the position of the wand did determine the general direction the spell would travel, but its actual path was determined by the caster's intent. To simplify what was truly a very complicated process, a spell went where the mage wanted it to go. Mediating the process through the computer system allowed a muggle to use it — the transmission of intent was one of those things that often prevented muggles from using foci, which was technically what the bike was — but the bike's systems could also fudge things somewhat, adjust the timing and their aim for an optimal shot. Beth had simply pressed the trigger as the bike came around to pointing in the general direction of the hidden automatons, and the computer did the rest of the work of calculating the exact angle necessary to hit them through the wall.

As for the stunner, most spellglows could only go in a straight line, but this group stunner was one that could be cast in a parabolic arc — the original purpose had been to allow the caster to lob it over cover without needing to expose themselves. Beth had marked where she wanted the spell to land, and had pressed the trigger on the way in. The targeting system took care of the difference.

Hermione continued to try to explain how intent shaped the mechanics of spellcasting, and how that affected the bike's functionality, while Beth made a few more loops through the complex, picking off the soldiers with stunning spells and the automata with piercing curses. Eventually, she'd downed all of them — she mapped the complex again to double-check, swiped the map away with a wave of her hand. "Mission complete, requesting evac."

There was a delay of a couple seconds, before one of the technicians said, "Acknowledged. Return trip in five."

Beth rose up over the complex, turning in place, as though keeping an eye out for any approaching hostiles. She would know there wouldn't be anyone coming, of course, Hermione guessed she was just putting on a good show. Unkåṗa was saying something, maybe asking what they were waiting for, but before the question could even be translated Beth and the bike disappeared with a twisting blur and a flash of light. The displays following Beth winked out a second later, as there wasn't anything for them to follow anymore. A second after that, there was an identical flash of light out the windows, in the middle of the testing grounds, and then a swirl of colour, and Beth and the bike appeared out of nowhere.

That, Harith explained, was a portkey. Instant point-to-point transportation, from anywhere to anywhere on the planet. They were very handy things. Their own military had started using them to instantly teleport forces right to where they were needed, or to automatically pull them out at the appointed time. A particular critical battle in the second jusannu invasion had involved broom fliers portkeyed in to cause havoc at a jusannu base, keeping the defenders distracted, a second portkey on a timer yanking them out of danger the instant before nuclear warheads struck, annihilating the jusannu before they could respond. Soldiers could also be equipped with emergency porkeys which would send them straight to medical if they were injured, the bike could be set to be automatically retrieved if they were damaged, that sort of thing. Very useful, portkeys.

Thuriqšalh seemed rather amused by the casual, matter-of-fact tone — why yes, Hermione assumed the ability to instantly teleport point-to-point would have tactical uses, she could see how Harith's tone might seem a little funny to someone not familiar with the idea.

They were talking more about the targeting systems and the portkeys when Fel drew attention to himself by taking a couple sharp steps out of the group, toward Hermione and the rest of the team. He hadn't talked much for most of the presentation, watching quietly, almost seeming to fade into the background. His voice low and flat, he spoke in Minnisiät, the translator picking it up a moment later. "May I go down there? I would like to see it for myself, speak with the pilot."

The rest of the team hesitated for a moment, Hermione found her voice first. "Yes, of course. Right this way, Captain." She led the short, slight, quiet man through a door at the back of the observation room, down a narrow flight of stairs, and then through a door leading straight out onto the testing grounds. While it could get terribly hot in this part of the world during the summer, it was early enough in the season and high enough in the mountains that it was quite cool, noticeably chillier than it'd been inside. Hermione quick cast a warming charm over herself, then turned to Fel. "Would you like a warming charm, Captain?"

He raised an eyebrow at her — on the scarred side of his face, a knotted line crossing through his eye socket and extending up his forehead to disappear under his hair. The injury had seemingly damaged the follicles, a lock right at his temple where the scar met his hairline bleached an unnatural white, sharp against the black of the rest of his hair. A drawling lilt on his voice, he answered...in Minnisiät.

Hermione blinked, then glanced back up toward the observation room. Right, the translation device would be back up there with everyone else, oops. She hesitated for a second, and then cast a warming charm on him. Fel twitched, his eyes widening in realisation. He nodded, but then made a sharp gesture across his own neck — telling her to cut the spell off, obviously. She did so, wordlessly nodded back at him, and then continued leading the way toward Beth and the bike. It was rather chilly out here for her, but if it didn't bother him, at least she'd offered.

Beth had gotten off the bike, but hadn't moved far, standing there poking at her phone and chatting with a couple of unfamiliar technicians, um... Hermione had no idea what they were talking about. Her Arabic still wasn't excellent, but it was plenty to know that they weren't speaking Arabic, which meant it was...Kurdish, probably? It could be Farsi, she thought they sounded similar, but they were in a predominantly Kurdish-speaking area, and she was aware that Beth had made a couple Kurdish friends in the war. Once again, a flare of jealousy burned in her gut — ever since she'd learned it existed, she'd thought omniglottalism was the most fascinating magical talent. It was the one thing she'd ever really envied her best friend for.

...Well, her looks a little bit, maybe, but that was mostly just because Hermione had been self-conscious about her weight back when they'd been in school. She'd gotten over that since, but she hadn't gotten over the omniglottalism.

As Hermione and Fel neared, Beth straightened a bit, the technicians backing off — she noticed that they were eyeing Fel, openly curious about the alien, but at least they weren't making a fuss. "Beth," she said as she came to a stop, a couple steps away, "this is Captain Jagged Fel. He asked to meet you, and see the bike."

Beth gave her a double-take, her eyes widening a little. "The Jagged Fel?"

"I assume so? I guess I didn't ask." As many quadrillions of people as there were in the galaxy, it seemed a bit silly to assume there couldn't be more than one Captain Jagged Fel. Humans were rather rare in the Law, though, so that this was the famous one she'd heard of before seemed the more likely possibility.

For some reason, Beth smiled at her, eyes warm — no idea what that was for — before she turned back to Fel. She straightened a bit, saluted (in the fashion of the Law), said something in Minnisiät. Introduced herself, Hermione thought — her Minnisiät was still very basic, but she could guess that much, at least. Fel returned the salute with a gesture she didn't recognise — one arm folding over his chest, and then dropping his hand, low and open palm-up between them — and then said...saying she'd flown well, Hermione was pretty sure. Grinning, Beth thanked him, and then Fel asked if she was the mage Beth Potter he'd heard of before, so she asked him if he was the Jagged Fel she'd heard of before. And then he was asking, um...

...no, she lost track of the conversation at that point, but it was clear that the two of them were talking about the bike. Beth took a couple steps back toward it, waving Fel closer, pointing at one thing or another. They were gesturing as they spoke, hands moving through the air — sort of acting out manoeuvres or something, she thought. At one point Fel spoke to the technicians, Beth translating back and forth for them — into and out of Kurdish(?), so of course Hermione didn't understand a word — by the look of it, she thought Fel had decided to introduce himself? Since they were standing right there, maybe, just to be polite. She thought that reflected well on him — it was pretty normal for VIPs at events like this to basically just ignore the support staff, that he'd bothered to say hello, by the look of it Beth even translating a couple questions back and forth, was unusual.

Hermione lingered for a minute or two, feeling very out of place — she didn't understand a word of what was being said, but at the same time she wasn't certain if it'd be appropriate for her to just leave Fel here with Beth. After a bit, the technicians walked off, and then Fel was swinging a leg over the bike. Should he be doing that? She reflexively glanced over her shoulder toward the observation room...but she guessed it probably wouldn't hurt anything. Fel was well-connected, if he got a better feel for their engineering and was suitably impressed that could only be a good thing for them. The display was switched on, Beth pointing at this thing or that, chatter in Minnisiät low and fast...

She was a little startled when one of the technicians returned, pushing along the long, delicate form of one of the old super-broom models. "Um, Beth? What's going on?"

"The Captain wants to give it a try. I'll show him around, and I'll be there to catch him if something goes wrong — that's what the broom is for."

Hermione opened her mouth to say that was a terrible idea, but then stopped herself, her teeth clicking. The way the Law's economy worked was somewhat confusing, but she understood that the more they gave the more they got — any contract they landed would mean more investment in Earth, more development assistance, allowing them to rebuild and start spreading out into space faster. The Law would help them with the basics for nothing, of course — they didn't let people inside their borders starve — but the faster they proved their worth, the faster they could join galactic society proper. She understood there was also a political calculation going on, to demonstrate that the Law wouldn't just want Earth for their mages, that, despite how primitive they might seem by comparison, their scientific and engineering capabilities were still useful. To prove that they didn't intend to rely on the Law's charity, that they could be a very valuable member of interplanetary society. Essentially, to stake a firm enough of a reputation that they didn't just vanish into the crowd, as tiny as a few billion people might be on the scale of the entire galaxy — to mean something, to make themselves known on the galactic stage, so they could earn themselves a seat at the table as quickly as possible.

As she'd thought to herself a second ago, the better the impression they made on Fel, the more likely they were to land Earth some kind of contract. Even if it weren't for the bike itself, if Fel talked to someone he knew in an important position and turned the authorities on to the benefits of their technology, anything they could get would be good. The purpose of this whole visit was to advertise themselves — if Fel taking a ride and playing around with Beth achieved that, so be it.

She might worry about Fel hurting himself, and how much of a diplomatic disaster that could be — Fel was well-connected, and he had absolutely no experience with enchanted devices, after all — but as long as Beth was close, it would probably be fine. "All right, then. Do try not to break him, Beth."

Smirking back at her, Beth drawled, "I wouldn't worry about it — I get the feeling Fel's about as natural of a flier as I am. I'll get him back to the party in one piece."

"You'd better." Shaking her head to herself, Hermione turned around and started walking back toward the observation room. She guessed she had to explain to everyone else what Beth and Fel were up to, brilliant.

Hopefully there was still more wine, worrying about Beth starting a diplomatic incident was going to make her hair frizz up at this rate...

Chapter Text

69:10:10 (17th March 2002)

There was something about Beth Potter that was at once very alien, and yet very familiar. It'd taken Jag an embarrassingly long time to identify just what it was.

Jag was hardly a frequent attendee of the tech demos different concerns put on for Procurement — he was a soldier, not an engineer, and hadn't the brain for logistics. To his displeasure, he had found himself invited far more frequently onto diplomatic missions, or even to the occasional cultural event. He had only himself to blame, he had to admit: his Expedition had been and still was the single longest venture of any element of the Law into the Republic. They'd done a number of cooperative exercises with the Empire, and they had an embassy on Bastion — though that was only a recent development, established after the planet had been retaken from the Vong — but they had virtually no contact with the Republic whatsoever. Luke Skywalker had been invited into their space, on two separate occasions, but that was the sum total of official interaction between their states.

Or it had been, anyway — since his return across the Rift, they'd been sending the occasional missive back and forth. Brief exchanges only, for the most part very practical concerns, they hadn't yet opened formal relations. For some unfathomable reason, he was often consulted by the teams handling these contacts, had once been brought along to a summit with a Republic Admiral on the frontier. He'd somehow managed to stumble his way ass-backwards into being considered an expert on their culture and politics, which was...just exasperating. He wouldn't say he knew that much — he'd been focussed on fighting the Vong, not making a thorough study of the peoples Beyond the Rift — but he supposed his impressions were better than nothing. Precious few people in the Law had spent any time Beyond the Rift at all, and the experiences of those who had were often decades out of date.

(Both of his parents had been born Beyond the Rift, but neither had been back for longer than Jag had been alive.)

Alongside his experience with the Republic in general, he was often considered an expert with the Jedi in particular, which he had to admit was a reputation far more well-deserved. He might not have spoken much with politicians and military leadership while he'd been Beyond the Rift, but he had spent no small fraction of his time around Jedi. While one might also be a member of the official military, the Jedi existed somewhat outside of the general organization of society as such, and so it had made sense for his Expedition to mainly partner with them. He'd fought alongside the Jedi, camped and ate with them, had spoken with members of the Order and their close associates probably more than anybody else.

He and his pilots, according to Republic law, had in fact been considered volunteers fighting under the command of the Jedi Order. He'd been uncomfortable with the arrangement at first, but his estranged uncle — General Wedge Antilles, Mother's younger brother — had convinced him it was the most convenient option available. For understandable reasons, the Republic was leery of permitting detachments from foreign militaries to operate within their borders — organizing under the Jedi had given them legal cover, legitimizing their presence in the Republic. In addition, their association with the Jedi had also given them access to the Order's own logistics channels, equipment and food and maintenance assistance that might have been difficult to acquire independently, so far away from home. He hadn't expected to be able to stay in the Republic for as long as they had, without the support of the Jedi they would have had to return home early, at least long enough to resupply. While they might have technically been under Jedi authority, Skywalker had been careful about the delicate diplomatic situation the presence of Jag and his pilots represented — they'd never been given direct orders, Jag always made party to discussions of tactical concern, left to command his people as he saw fit. It truly had been very convenient, the Expedition might not have gone nearly so smoothly without Wedge's advice and Skywalker's cooperation.

And so he'd worked very closely with the Jedi, had more direct experience with them than...well, quite literally anyone on this side of the Rift. Even the rest of the Expedition had had less contact with them — few had spoken much Basic at all, and they'd all been somewhat leery of the foreign sorcerers, had mingled more with the common soldiers instead. He was aware that some among the leadership had received the resurrection of the Jedi with some mild alarm, especially now that the Republic was aware of their existence. The Jedi had a long history of interfering in the affairs of the Republic's neighbors, going back millennia, and while there were similarly gifted people in the Law, particularly among the Monatšeri, they simply had no organized defense against sorcery. They wouldn't be able to resist such an intrusion, and if the Jedi poking their noses into the Law's business caused an incident...

On multiple occasions throughout Republic history, the unsanctioned activities of Jedi within the territory of their neighbors had escalated into all-out war. And if it came to war, the Law would lose — the Republic was simply too large.

(Palpatine might have been a deranged genocidal madman, but when it came to his elimination of the Jedi, Jag could at least see where he'd been coming from.)

Perhaps it represented an unfounded degree of paranoia, but now that the Rift was becoming more permeable, some among the leadership (both civilian and military) had begun to feel vulnerable. And so his knowledge of the Republic and, most particularly, the Jedi had become valuable. Even among those who had spent any significant time Beyond the Rift, his experience with the Jedi was unique — he hadn't only fought alongside them, but he'd interacted with them socially, continuously over the course of years, had had plenty of opportunity to speak with them about what Jedi were, their ideology and their abilities, had become familiar with their internal politics. While he felt his expertise when it came to the Republic in general was overrated, it was far more legitimate to call him an expert when it came to the Jedi in particular. Or at least as close to such a thing as the Law had.

Though he'd found that those he spoke with had little idea what to do with his rather...ambivalent evaluation of the threat the Order represented. To put it bluntly, they had drastically overestimated the powers of the average Force-sensitive. The old kharson sorcerer-lords no longer existed, the feats they were capable of having faded into legend, only having grown grander in the re-telling. The Jedi had been the bitter enemies of the old kharson, had driven them to flee their original home Beyond the Rift in a vicious, bloody war — their feats had had even longer to magnify into myth, on top of likely being founded on propaganda against their opponents. Those who had come from Beyond the Rift, well, their stories of the Jedi were from a very different Order, one which had had thousands of years to refine their abilities, while Skywalker's Order had effectively started over from nothing. In addition, Jag couldn't deny that what they'd known of the old Jedi was likely also official propaganda, in part to legitimize their role in society — before the Empire, the Jedi had had critical law enforcement and diplomatic powers in the Republic — and then later to vilify them, to justify Palpatine's purge of the Order. They'd had precious little direct knowledge of the Jedi, and what they had had was clearly unreliable, when one considered it for but a moment.

What he'd seen during his time among them had made it very clear to him that the legends were exaggerated. Sure enough, Jedi did have powers the average person did not. They could move with unnatural speed, lift impossibly heavy burdens, could endure without rest or without sleep far longer than should be possible. Their reflexes were so impossibly quick that their reaction speed was negative, responding to an impetus before it even occurred. Their foresight allowed them to move just where they needed, at just the right time, allowing them to dodge blaster bolts with graceful ease. They could communicate across distances, allowing them to share intelligence, yes, but they could also coordinate so smoothly as to seem a single unit, moving in perfect concert. Also, one could not underestimate the possible tactical advantages of moving things with one's mind, or reading or even manipulating the thoughts of others. Their sorcery did have its uses, that was certainly true.

But it also had its limits. For all their powers, Jedi were mortal beings — they would fall to the same wounds as anyone else. They might need to be put down harder than most, able to push on for longer despite having received what would be fatal wounds on anyone else, but they would fall if pressed, if not given time to recover. They could be overwhelmed: a single man with a blaster might not be able to touch one, but surround a Jedi with twenty, all firing in concert, well. And while lightsabers might be useful against small arms, Jedi were just as vulnerable to artillery and to explosives as anyone else. Their foresight might tip them off that they were in danger, but in most cases they were only given a warning of a couple seconds — hit them with something big, for which a couple seconds of warning was not enough to escape from danger, and their foresight was useless.

Jag had even been somewhat unimpressed with their much-vaunted ability to fiddle with a being's mind. The stories of them rewriting someone's entire identity, able to effectively enslave someone with but a glance, that was obviously an exaggeration. Jedi could influence people, sure, tweak their thoughts and their senses, meddle with their short-term memories, but what they could do was limited, and the effects generally faded once the victim was no longer in their presence. There were stories of people doing more than that — Kyp Durron's violation of Qui Xux was horrifying, exceeded only by his murder of an entire solar system, Jag was still dumbfounded that he hadn't seen any consequences for his crimes whatsoever — but they were few and far between. And even that influence was not so absolute as it was often claimed — some were entirely immune to it simply by nature, and anyone could quickly develop a resistance to it. Jag himself had, with some practice. He'd been curious, so he'd experimented with the help of a few cooperative Jedi (particularly Jaina and Lowbacca), and had discovered that he could easily shrug off their influence if he knew it was coming. If they were sneaky about it — waiting for him to be distracted by some task, or speaking with someone else, unaware of their presence — at first he'd been vulnerable to it, but with more familiarity he...

It itched. He didn't know how else to explain it — he could feel their presence in his mind, and it itched. Before his experimentation with the Jedi, he'd never perceived his mind as a discrete thing which could itch, but once it'd been touched enough times, he'd become aware of it. This was the key, he thought: once he'd learned to be aware of it, it'd become far easier to resist whatever manipulation a Jedi attempted to thrust upon him. In time he'd become so adept at it he was practically immune. They'd even made a game of it once, near the end of his time Beyond the Rift, Jaina and her friends teaming up to try to make him do something embarrassing all through a social gathering, but despite their combined efforts he'd never once lapsed. That awareness of one's mind as a thing that could be touched was the trick, he was certain of it.

Of course, that wasn't much help to their planners, since the only way he could think of to give that awareness to someone was to test them. They couldn't immunize their people against the threat of Jedi manipulation without a Jedi on hand to manipulate them. There were some Monatšeri who had the ability, but few enough to train to competence everyone throughout the entirety of the Law who might need the protection in the event that the Jedi became a threat.

That had recently ceased being a problem: it seemed the Dimitrans could 'enchant' an 'amulet' which would guard one's mind against intrusion, with no effort needed on the part of the wearer. A far simpler solution, that.

No, as effective as their sorcery could be in the right context, as much as he respected the dedication some Jedi he'd met held toward their self-imposed duty to selflessly serve the peoples of the Republic, he hadn't found them particularly impressive. But that didn't mean they weren't a potential threat — in fact, one of the ways in which they were less of a danger than they might have been was precisely what made them dangerous. The "Jedi Order", he'd come to find, was something of a misnomer: they were horrifically dis-organized. While they did all recognize a single authority in the person of Luke Skywalker himself, while there was a vague sort of hierarchy in the system of masters and knights and apprentices, it had seemed very much to him as though every Jedi were a law unto himself. They went where they will, they did what they will, swooping in from nowhere to act as judge and jury and executioner, when they vanished again leaving normal people to pick up the pieces scattered behind them. Skywalker had attempted to avoid handing the Republic leadership a force of superpowered beings they might use to repress the populace, but in their place he had created dozens of superpowered individuals who respected no authority but their own whims, responsible for and accountable to nothing and no one.

Fearing the possibility of a single tyrant, Skywalker had instead created a hundred.

Jag's understanding was that this was a state of affairs that the Republic had come to find absolutely intolerable, for what should be eminently understandable reasons, and had been in the process of attempting to bring the Jedi under control when they'd been interrupted by the Vong invasion. The war itself had at least brought the Jedi partially into line, in that many of them had been integrated into the military, but even then there were...issues. These Jedi might be theoretically accountable to the chain of command, but in practice they were given special privileges that common soldiers of their rank were not, and any attempt to discipline them could be immediately countermanded by the Jedi themselves. Jag had personally observed situations where Jedi had acted without orders, or directly disobeyed orders, spoken with flagrant insubordination to their superiors or open contempt for their peers, and generally engaged in behavior which might see any common soldier in the brig or court martialed, but which resulted in no greater consequence than the occasional lecture.

As far as he knew, no legitimate authority had ever attempted to detain a Jedi. He suspected they were skeptical of whether the Jedi considered themselves bound by the same law as common people, and didn't want to take on the risk of directly testing it.

So long as the proposition were never tested, everyone could go on pretending as though Jedi weren't above the law, even while they very clearly were.

Skywalker, at the very least, was aware of the problem. When Jag and his surviving pilots had been packing up to return home, the talk among the Jedi was that Luke intended to reinstitute the Jedi Council, to once again impose some controls over the Order. It was still blatantly unfair that Jedi should be policed by an institution entirely separate from the law that bound common people — one organized for and by themselves — but it was a step in the right direction, at the least. Better than the Jedi being under no authority whatsoever, as they had been before. Given how wilful some of the Jedi were, how attached they were to their total unaccountability, how deeply they'd romanticized it, Jag was skeptical as to whether it would be successful. One of the last things he'd ever said to Skywalker was to wish him luck, because he would need it.

The disorganized, unruly nature of the Jedi made them a lesser threat than they might seem at first glance, but at the same time it made them a greater danger. It was true that there were a hundred trained sorcerers within the Republic — perhaps more than that by now, even considering their losses during the war — but those sorcerers were not under the command of the Republic. They were under nobody's command, they were effectively independent agents — given how difficult Skywalker had found any attempt to corral them, even against the existential threat posed by the Yuuzhan Vong, it would be inappropriate to assume that the Jedi could ever be used by the Republic in any sort of organized effort. Not in any significant proportion, at the least. Any use of the Jedi against an opponent would be in small numbers, and uncoordinated, according to the whims of the Jedi in question.

And there was where the danger came in: according to the whims of the Jedi in question. They might not have to worry about the Republic sabotaging the Law through the coordinated use of Jedi agents, but they did have to worry about some Jedi stumbling over their border and making a fine mess of things. While a single Jedi might not be able to bring the entire Republic into war in their wake, in an official capacity, one could theoretically create serious enough of a diplomatic incident which might result in some sort of response from the Republic, which could ultimately escalate into war before cooler heads could prevail. Especially given how well connected certain persons among the Order were, yes, some reckless self-righteous bastard messing around could easily cause a disaster.

Some reckless self-righteous bastard like Jacen Solo, for example. Jacen had hardly been inside the Law for a couple days before alarms had already been being raised at the highest levels — at least in part thanks to Jag's advice concerning the danger posed by the Jedi, he'd been being closely watched ever since his presence had been noted. Jag had even been called in to consult on what he knew of Jacen's character and abilities, and what he might be doing here. Unfortunately, he hadn't been able to answer the latter. He hadn't spoken with Jacen much during the war — they hadn't gotten along, and he'd spent a significant fraction of the war in captivity behind enemy lines regardless — and there hadn't been much opportunity to correct that in the months between the Liberation of Coruscant and their return home either. Jacen had been in a...peculiar mood, distant and preoccupied, noted even by his family — Jaina had complained to him about it several times, though Jag hadn't been certain how much her difficulty in communicating with him had been...

Well, he didn't want to say her fault, but it was obvious even to him, who hadn't met either of them until after it had already started, that both Solo twins had been deeply changed by the war. It was no great shock that their relationship might have been damaged by it.

When Jacen disappeared after clearly preparing for a long journey, their assumption had been that he meant to return beyond the Rift — so they'd been taken by surprise when he'd appeared over Dimitra, of all places. He was still on the planet, a local military officer had reported that she'd agreed to give him magic lessons. This was a relief in some ways, since Jacen was less likely to make a nuisance of himself while he was preoccupied with studying Dimitran magic, but on the other hand, they didn't want Dimitran magic getting back to the Jedi either.

There'd been some no small degree of relief among those same voices who feared subversion from the Jedi upon the discovery of Dimitra. It was still early, but it seemed chance had delivered them precisely what they needed — sorcerers of their own, with powers and in numbers more than enough to counter the danger of the Jedi.

Since Jag had found himself stumbling into a position as an expert on magic, he'd been reading up on whatever they learned about the mages of Dimitra, permitted access to more information than his rank would normally merit, in order to keep their expert properly informed. It hadn't taken long before it'd become clear that the abilities of the mages — not a proper noun, they'd eventually realized, "mage" was simply what they called Force-sensitives — made the Jedi look like children playing with blocks. As bizarre as it might seem, they were not the only relatively 'primitive' people to successfully resist an invasion of their world thanks to the use of sorcery. The Dathomiris, Tenel Ka's people, had done much the same, though they'd also relied on the assistance of spaceborne allies, most especially the Hapans — the Dimitrans had had no outside help whatsoever, so far as Jag knew representing a unique accomplishment. Their magic was even more versatile than Dathomiri witchcraft, their sorcerers equally powerful, perhaps, but in greater numbers.

And unlike any band of sorcerers Jag had ever heard of, the Dimitrans had refined their magic to a science, systematized and reproducible — they had theoreticians, researchers, engineers, constantly pushing what was possible with their magic, further developments one year after the next. How much their magic had advanced even since the arrival of the Yuuzhan Vong in their system was astounding. From what he could tell, studying what materials he could find, it didn't seem as though the theory of their magic had advanced all that much — most developments made had been achieved with pre-existing knowledge — but the application certainly had, their entire society effectively transformed over the course of a small handful of years. Dimitra was in the process of a sort of industrial revolution, one which was still proceeding — advancements they'd made just in designing enchanted devices which could be used by ordinary people alone would make their civilization absolutely unrecognizable even in Jag's lifetime.

If he had his way, these devices would make all of the Law unrecognizable in his lifetime. Now that they were allies, there was no reason the Law shouldn't acquire this magic for themselves. It would take time for the transformation to spread, reliant on Dimitran experts for design and production, but it wouldn't take long for the knowledge to spread — in time, Dimitran magic would become regarded the same as a science like any other, and the Law would be forever changed for it.

The galaxy would be forever changed for it, of course, though the Law would receive the advantage of being the first adopters. It was truly a great stroke of luck that they'd been the ones to make contact with Dimitra, instead of some potential rival.

Though, if it were the wakali or even the Empire who'd found Dimitra first, Jag doubted first contact would have gone so smoothly. They would be unlikely to offer Dimitra favourable terms — and the Dimitrans had already demonstrated that they were quite capable of standing up for themselves.

While Jag normally had nothing to do with Procurement, he'd been very interested to be invited to the first such demonstration on Dimitra. Excited, even. He'd read as much about the mages as he could get his hands on since their discovery, and it was always more interesting to experience something himself than to watch a recording or read a description. (While there had been practical concerns, a similar curiosity had been part of the motivation behind his proposal of an Expedition to the Republic — it was a character flaw of his, he would admit.) Their Force-powered technology was fascinating, and he couldn't repress a desire to see what they might have already come up with, so soon after making contact. And, there was an element of...

He might have been able to relate to individual Jedi, but he'd found their Order as a whole somewhat...bizarre. Almost unnerving, in a way — as far as he was concerned, religious zealotry should not be paired with magical powers, that was simply asking for trouble. Some of them had had a more practical mindset, and hadn't taken so seriously the more spiritual aspects, but even with them it was always there, in the background. A similar issue had also always bothered him concerning the few sorcerers among the Monatšeri, though they were even more limited in their abilities than the Jedi. The Dimitrans, on the other hand, seemed far more like his sort of people.

That impression he'd had from a distance had only been solidified through his first conversation with a Dimitran mage of any real length. Jag had been familiar with Beth Potter before, from his research on Dimitra — she'd been one of the mages trained as a translator to facilitate negotiations with the Law, and had been the very first native Dimitran to join the Fleet. He'd seen several different recordings of her, innocuous ones of her in the background of diplomatic events but others of her performing magic, her flashy duels with one of the other translators, a demonstration she'd given during officer training. He'd even seen a few recordings taken from battles she'd participated in since joining the Fleet, but those were rather confusing, Potter teleporting around too much to get a clear picture. As far as they could tell, Potter was an especially capable mage, yes, but not a uniquely talented one, there were presumably dozens, even hundreds of mages on Dimitra who might be equally effective on the battlefield as she was proving to be.

Her superiors had noted her recklessness, seeming too quick to put herself at risk, but Jag thought he understood where that was coming from. With miraculous Dimitran sorcery at her fingertips, she was far more capable of meeting any threat than a common soldier would be. So, when danger presented itself, it only made sense to put herself between it and her men — to do any less would be to unnecessarily risk the lives of the people under her command. Jag habitually did much the same thing while flying alongside the pilots he commanded, putting himself at the front, taking for himself the most risky role in any exchange — because he was the most skilled pilot in the group, so anyone else put in his place would be more likely to die. If anything, Potter was putting herself at lesser risk than he was, since he didn't have magic to further insulate himself from danger.

He thought it reflected well on her, that they should be pleased that someone who had evidently been born into some manner of aristocracy had developed such a strong sense of selfless duty at all. But he realized that his superiors also thought he was unnecessarily reckless, so it was truly no surprise that they didn't share his lack of concern.

It was common for people to be ill at ease around sorcerers — most of his pilots during the Expedition had avoided even being near the Jedi if at all possible, mingling with the common soldiers but keeping a healthy distance from the sorcerers. Jag did have to admit that it was somewhat unnerving to know the person he was speaking with had magical powers, and could use them to fiddle with his mind or blast him into a wall or snap his neck, but it wasn't... There were all manner of myths around sorcerers, both in the Law and Beyond the Rift, and they tended to frame them as beings somehow distinct from the rest of them, sometimes even semi-divine, something else. In his experience, sorcerers were simply people. The wider perception the Force allowed them could make them seem a little strange at times, speaking and acting in response to things Jag couldn't see or hear, but it wasn't so different from a person of another species simply having different senses than he did. They were still just people, like anyone else.

As to the powers themselves, well, an untrained civilian would be equally helpless to defend themselves from Jag as they would a Jedi — the only difference was that Jag would need to use his hands. It wasn't even unusual to be in the helpless position himself, given how much stronger than humans some other peoples could be, he'd fought alongside plenty of soldiers who could easily kill him with their bare hands if they wanted to. As odd and subtly unnerving as he found the Jedi doctrine, at least the programming prevented them from murdering people on a whim. It could be a little unnerving, yes, especially when the Jedi he was speaking with did something to remind him of the power they could theoretically hold over him, but it wasn't enough to deter him.

For all that she was obscenely powerful by the measure of individual beings — could pick apart entire platoons of soldiers singlehandedly, knock speederbikes and fighter craft out of the air, blast apart tanks and artillery or even demolish buildings — when meeting her in person Jag had found Beth Potter perfectly ordinary. Perhaps a little overly casual when speaking to superior officers, a little presumptuous, like with that comment at the beginning of her part of the demonstration — a relic of her aristocratic upbringing, maybe, left with a lacking sense of when she was reaching beyond her station. Once they'd started discussing the bike, Potter enthusiastically describing how it felt to fly, the advantages of the magic that went into its design — exploits that he wouldn't be aware of, having no experience with flying broomsticks or whatever else — she'd felt no different to him than any other natural pilot he'd spoken with. The sort who truly loved flying, had an instinct for it, felt more natural in the air than with two feet on the ground — the passion on her voice, the gracefulness of her gestures as she described maneuvers, he'd met countless people who spoke the same.

He was one such person himself, even. No matter cultural boundaries, species who experienced the world in radically different ways than did humans, he never had any difficulty communicating with other natural pilots. If nothing else, they had their love of flight in common.

After having flown the Dimitrans' take on a speeder himself, he was almost jealous that Potter had had access to things that flew like this since she'd been a child. The craft was impressive for all manner of other reasons, of course, the armour, the weapon systems the sensors, it was brilliant work in general — he imagined the simple fact that it required no fuel whatsoever, didn't even have batteries that needed to be charged between uses, would make it very attractive to more isolated outposts which had greater issues maintaining supplies or limited power generation capabilities. It was a little amusing that the specialists had mentioned that it didn't require any outside power whatsoever as though it were an afterthought, Dimitrans clearly had a very different sense of what was ordinary and what was noteworthy. Jag didn't think it likely that the military would be replacing the speeders they already used with the one they'd been shown today, but it might still perhaps be useful for planetary defense, or isolated outposts, and there were several different technologies incorporated into it which might be adapted to other purposes. He half-expected that had been the Dimitrans' intent — that even if the speeder itself wasn't an attractive prospect, it functioned as a demonstration of a basket of other technologies which might be, if turned to some other use. Putting them all together into one demonstration was simply more efficient than arranging for a dozen.

But all thought about the engineering that went behind it, simmering curiosity about the Dimitrans' bizarre Force-using technology, what else in the package might prove useful in the future, all had vanished once he'd actually started flying the thing. He'd been worried that the alien craft might take some getting used to, that he could even put himself at risk adapting to an unfamiliar system — Potter had promised she could catch him with magic if something went wrong, but if he were moving at speed she might not have the time to. Those concerns had been entirely unnecessary, because it turned out that flying the speeder came as natural as breathing. It was a little odd at first, since the speeder didn't use traditional controls at all, instead guided by how he sat on it, how he leaned or dipped or clenched down. But not only that, the speeder wasn't guided only by how he moved his body, but by his thoughts, turning at the slightest shift of his weight, yes, but travelling exactly along his flightpath as he imagined it, smooth and perfect and...

It felt almost as though he weren't piloting a speeder craft, but as though he were flying, himself. He wasn't, of course, he could feel the speeder under him, the grasp of the Dimitrans' magical antigravity tech on his skin, the harsh scream and jittery thrum of the thruster, could see the colourful holographic displays before him. It was hard to explain, it felt so natural to fly, seamless, moving exactly when and how he wanted, obeying his very thoughts...

Once he grew accustomed to it, the speeder almost seemed to fall away — similar to when he fell into the flow when piloting, but as though there were an extra layer of separation he hadn't even been aware of that had finally dissolved. It'd been...

Well, it was possibly the most joyful experience he'd ever had in the air. Maybe the Fleet wouldn't end up commissioning these speeders, but he wanted one. Was there someone around who might be willing to make him a civilian model? He should maybe try to ask around while he was here...though he didn't know where he'd keep it, he moved around too much...

He'd returned to the ground reluctantly, would have stayed in the air if he could — someone had called Potter when the meeting had begun wrapping up. Even after landing, Jag hadn't properly rejoined the conversation between their delegation and the Dimitran technicians — he doubted he'd have much to contribute anyway — caught in a conversation with Potter instead, trading stories. Potter had ridden one of their flying broomsticks (still very strange to him) in several battles during the Vong invasion, and she was curious about his experiences as a fighter pilot, having received only very basic pilot training herself. (Speederbikes were flown by the army, an entirely different specialization from fighter pilots.) Apparently, when she'd been fourteen she'd flown a broom against a dragon, at first he hadn't been certain what she meant by the term, but Dimitra had enormous magical animals that could fly and breathe fire, what even was this planet, that was just bizarre...

The time had come for their delegation to leave, but somehow — he wasn't certain how it had happened, jumping from one thing to another in a fashion that had felt natural at the time but seemed abrupt in retrospect — Jag had ended up with an invitation from Potter to continue their conversation. Without quite realizing what was happening, he'd agreed, told the Commodore that he'd catch up with them tomorrow. A very impulsive decision, he...

Potter did seem very much to be his kind of person, but she also felt familiar, like he already knew her. It took him embarrassingly long to figure out why.

They'd discussed it for a couple minutes, before she'd suggested they go to...some cantina or something somewhere, he thought — she used proper names, lapsing into Dimitran terms, he didn't follow what she was saying. Civilian dress would make sense, just to not stand out too badly, but Jag hadn't brought any civilian clothes with him. Beth — first names, now that they were off-duty — gave him a once-over, and then said that her uncle's clothes should fit him. Jag was a little put off by the thought of borrowing some stranger's things without his permission, but Beth seemed very confident that he wouldn't mind. She didn't spell it out, but this uncle of hers was away from Dimitra, and he got the impression that she didn't expect him to come back any time soon. That whatever he'd left behind when he'd gone was effectively abandoned, and could be considered free to be used by anyone. There was a story there — there would need to be, as few Dimitrans as there were away from their homeworld at all — but it didn't seem like his business to ask.

And so Beth had taken him by the arm and teleported him to her home, which turned out to be a seriously uncomfortable experience. It seemed as though space collapsed upon him, stiff warm blackness squeezing hard against his skin — and then he was pulled through it, strained and stretched like drawing out noodles, his ears popping and stars dancing in his eyes at the force pressed against them. It lasted a second, and then the blackness retreated and the world popped back into existence around him, leaving Jag disoriented and nauseated, staggering until he hitched up against the back of a sofa. He'd needed a moment to compose himself, taking long deep breaths, fighting to still his churning stomach and spinning head.

Apparently it could be worse — Beth claimed it wasn't unusual for people to vomit their first time through. Some warning would have been nice, but at the chastisement the woman just smirked back at him, unreasonably amused.

Given that she was some manner of aristocrat, Jag was unsurprised that he'd been teleported into a sprawling mansion, he didn't need to know anything about the Dimitran economy to understand that the materials and furniture and decoration were all very fine, glittering and delicate. It was only a short walk from wherever they'd appeared to what had apparently been her uncle's rooms while staying in the manor, but even in that time they came upon a few people, lingering chatting over some alien card game in a sitting room. They called to Beth, there was a brief, inscrutable exchange in the local language.

Beth simply pointed him at where her uncle's things were kept, and then left him alone to go get changed herself. They were in a mix of styles and materials, while not exactly the same as clothing he'd worn before at least generally recognizable in their form — there were only so many ways to clothe a human body. Holding a couple pieces against himself, yes, it looked like this Sirius man was reasonably close enough to Jag's size to borrow his clothes. Jag thought he might be a little taller, and broader in the shoulder, but it was close enough. He didn't know anything about Dimitran fashion, of course, or what would be appropriate to be wearing in public — it didn't help that he wasn't certain what sort of place Beth was bringing them to — but he doubted it would make that much of a difference. Besides, there was little chance anybody would recognise him anyway.

In the end, he picked out a black pair of pants made out of some kind of soft but sturdy fabric, a pale blue shirt made out of something silky smooth, and then since the shirt seemed like it might not be quite enough for a more formal setting — Beth was some manner of aristocrat, it was possible she was bringing him somewhere reasonably nice — he added a button-down vest, a deep blue that wasn't quite black stitched with curling spiraling patterns in white and gold. Now that he was looking more closely, was that actual gold? He hesitated a moment, wondering if this was too fine, before just shrugging it off — the effect was subtle, especially compared to some of the more garish pieces in this Sirius's wardrobe, it was probably fine. Trying them on, the fabric of the shirt was loose enough to accommodate his wider frame, but the legs of the pants didn't quite fit over his boots, so he swapped them out for a different pair, these in a fabric more like the shirt, sitting loose enough to billow over the tops of his boots, perfect. They were also blue, but would Dimitrans think it peculiar to wear all one color like this? He simply didn't know enough about their culture to have any idea...

Beth had already returned to the sitting room by the time he was finished, chatting with the card-players here. Seeing her in civilian clothing — pants of some kind of rough, sturdy fabric hugging close around her hips, the seams standing out and a few rivets here and there catching the light, a button-up shirt in a light, shimmery material, a couple of the buttons at the top left hanging open, showing a triangle of her chest pointing down from her collarbones — her slouching, casual posture leaning a hip against the arm of a sofa, the casual drawl to her voice, it abruptly clicked why she seemed so familiar to him.

She reminded him of Jaina.

It should not have taken him that long to figure it out.

Beth teleported them again, and they burst out into somewhere bright and sunny and warm, a chatter of voices and the roar of the surf in the near distance. Once he'd recovered again, she led them out of the small alleyway they'd appeared in onto a wide open boulevard, lined on both sides with low buildings made of brick painted in pastel colours, alien trees sprouting up here and there. There were some people around gathered in small clumps, but most of what he assumed were shops and restaurants seemed somewhat empty, some of them even shut up, dark. Given how wide open the brick-paved street was, it seemed like this was the sort of place that should get a lot of foot traffic, making the small number of people around appear fewer than they truly were.

Sauntering along down the boulevard, Beth said, "This is Málaga — it was pretty badly smashed up in the jusannu attack, was left half-abandoned for a time, but it was built back up as manufacturing got going up in the hills and the gate network was set up. It's pretty common for working people to come down here after they're let off, on big days the town practically transforms into one huge festival. We're early yet, so I figured we'd grab a drink and wander around, waste time until the party starts. That good with you?" she asked, glancing at him over her shoulder. "I can bring us somewhere further east if you don't want to wait for the dinner hour, I just thought they throw good parties in Málaga."

Jag shook his head. "You know Dimitra better than I do. How far have we travelled? The sun seems higher in the sky, and I thought the sea was hundreds of kilometres away." Beth had demonstrated her teleportation trick over shorter distances, but so far as he knew they'd never tested how very she could go in a single jump.

"I don't know exactly. A few thousand kilometres?"

His step hitched for a second, he gave her a double-take. "A few thousand? Are you using the wrong units?"

A smirk on her voice, she said, "No, our distance units are pretty close to yours anyway. We went to the opposite side of Europe, it— Hold on a second." She stopped, turning to face him, the wooden stick she used to cast spells appearing in her hand. With a little wave, an image of Dimitra appeared between them, looking as solid as any hologram — the entire globe, the colors stark and flat, seas blue and land green, the features of the shorelines somewhat simplified. "We started here," Beth said, reaching through the globe to point the tip of her wand at a narrowed spot in the middle of the largest landmass, surrounded by ocean and enclosed seas, the general area of the planet Jag knew their only spaceport and the testing site were located. "The first jump brought us here," her wand moving up to the large, oblong island off the coast of the peninsula to the northwest of the landmass — the same island where Jag knew Jacen was studying at the moment, incidentally. "Now we're here," she said, pointing near the very southwest of the peninsula, close to where it didn't quite touch the southeastern portion of the landmass, a narrow channel connecting a wide enclosed sea to the planet's great ocean. "I'm not sure the exact distance, but it's a few thousand kilometres." The image disappeared with a wave of her hand, her magic stick disappearing up her sleeve again.

"...How far can you travel with that teleporting you do?"

Beth blinked at him for a second, seeming slightly taken aback by the question. "Um, I'm not sure, actually. I know I can get all the way to the opposite side of the planet in a few hops, but I'm not sure if I need to break it up into smaller jumps? Supposedly, the energy necessary scales with mass, but not distance, so if I can jump five kilometres I should be able to jump fifty thousand kilometres — people can get tripped up with distance, but that's just because it feels like longer trips should be harder, gets in your head, you know?" Jag, of course, did not know. "So, I'm not sure how far I can go in one jump, but I can get anywhere on Dimitra in the space of a minute or so, taking a couple jumps. Anywhere I've been to, I mean, you need to have been to a place to teleport there."

For a moment, Jag just stared down at her, dumbfounded. "That's absurd. Can you teach that to other Force-sensitives?"

She made a little sneer at the term Force-sensitive — he was aware that the mages of Dimitra tended to think the terminology the rest of the galaxy used was a bit silly — but then she shrugged. "Sure, I guess. It's not that hard — as long as you can express magic without a wand, you can teleport, and none of you even have wands, so. But you'll want magical healers on hand for that. If you don't know what you're doing, you might pinch off body parts and leave them behind."

...Jag was going to ignore the implication that she could have pinched off pieces of him. As many times as he'd seen her use this teleportation trick in recordings, it was clear that she knew what she was doing — he trusted her enough to assume she wouldn't risk harming him for no good reason.

He wasn't sure how much that trust was just because she reminded him of Jaina, which was an odd thought to suddenly be having.

A short walk later, Beth turned down a side street — the path ended abruptly at the beach not far away, after a span of pale yellowish-white sand bright greenish-blue water stretching out to the horizon. He hadn't spent much time around oceans, so much of his life passed in space, most of the worlds he'd been on either much colder or more polluted than Dimitra, so seeing a proper beach was always somewhat novel to him. At the end of the short road was a railing blocking off the short drop down to the beach, just to the left a restaurant of some kind lightly constructed of wood, a slew of tables outside under the sun. All of the tables were empty, only a few people at the bar inside, but Beth had said they'd arrived before peak hours, presumably it'd fill up as people left work.

Beth led them inside, walked straight up to the bar. She greeted the human man there in an unknown language — a different one from what she'd been speaking with the people at her home earlier, he was pretty sure, supposedly she spoke dozens of languages — after a couple exchanges back and forth turned to Jag to ask if he had any allergies or anything to avoid. They walked out again with glasses filled with a Dimitran drink, something sweet and fruity, fizzing on his tongue — he didn't recognize the fruit flavoring, something native to Dimitra. The fruit flavoring was from a sweetened carbonated drink, which had been mixed with wine...made from another Dimitran fruit he didn't recognize. The concept was familiar, at least, even if the particulars weren't.

She asked him if he had a preference for which direction they went. He was tempted to suggest they wander the beach, since it was so rare he got to see one, but he realized this was a unique opportunity to see more of Dimitra, on the ground among them, much closer than simply reading of the place in text. So, a little reluctantly, he instead said they should wander about the town for a bit — they put the beach behind them, Beth leading the way across the wide boulevard and onto another street, continuing deeper into the colourful seaside town.

For the first segment of their walk — sipping at their drinks, Beth babbling a little about the polity they were inside and the effects of the Vong invasion — Jag spent a bit of time turning over why exactly his brain had decided to associate Beth with Jaina. They weren't that much alike, he didn't think, it was a strange connection he'd made.

Beth was noticeably taller, her frame a bit sturdier — Jaina was tiny, delicate in the manner common among certain lineages of humans. They were both rather pale, though Beth's skin showed patches that had bronzed from repeated sun exposure, especially along her nose and across her cheeks, dotted here and there with subtle freckles. Jaina's face also had much more sharpness to it, stark and angular, reminiscent of the aristocracy of certain old Core worlds, particularly those of Alderaanian or Kuati extraction. (Luke took more after their father, and they assumed Leia must take after their mother — Leia's own theory was that she'd been among the rarefied classes a Jedi might have cause to come into contact with on Coruscant, but they weren't certain who. Presumably, Jaina looked like her grandmother, but it was hard to say for certain.) While Jaina's hair was a brown so dark it was almost black, only showing its softer shades in the light, Beth's was a vibrant, vivid red, with only the occasional hints of orange, the sort of color Jag didn't think human hair ever took at all. He assumed it was magic, apparently Dimitran mages could alter their appearance if they felt like it. The texture was very different as well, Jaina's straight and sleek, cut just above her shoulders, while Beth's was cropped short, only a few inches, let go wild in an fluttering asymmetrical mess, showing kinking curls twisting seemingly at random...

They really didn't look that alike, at all. He wasn't sure what had made him think of her — he hadn't even seen Jaina in...over three years by this point. Four years?

...They did have a similar flat drawl to the way they spoke, he guessed — though it was hard to say for certain just how similar it was, with the difference in cadence between Minnisiät and Basic. How blunt Beth was, sparing with the formalities, that was also similar.

They had a similar walk. Smooth and confident, yes — they were both powerful sorcerers and trained fighters, held themselves with the self-assurance that came with both — but also tense and ready, watching. As though they were at once on the lookout for any threat, ready for a fight to come upon them at any moment, but at the same time didn't fear the prospect, confident of their competence should one come. It was a somewhat peculiar combination, he felt — the alertness that could be found in many who'd seen too many battles, but without the wariness that came with it. He wasn't sure how to explain it.

Beth felt...calmer, than Jaina. Last time he'd seen her, Jaina had seemed rather brittle. The war had been very hard on her — she'd been fighting more or less constantly for years straight, had been severely injured multiple times, had lost countless friends, someone he understood to be something of a close uncle (he wasn't certain what to call Chewbacca's place in their family), her brother. It'd nearly broken her, in the wake of Anakin's death, but the state she'd managed to reassemble herself into still hadn't been the most stable.

The greater part of his reluctance to finally return home had been because of how unstable she'd seemed. She'd insisted on joining the effort to hunt down unreformed Vong elements, when he truly didn't think she was in any fit state to continue fighting — she'd needed to rest, badly, before the strain of everything she'd gone through finally made her snap. And he wasn't the only one who thought so either, Leia had been equally concerned. He'd tried to broach the subject with Jaina on a couple of occasions, but she always just brushed it off, abruptly going all cold and snappish until he dropped it. Her family had effectively broken apart over the course of the war, her brother going off who knew where, her aunt (and former Master) too preoccupied with her young son and helping Skywalker with the rebuilding effort to spare the attention, her parents...

They were fine, more or less, but Jaina had been away from them long enough, travelling and fighting on her own, that she didn't respect their authority over her anymore — even if they could agree on Jaina needing to take a break, which they didn't, Han placing too much trust in her own ability to judge her limits — and it wasn't as though they had a home for her to stay with them anyway. Last Jag had known, Leia and Han had been living out of the Falcon, and planned to continue doing so indefinitely. Jaina had not been okay, but as strained for personnel and resources as the Republic were they weren't simply willing to refuse help from a Jedi of her competence, and there'd been nobody in her family, nobody in her life, who had the standing to confront her. He and Leia were the only ones he knew of who'd even expressed concern, but neither of them had been in a position to do anything about it.

He'd been worried, when he'd left, that Jaina would succumb to the trauma accumulated during the Vong invasion, and... Well, he didn't know what might happen then. She hadn't, as far as he knew — according to their intelligence, Jaina was still working with the teams rooting out parties of unreformed Vong across the Republic. He was still worried, honestly, on the occasions it occurred to him to think about her.

Perhaps Beth might have seemed as fragile as Jaina, if he'd met her four or five years ago...but, somehow, he doubted it. It was hard to put his finger on what about her it was that gave him the feeling, but he got the impression that, put under pressure, Beth would bend, but not break. He couldn't say why, just the feeling he had.

While he pondered over that, Beth led him deeper into the town. This place had been a much larger settlement before the invasion, as she'd explained earlier, before being bombed to rubble and mostly abandoned. The portion of the settlement she'd first brought him to was more tailored to guests from the industrial cities of the country — and also tourists from further afield, apparently, though travel for leisure hadn't yet picked back up from the chaos the Vong invasion had thrown the planet into — while the place they were entering now was more for the local residents. Most of it was very new, rebuilt after the city had been devastated in the initial attack, apartment blocks built primarily of ceramics and glass — the same sort of ceramics used in their speeder, Beth claimed, though tailored for construction and not as armor. The buildings looked very similar, built all at once and somewhat rushed, more concerned with function than the aesthetics, blocky and regular.

Though in the years since their construction, the locals had made the place their own. Scattered all over were troughs and pots hosting plants of all kinds — many of the plants seemed rather thin to his untrained eye, he assumed it was early in the season — vines crawling along railings and the sides of buildings. Short bushy trees had been set into the pavement in long rows, most of them flowering — some kind of fruit, maybe? The walls and the street had been painted all over in an eclectic mix of colours, plants and animals, figures of people, complex geometric designs, what he thought were stylized words written in the local script. The underlying structure might have been very stiff, inorganic, but the locals had covered it up with life and color, adding some much-needed character to the place. It was rather nice, he thought, if somewhat busy.

There were also far more people about, which he supposed made sense. If many of the people here were involved in the sector playing host to workers coming in after their work for the day, then the workers serving them would now be attending to their errands before it was time to get to their jobs. Nobody paid the two of them any mind as they walked along, slipping innocuously through the people moving this way or that down the street — Jag assumed they might have gotten rather more attention if they were in uniform, so finding other clothes had likely been a good call.

Before too long they arrived at what Jag took to be a central square of some kind, at the heart a large stone fountain, jets of water sprayed up to splash back down in the pool. There were what Jag took to be a mix of residences and stores and possibly government offices ringing the square, but there were also stalls set up seemingly at random throughout the open space, the locals heading to this one or that, waiting in line. They were mostly food stands, by the look of it? He guessed people were grabbing a quick dinner before it was time to head into work. Though, looking around, he saw there were some children and teenagers around as well, maybe the street food here was simply popular with the locals.

Beth spoke, interrupting his observation. "I'm a little hungry — I didn't have lunch — so I figured we'd get something and split it. We can grab more food back by the beach, later in the night."

"You expect to be out long enough we can't simply eat now?"

"Did you have somewhere else you planned on being?"

"Not really, no," Jag admitted. "We aren't planning to leave Dimitra until the day after tomorrow." By the official clock, of course, but the length of the day was only about an hour and a half longer than the local clock. "I'm not objecting, merely curious as to what you have planned."

She gave a careless little shrug. "I guess we could eat now, but, like I said, I'm not that hungry. And I expect the dancing will wear us out enough we'll want food later."

"Taking me out dancing, are you?" he asked, ticking up a skeptical eyebrow.

"You saw the look of the street we were walking down earlier, I thought that was obvious." It sort of was, yes, though he wouldn't want to assume, keeping potential cultural barriers in mind. "Not with each other, to be clear — no offense, but you're not my type. I'm sure you won't have any trouble finding a partner, especially since you look like a mage, in those clothes."

That was the other thing he hadn't wanted to assume, nice to have that cleared up before he could start worrying whether they were on the same page or not. "I see. In that case, let's do whatever you think you best. You're familiar with this place and the culture surrounding these things, and I'm not — I'm simply along for the ride. I'm sure it'll be an interesting cultural experience."

Beth let out a snort. "Interesting cultural experience, honestly, you just sounded like Hermione for a second. Do you mind spicy food? There's a fruit that grows on Dimitra, the flavor is a little similar to those nuts Monatšeri put in everything."

"Oh, I love Monatšeri food, that won't be a problem."

"Good, I think we'll head...that one," she said, pointing to one of the stalls halfway across the square.

Squinting off in that direction, Jag couldn't make out the signs from here — he wouldn't be able to read the script anyway, of course, but he couldn't really distinguish that stand from any of the others. "How are you reading that from here?"

"Magic. Come on." She started leading them along, weaving between people standing around chatting or waiting in line for one stand or another. The air was intensely fragrant, thick with smoke and steam, smells hearty and spicy and sweet and sour, alien spices and fruits in a dizzying medley. He was aware that most of Dimitra's biological diversity was still intact, they'd clearly used what resources they had to their greatest effect — he hadn't been joking about it being an interesting cultural experience, the local food was one thing the data he'd seen had touched not at all. They split up to get around a clump of people, when they joined back together Beth said, "If you'd rather not do something quite so social, I can bring us somewhere quieter. Just the first thing I thought of, and I'm on mandatory leave, so I might as well have fun with my time, right?"

"No, that's all right. I prefer not to go out much these days, due to my fame thanks to the Expedition. It can be...tiring, when I'm recognized."

"Believe me, I know," Beth drawled, sounding thick and exasperated. "I was stupidly famous with mages practically from birth, and thanks to the war I get recognized with normal people all the time too. And now my face is getting around the Law, can't bloody escape it."

Once again, he noticed the odd use of the word bloody — must be some Dimitran idiom she was literally translating into Minnisiät. "Why were you famous from birth? You mean since you were born into the aristocracy?"

She sighed. "It's not that, no. This is going to sound insane, but..."

As they waited in the line for the stall Beth had picked out, she spoke to him of the Dark Lord — she used one of the titles for the old kharson sorcerer-lords, said it came with a similar connotation in her native language — who had terrorized her birth country so thoroughly he'd been believed to be unkillable, until his miraculous self-destruction while attempting to murder Beth as an infant, and the absurd, religion-colored stories her people had told about it in the years after. The story was, in fact, insane, but by this point he'd realized that many things to do with sorcerers sounded insane to the uninitiated. In fact, it sort of sounded like some of the more colorful Monatšeri legends from the days when the sorcerer-lords had still been around — the only difference was that it was something that had happened only two decades ago, directly involving the woman standing right next to him. "This is something that truly happened? I mean, I don't doubt you, but from what I know of the Force, this Dark Lord destroying himself isn't something that just...happens."

Beth rolled her eyes at his use of the Force, but answered without commenting on it. "Yeah, it happened, but the things people say about why are ridiculous — I was just explaining the kind of shite I had to deal with when I was younger. I've heard a few theories, but I think the only one that makes any sense is that my mother performed a ritual to protect me, sacrificing her own life to do it. Ritual magic is weird and unpredictable, especially when powered with the sacrifice of a sapient being. My mother was the one who defeated the Dark Lord — there's nothing special about me, I was just in the room at the time. But you know how people can be, the story got spread around anyway."

"I see." Jag didn't know exactly what Beth meant by ritual magic, but he'd take her word for it. He knew enough from old Monatšeri stories that anything that involved sacrificing people was deadly serious. "I thought the renown I have from the Expedition is bad — it almost sounds as though people started a cult around you."

"No almost about it, some people think what happened that night was literally the result of divine intervention."

"Oh, damn. You have my sympathies, that sounds terrible."

"It was, yeah. If I have to pick one, I much prefer being known for doing crazy insane heroics — at least that's something I actually did." Before he could respond to that, they got to the front of the line, and Beth turned to the workers behind the counter, started chattering away in the local language. He noticed Beth gesture at him once, the workers' eyes going wide. "I just told them you're an alien," she explained, before going back to talking to them. After going through the conversation, Beth paid with her comm — no, not her comm, that was one of the locals' magical devices, she held it up to a box built into the counter, the steady hard glow of their not-holograms briefly appearing as the transaction was made — and then they stepped aside, letting the next person in line come up as their food was put together.

Jag was tall enough to see into the stand, though he couldn't make out much without tipping up onto his toes. Not that it seemed as though anything they were doing in there was that unusual. It looked like they had a flat grill in there, perfectly familiar, and what looked like a somewhat primitive method of immersion frying. Cooking things on a hot surface and frying them in oil were things which basically every culture ever had innovated on their own, it was no surprise they existed on Dimitra as well — given the cultural diversity on this planet, he would expect them to have a dozen different ways of doing them. They had multiple orders going at once, a few other people standing around waiting, Jag couldn't tell which parts of the activity going on in there were their order. Beth had gotten pulled into a conversation with one of the other people waiting for their food — by the set of her shoulders, he suspected she'd been recognized, so Jag occupied himself watching the cooks at it, manipulating unfamiliar alien ingredients with all the smooth ease of long practice.

After a few minutes, the cook coming up to the counter holding a basket called out Beth's name. She slipped up to take it from him, said what he assumed was a thank you in the local language, and then turned to start leading him away. She plucked something out of the basket, and then held the basket out toward him. "Here, try one of the little things — they're best when they're still hot."

Inside the basket was a long narrow sandwich of some kind, cut in half, with a mound of crispy-looking yellowish...long and thin rectangular segments of something, drizzled over the top swirls of two different sauces, one off-white and the other a vivid red. He picked up one of the segments where he wouldn't get sauce on his fingers, popped it into his mouth. He thought it was some kind of rich starchy vegetable, or maybe a grain or nut paste, fried to be crispy on the outside but soft on the inside, salty and greasy, a mix of flavors from the sauces he couldn't identify, unfamiliar Dimitran spices. They were good, creamy and hot and sharp and sour, it was simply difficult to put words to what tastes those were, exactly — not that that was an unusual experience, happened all the time when he tried alien food. "Those are good. The texture sort of reminds me of khaliśam, if you've had those."

Chewing on one of the fried things, Beth nodded. "Mm, yeah, similar idea. We do have what are basically khaliśam — made with different stuff, but close — but these are slices of... It's the root of a plant, basically."

"Like mado."

"The flavor is a bit different, but sure, like mado. The white sauce is alioli, which is sort of..."

While Beth continued explaining where everything had come from and the basics of how it was made, she led him over to the fountain, took a seat on the rim. It was perfectly normal to use the fountain as a bench, apparently, there were plenty of locals around doing the same thing. By the sound of it, the white sauce was not dissimilar to certain things in Chiss cuisine — the flavor profile was different, but the use of eggs to stabilize a sauce was familiar — and the red sauce could easily be confused for Monatšeri. The use of the two of them together was...interesting. He wasn't sure he liked the white one as much, quickly started avoiding the ones with more of it — it seemed like Beth noticed almost right away, picking out the ones with the most white on them. They let the sandwich be for now, eating the fried things first, since Beth insisted they were best while still hot. He could tell how that would be the case, he had the same opinion about khaliśam.

The conversation turned toward the war with the Vong, and their participation in it, without Jag quite realizing how one thread had led into the other. He thought it had something to do with a question from him about how her fame among mages had extended to all of Dimitra, and a misjudgement of his age on her part, but he hadn't really followed the subject change. (People were very bad at guessing his age, though whether they guessed too high or too low seemed to be random.) Jag had always intended to join the Fleet — all of his siblings had, that he would as well had simply been taken for granted — but it turned out Beth had joined the military even younger than he had. Fifteen, the same age as Jaina had been...slightly younger, actually, since Beth had just turned fifteen and Jaina had been nearly sixteen. That had been young for her people too, her uncle (the same one whose clothes he was borrowing) had been preparing her to defend herself ahead of the outbreak of what sounded like a civil war among the mages, the skills she'd acquired then very convenient when the Vong attacked. She'd just been an unattached volunteer in the chaos of the initial attack, it'd taken some convincing to get the official military to take her — which made sense, since she had been barely fifteen.

He would question the ethics of signing on someone so young, but after a second of thought he realized he was being uncharitable. Dimitra had been in the most desperate of straits, having been invaded by aliens who had them at a severe technological disadvantage — and despite her youth, Beth had been a very talented mage even then. They'd likely needed all the help they could get.

The Law's own fight against the Vong had been almost equally confusing, if for somewhat different reasons. He supposed that an invasion from outside the galaxy was analogous to a planet-bound culture unaware of galactic civilization being attacked from space, but the Law had not been caught entirely unprepared — they'd been aware that the Vong were coming, had fought several skirmishes with them in the decade leading up to the invasion proper. They'd even managed to capture some Vong technology and prepare countermeasures ahead of time. What they hadn't expected was for the Vong to arm the Vagâri and use them as a proxy, time their own strikes in coordination with the Vagâri invasion. They hadn't anticipated the Vagâri resurgence at all, the slaving marauders invading in numbers they'd never seen from them before, the multi-front war quickly devolving into chaos.

They had managed to hold on, but it'd been difficult, there'd been a brief time there when there'd been serious concerns that the Law might collapse under the strain. Jag hadn't been a senior officer then, of course, but his father was a member of the general staff, so he'd been close enough to the people in charge, overheard a few tense conversations, enough to get a general feeling for how the war had been going. The most intense phase of the war had already been ongoing for over a year by the time he'd joined the Fleet — he'd been sixteen when he'd joined, but he hadn't first seen combat until he'd been seventeen. He couldn't count the battles he'd been in, it hadn't taken long before it'd all smeared together into an undifferentiated morass. They'd been pressed enough at the time that the mandatory leave system that had just had Beth sent back to Dimitra had been suspended — they'd been fighting so many battles in so many places all at once that they simply hadn't been able to afford sending people back home — so the fighting had been more or less constant, moving straight from one siege to another. As much as it'd all blurred together, he couldn't say he had any particularly interesting stories from that time.

He did have some from the Expedition — that had been later, well after the main Vong invasion force had been repelled, as they'd started receiving worrying intelligence on their advance through the Republic. The war had still been ongoing then, their focus turning entirely on the Vagâri — they'd proven rather more difficult to dissuade than their patrons, the war only now beginning to draw to a close — but Jag had been concerned that, should the Republic fall, they'd soon find themselves being flanked through the Rift. The general staff had been equally worried, his mission across the Rift at least as much to gather more detailed, up-to-date intelligence than their network at the time would allow as to actually contribute to the military effort. His position somewhat removed from the frontline, considered to be as much an ambassador from the Law as a military officer, and his direct working relationship with the Jedi had given him more insight into the state of the war than he'd had while fighting for the Law, and had also involved him in some more...interesting projects.

He was telling Beth of Jaina's Trickster scheme, playing into the Vong's own superstitions to lead them straight into traps, as they finished the fried things and moved on to the sandwich. This was familiar to him in concept, even if he didn't recognize any of the specifics — he could understand something was some kind of meat or vegetable, sure, general strokes were the best he could get. Apparently it included some of the same fruit that was responsible for the heat in the red sauce, though a milder cultivar, roasted until they were dry and crispy. He wasn't sure if he liked the effect on the texture of the sandwich, but it was something new, at least. Hardly bad, of course, trying unfamiliar alien food was always a shot in the dark.

Beth was telling him of her very first encounter with the Vong, the day they'd first made contact with Dimitra. She'd been travelling at the time, she and some of her friends left by the adults they'd been with in some sort of underground transit station — the thinking had been that they'd be largely shielded from the bombs, not having realized yet that the Vong meant to take captives. Beth had already basically taken command of the station and moved the civilians — she'd been some random civilian teenager herself at the time, regardless — deeper underground, and had some volunteers barricaded the entrance in the event they were attacked. They'd been unlucky enough to have a landing party touch down right over their heads, Beth had been setting traps on the stairs down when she spotted the Vong and their Chazrach troops disembarking, had rushed back to rejoin the defenders before she could be cut off.

The story of her motley band holding off repeated waves of Chazrach thralls and ultimately proper Vong warriors was absurd, of course. They'd been literal teenagers and a small handful of off-duty soldiers, they'd performed shockingly well against an entirely unknown enemy on such short notice. Magic did help, it'd been clear that the Vong had been taken by surprise by the locals' abilities, but all the same. When Beth described going out alone to parley with the Vong commander — and then giving up when it turned out she couldn't read the meaning of their speech from his mind, blew the warrior's chest out with a single spell, and then teleported back behind cover before the rest could kill her — Jag didn't quite manage to hold in a snort of laughter. At her questioningly raised eyebrow, he shook his head. "Nothing. I was only thinking, for all that you mages protest at being called Jedi, sometimes you sound to me very much like Jedi. I could easily imagine Jaina doing something like that, in your place."

Beth shrugged. "Yes, well, Jaina Solo doesn't sound much like other Jedi to me anyway."

...That was fair enough. Jaina had been far more practically-minded than most of the other Jedi around, blunt and direct in a fashion they tended not to favor — to the point that, at least to his eyes, she even seemed somewhat awkward interacting with Jedi besides her family and close friends. And even them sometimes, if he was being honest, though he wasn't sure how much of that had been a result of Jaina isolating herself due to the stress of the war. He hadn't had the opportunity to observe how they'd interacted beforehand, after all.

"I think that's the third or fourth time you've brought her up now," Beth said, an odd tone on her voice he didn't know how to read.

"Is it? I suppose she's on my mind. You remind me of her, somewhat — it was bothering me at first, back at the testing site, I didn't realize what it was until you'd changed out of the uniform."

By the odd, crooked look on her face, she didn't know what to think about that. "I remind you of your ex-girlfriend, do I?"

"Somewhat, yes."

"Well, I hate to break it to you, Jag, but you're not my type. If Jaina were sitting in your place right now, maybe we'd be getting somewhere — she sounds fun."

Despite himself, he let out a little huff of a laugh. "I hate to break it to you, but you're not her type."

"Ah yes, heterosexuality: my greatest enemy."

The term she used wasn't familiar to him, but he reason out what she intended from the meaning of the component parts. (Perfectly ordinary in spoken Minnisiät, people habitually invented new compounds to stand in for words in their native language, the use of the language between different people groups always required some creativity.) Smirking across the nearly empty basket at her, he drawled, "Unfortunately, this is one opponent which cannot be defeated."

"Oh, I don't know about that," Beth chirped, grinning bright and cheerful. "You have no reason to know this about me, Jag, but I can be very persuasive."

"In civilized societies, I believe we call that sexual harassment."

"Ha ha, very funny..."

As the numbing hold of sleep gradually loosened, Jag came to notice two things: he didn't know where he was, and he was hungover.

Neither of those were particularly unusual. He hadn't spent very long in any one place since he'd been a child — the only time he used a single bed long enough to become familiar with it was when he had a posting on the same ship for months at a time. Between assignments, he was accustomed to temporary housing, sleeping wherever he happened to be at the time. He did still have a room at his parents' home, but he hardly stayed there for more than a couple weeks a year. At some point he'd simply become accustomed to not recognizing the room he woke up in. Waking up with a hangover also wasn't unusual, though it was rarely little more than a dull headache and a persistent burn in his throat. He could tell by the subtle aches in his limbs that he'd been dancing last night, and the clingy, sour, slimy feel to his mouth suggested he'd forgotten to properly wash it before going to bed.

Only half awake, memories flickering behind his eyes, he remembered that Beth Potter — the same Dimitran sorcerer whose name had come up now and again of late — had brought him to...some kind of open-air cantina on the beach, somewhere. He wasn't certain what to call it, such concepts didn't always neatly translate between cultures. Regardless, the street had been packed with countless people, there'd been drinks and snacks, alien music loud and bouncing and throbbing and bright...

It wasn't until he was trying to piece together what had happened last night that he realized he wasn't alone in bed.

Turning his head to the right, he saw a wild mess of dark hair, the precise color indistinguishable in the shadows filling the room. She was lying on her side, turned away from him, her lower back against his side, his arm pinned under her pillow. Slowly, gently, he tipped up onto an elbow. She was curled up hugging...he wasn't sure what that was, a large overstuffed pillow or the like, breath shallow in sleep. It was difficult to make out her face from this angle, partly hidden by her hair anyway, her skin a sort of dusky bronze color, almost seeming to glow in the dim half-light.

...Oops. If she was a local, she almost certainly didn't speak Minnisiät — the morning after was always terribly awkward when they didn't share a language, he tried to avoid doing that. He was blaming Beth for getting him drunk, yes.

Brushing off the awkwardness in his near future with a thin sigh, he started to carefully, slowly, gently extricate his arm from under the woman's pillow. He'd inevitably have to stumble his way through whatever the morning would bring, but that could wait until later — right now, he badly needed to find the fresher. It was slow work, but he managed to get himself out of bed without waking the woman up. There were two doors, but one of them was a closet, meaning only a single exit. He assumed that door led out into the rest of a shared apartment — he hoped Beth wouldn't have let him go off alone — so he should get some clothes on first. That turned out to be somewhat more difficult than expected — there were a few articles scattered around the room, but he'd been borrowing what he'd worn last night, and he didn't recognize them. He couldn't even necessarily rely on his sense of which seemed more likely to be meant for men, because such signals could vary wildly even between human cultures, and he wasn't that familiar with Dimitra. In the end, he picked out what he was mostly certain were his clothes from last night, relieved when he found his comm — he had a few messages, nothing urgent, just routine notices — once he was decent carefully clicked open the door.

The light in the hallway just outside the door was off, but there was light bouncing from somewhere else, faintly illuminating the smooth soft blue and orange surfaces. It wasn't too bright, but it was louder, laughter and rapidfire chatter in an inscrutable language coming from nearby — he froze, glanced over his shoulder, but the nameless woman in the bed didn't stir. He stepped outside and gently shut the door behind him, not releasing the latch until it was already back in its frame to make as little noise as possible. There were multiple doors along the narrow hallway, even turning at an angle some meters that way to continue on. They all looked more or less identical, it was impossible to tell which, if any, was the fresher. After a second of hesitation, he walked down the hall in the direction of the voices — hopefully Beth would be there, or at least someone who spoke enough Minnisiät to point him in the right direction.

At the end of the hallway, he stepped out into a surprisingly wide open space, by the look of it a combined kitchen, dining, and living room, intended for several people. The furnishings and the appliances in the kitchen area were at least familiar in their general profile, even if the specifics were foreign, a lot of Dimitran ceramic and wood and embroidered cushions, everything colored in blues and oranges and yellows and reds. It looked like the curling red rosette patterns along the join between walls and ceiling might actually be hand-painted, perhaps something done by the residents to liven up the place, but it was hard to say for sure. Perhaps the apartment might have been rather barren to start off with, some of the more colorful decorative touches done by the residents later, because he could tell they were in one of the dense housing blocks Beth had shown him yesterday — through a wide glass door was a balcony with several planters, both set on the floor and hanging from the ceiling, vines crawling along the railing, past the railing another building facing this one, green clinging to the balconies and the walls light brown ceramic where not covered with elaborate murals. (It looked like they were several levels up off the ground, but as narrow as his view was it was hard to say.) There were potted plants indoors as well, stashed here and there in spots where there was room, hung up where they'd catch sunlight let in through the windows.

The kitchen area was blocked off from the rest of the space by a chest high barrier, a narrow counter running along the top, baskets of what he assumed were fruits and vegetables and packages of some more shelf-stable product here and there. He was surprised at how many people there were here, a couple sitting chatting at the dining table, a woman sitting at what must be a stool on the other side of the high counter, and the kitchen was busy, two women and a man chattering away while working at—

Ah, good, one of the women was Beth — she hadn't let him wander off alone, then, that made things much simpler. He wasn't even certain how to get back to the spaceport to meet up with the others, it'd be somewhat embarrassing to have to call for a pick-up.

The woman at the counter noticed him, her eyes widening a little, said something to the people in the kitchen. Heads swivelled toward him, and the man in the kitchen raised a hand and said something — Jag assumed it was a joke, getting loud laughs and sarcastic(?) cheers from the rest of the room, before exploding back into more too-fast, overlapping, alien chatter. People kept glancing back his way, smiling...

He didn't understand what anyone was saying, but he felt like he was being mocked somehow.

Stepping up to the edge of the kitchen, the woman working in here (not Beth) came up to him, said something in the local language — the upward tick of an eyebrow seemed like she might be asking a question, but it was hard to say. "I'm sorry," he muttered, with a sheepish shrug of shoulders. "Beth?"

"She was asking if you want un café. It's like muqsa, very common drink all around Dimitra. Though I'm more of a tea-drinker myself, they prefer café in this part of the world."

"Before I even think about drinking anything I need the fresher."

"Oh, right, of course." Beth leaned away from where she was working at the stove to say something in the bubbly, bouncy local language to the woman at the counter. The woman replied with a nod, tipped off her stool and came around the counter toward Jag. Smiling up at him, she said something, gesturing back into the hallway, and continued walking.

Jag followed her back into the hallway, the woman led the way past a couple of doors before coming to one that was hanging open a crack — she pushed it open the rest of the way, reached inside to flick on the light. She turned back to say something to him, though he of course didn't understand a word. "Thank you," he said, dipping his head a little and crossing an arm over his chest. He didn't think she understood the Minnisiät at all, but she smiled, muttered a word in the local language and mirroring his gesture back, before walking back past him to return the way they'd come.

The facilities weren't too difficult to figure out, though he did note that the room was rather larger than he would have expected, with multiple copies of everything, what he assumed to be hygiene and cosmetic products belonging to different people scattered around. The number of doors he'd seen out in the hallway, this place must be meant for several people to share, perhaps public housing for young adults without families of their own. By the time Jag finished up and returned to the main room, he noticed that more people had arrived just in the time since he'd left — unless he was mistaken, one additional man and two women, enough now to easily fill every seat at the dining table.

He also noted that the group was disproportionately women, one, two...five women, not counting Beth — six if he included the woman back in the room he'd woken up in, who was still missing — and only three men. Maybe the apartment was shared between the women, and the men were lovers who'd spent the night? By the quality of sunlight out the windows, he assumed it was still rather early, so that would make sense.

Jag noticed that one of the women had gone very red in the face, scrunching down in her seat at the counter, some of the chatter and the laughter directed at her — still at the stove, Beth was smirking, but it seemed somewhat uncertain, eyes rapidly flicking between the faces in the room, as though watching for something. It was hard to say, but he thought Beth had spent the night with the red-faced woman, and that her bringing women home was not a frequent occurrence. He randomly remembered Beth's joke about being persuasive, and coughed out a laugh.

While he was still getting the lay of the land, a woman — the same one who'd shown him to the fresher, he thought — appeared carrying a clay mug holding a tannish-colored, gently-steaming liquid. "Café?" she asked, tipping the mug up toward him.

Beth had said this café was a Dimitran staple, he might as well try it while he was here. Accepting the mug, he nodded back at the woman. "Thank you."

"Gracias!" Beth called from her spot in the kitchen. "'Thank you' is gracias!"

Jag made his best attempt at the word, but there was really no telling whether he'd even gotten close. These were humans, so their languages would still be operating within the limits of human physiology, but it could be very difficult to properly reproduce words in a language without knowing where it drew the lines between different sounds. Whether he'd gotten it or not, the woman smiled and nodded at him, muttered something in the local language before rejoining the chaos in the kitchen. He looped around, after a second glancing around the room moved to sit up on one of the stools at the counter — right next to the red-faced woman, giving him little sheepish glances through her eyelashes. He just wordlessly nodded at her, before trying a sip of the drink.

...It was all right, he guessed. It didn't quite taste like muqsa, but he could see why Beth made the comparison. Personally, he thought it'd be better with less milk (at least he thought that was milk) and less sweetener — it was a bit mild, the underlying complex flavor of what he assumed was the café covered up by the additives. It was drinkable, at least, and if it was a stimulant like muqsa it'd also help him wake up the rest of the way.

At that point it wasn't very long before breakfast was coming together — in what was often the way of group projects, the kitchen seemed like absolute chaos up until everything seemed to come together all at once. Baskets of some kind of bread set up on the table, a pitcher of what Jag assumed was more café and another of an orange drink of some kind, Beth and the man in the kitchen had fallen into smooth coordination, the man scooping a helping of some kind of cooked grain into a bowl and passing it to Beth, who scooped some chunky reddish sauce over it and set it aside, after a time the woman appearing to collect a platter of bowls, carrying it over to the table while Beth and the man kept filling more bowls. The entire time the air was filled with a mess of overlapping chatter in the local language — people here didn't seem to quite wait for someone to finish their sentence before beginning to speak themselves, which Jag was aware was common in some cultures — fiddling with things on the table, pouring drinks. He remained at his spot at the counter, observing the activity, the alien language washing over him as constant and meaningless as the wind.

Eventually, there was a tap at his arm, he looked that way to find the woman who'd been helping in the kitchen, holding another cup of café. She said something, but of course he didn't understand a word. Before he could do more than blink at her uncomprehendingly, Beth said, "She's suggesting you go wake up Ale — it sounds like she's normally a sluggish riser, so Gema suggests you bring her café."

"Ale?"

Beth smirked across the counter at him. "Your new friend from last night — Alejandra, Ale for short."

"Ah, good to know." In his defense, it was a foreign name, and he'd perhaps had too much to drink. He accepted the mug from the woman — was that like khéma? — with a nod, slipped out of his stool.

As he started to move, Beth asked, "Can you find your way back to the room?"

"I think so."

"'Breakfast' is desayuno."

Jag frowned. "Desaġuno?"

"Close enough. Go, we're almost done here, she's going to be late."

The noise of the chatter in the main room only diminished somewhat as he stepped into the corridor, turning somewhat muffled in the narrowed space. He gently opened the door which he was mostly certain belonged to the room he'd woken up in, glanced inside to find he was correct. Once he'd slipped inside, he closed the door behind himself again — it was warm enough in the apartment that they apparently hadn't bothered to pull the sheets over themselves, Ale curled up on the bed uncovered. He wavered for a moment, hesitating, before choking back his sudden awkwardness and stepping up to the bed. Sinking down to sit more or less level with her knees, he reached over to grip her arm, gave her a gentle shake. "Ale. Ale?"

She let out a low, flat groan, but didn't move.

"Café, Alejandra." He was only somewhat confident he'd pronounced that correctly.

She let out a second groan, but this time she moved, stiffly, pushed herself up to a seat. Still hugging the formless blob of a pillow against her stomach, she rubbed at her face with one hand, blearily frowning at him — at a guess, she didn't recognize him, but wasn't really surprised to see him either. Taking the mug with both hands, she muttered something he didn't understand...and then took a long pull from the mug, enough for multiple swallows, all at once.

Jag tried not to grimace — it was a hot drink, he felt uncomfortable just watching her do that.

She lowered the mug again with a sigh, gave him a little smirk, and said something in the local language, sounding somewhat hoarse and unfocussed from sleepiness. "I'm sorry, I don't understand," he said, tapping his head with one hand and shrugging.

For a second she seemed a little exasperated, she'd been a couple syllables into saying something when she suddenly cut off, her eyes going wide. She stared for a moment, unblinking, her lips parted. The silence lasted long enough that he wondered if he should be doing something — and then she said something incomprehensible, the words a soft whisper, pointing up at the ceiling with one finger.

Copying the gesture, he said, "Yes, I'm an alien." Just to make sure they were understanding each other, Jag reached into his pocket to pull out his comm, after a bit of fiddling around brought up an image of Nikshor from orbit. The colors seemed generally similar to Dimitra, as most worlds habitable to humans would, but the shapes of the shorelines and the cities would be obviously alien. Turning the screen toward her, pointing between himself and the image, he said, "My home."

Alejandra seemed at a loss for what to say, wide eyes flicking back and forth between Nikshor and his face. She silently took a sip of her café.

"Anyway." He closed his comm out, tucked it away again. "Ah, what was it...desaġuno?" Her eyebrows twitched — he was pretty sure he hadn't pronounced it quite correctly — but she nodded, muttered something in the local language. Right, message delivered

He hadn't even managed to get to his feet before there was a tug on his sleeve, he dropped back to the bed. "Alejandra," she said, pointing to herself. Her finger then pointed to turn at him.

"Jagged."

"Buenos días, Jagged." Her hand was then at her collar, tugging him forward, and before he realized what was happening she was kissing him.

He was abruptly very aware that she was naked, only the pillow she'd slept with between them.

After a couple seconds she pulled away, gave his shoulder a light push — he didn't understand a word of what she said, but he could guess she was suggesting he go ahead of her, that she'd get dressed and catch up. Soon he was standing out in the hallway, his hand still on the door handle.

...Okay, then.

He returned into the main room, and then froze just a couple steps inside, blinking. They were all sitting at the table now, everything moved over and set up, the group either already eating or fixing their drinks. He was certain the table hadn't been that large when he'd left — there were even some empty chairs, there had not been enough room for that a few minutes ago. Beth must have made it larger with magic, that was the only thing that made sense...for a certain understanding of sense.

While he was still standing there blinking in confusion, people started to notice him, calling and waving at him. "Over here, Jag," Beth said, pointing down at an empty chair next to her. "This is your café right here. I figured next to me was best, in case I need to translate."

"Thank you." He walked over to take the chair she'd indicated, nodding back at the people who greeted him. On the way, he noticed the woman he was mostly certain had spent the night with Beth was sitting on her other side — still looking somewhat embarrassed, sitting low in her chair, her face pink behind a curtain of black hair. He looked over the things arranged on the table in front of him, a partly-emptied mug of café, an empty glass, a small empty plate, one of those bowls he'd seen Beth and the man fixing earlier, the grains hidden by the thick red sauce, some yellow and white something spread over it glistening in the light. "And what is this?"

"Around here they call it huevos a la flamenca — not a typical breakfast food, but I was up first, and I was in the mood for shakshouka."

"How early were you awake?" She'd been drinking as much as he had, he'd expect she'd have been knocked out even more thoroughly than he had been. Unless mages had some resistance to alcohol nobody had told him about — Jedi didn't, but Dimitra could be such an odd place...

Beth just shrugged, not answering the question. "I made it spicy, it'll probably remind you of Monatšeri food. That thing on top is an egg. It might still be a little runny in places, but it's clean, it won't make you ill. Eating it with bread is recommended but not necessary, if that arroz is enough starch for you. I did teleport over to Francia to pick up fresh croissants — another Dimitran specialty, you should at least try one."

"Now I'm only more curious how long you've been awake."

"If you must know, I was woken up dreaming of the liberation of Oxlapś, I couldn't get back to sleep. Eat your breakfast, Captain."

...Fair enough.

Breakfast was fine, if somewhat awkward at times. The food did, indeed, remind him of Monatšeri fare, though the bread was more similar to pastries he'd tried a few times while he'd been in the Republic — thin delicate crispy layers twisted together into a spiral, the inside soft and rich, it was very good. He liked the food more than the café, honestly. After his café was empty, he tried some of the orange juice out on the table — made from a fruit the locals called naranja, mixed from a shelf-stable concentrate produced through some magical process — and he liked that much better than the café. Beth said they could quick drop by a shop on the way out to pick up a package of the concentrate if he wanted a souvenir, sure, he didn't see why not.

The awkwardness was mostly due to the fact that there were multiple rapidfire conversations going on around him, and he didn't understand a word of it. He always felt somewhat self-conscious when he couldn't understand what people were saying — it was perhaps a little paranoid, but he could never help the suspicion people were talking about him without his knowledge — but it was only made worse when Alejandra made it to the table. There was definitely a round of teasing, though he wasn't certain how much of that was over Jag and how much was about Alejandra being slow to rise — and she still looked barely half awake, eyes bleary and hair gathered up into a sloppy asymmetrical bun. She seemed to mostly ignore the teasing, squinting against the light and snapping back at a couple of the people at the table, plunked down in the seat on his other side. (The only remaining open one, he was sure someone had arranged that on purpose.) Alejandra just gave him an odd, frowning look before tugging her bowl closer to herself, reaching for the pitcher of café to—

Wait, she'd already drunk the mug he'd brought over? If the stimulant in café was anything like muqsa it probably wasn't wise to have a second one so soon, but he guessed that wasn't his business.

The chatter was very busy — multiple overlapping conversations going on at once, sounding very animated and expressive, voices rising and falling as people gestured, occasionally breaking into wordless ahh or oohs or bubbling laughter. Somewhat odd behavior for humans, in his experience, but if he was being honest he didn't have that much experience with his own species. There simply weren't many humans on this side of the Rift, and they were all recent transplants — they effectively had no culture of their own, instead adopting that of whichever of the locals they lived among (Jag himself had had a very Chiss upbringing, for example) — and his experience of human cultures Beyond the Rift had been limited by the circumstances. He supposed the bouncy quality of the language and the speed with which they spoke, sometimes speaking over the trailing end of each other's sentences, was somewhat reminiscent of Hapans, though they didn't appear or behave much like Hapans otherwise. He'd met beings whose conversational style had a similar feeling to it, but never among humans before, which was somewhat curious.

Not that he was surprised, of course. Dimitra had had less cultural contact with the rest of the galaxy than practically anywhere else he'd ever been — they might be human, but in every other way that mattered the locals were more alien to him than anyone he'd met before. More alien than the countless peoples Beyond the Rift, even, and that had been an adventure all on its own...

While he didn't understand a word, some details did stick out at him. He noticed that, while Beth would participate in the table conversation, as bright and lively as the others — even on the alien sound of the language, he could still identify the coiling drawl on her voice when she was teasing someone — at other times she was quiet, lowly muttering back and forth with the woman on her other side. In most circumstances, it might be paranoia to suspect people speaking an alien language might be talking about him, but this time he knew it for certain. Sometimes he knew simply by picking up the signs, people glancing his way between incomprehensible statements, on a few occasions seemingly trying to give Alejandra a hard time over him.

He characterized it as an attempt, because it seemed as though Alejandra gave even better than she got, snapping or drawling back at people — sometimes getting scoffs and rolls of eyes as a response, or sudden bursts of laughter, once or twice her interlocutors even left red-faced and spluttering. Now and then, when she didn't think anyone was looking, he would catch her watching him, but she'd look away whenever he did, smooth and casual.

It was impossible to guess what she was thinking, but he didn't think he'd have much better success at it even without the language barrier. From what little he could tell, Alejandra seemed like the type to keep people guessing regardless.

At one point, around the time Jag was finishing off his food, Beth seemed to make a production of it. Holding the whole table's attention, clearly spinning some kind of story, the rest of the table going quiet — by comparison, anyway, there was still an occasional comment or question but the constant stream of chatter had died down significantly. He heard his own name now and then, but the only other words he understood were an occasional person or place or title, the rest all in the local language. When he asked, she bluntly admitted that she was telling them who he was, about his father's history and the Expedition Beyond the Rift. He glared at her, but she just grinned unrepentantly back at him.

Because of course, he wouldn't actually expect her to show any shame — by this point, he knew her well enough to realize Beth Potter didn't have any.

It seemed that the residents intended to linger for some time after the meal, even with the food gone settling in to continue talking, but Jag should get back to rejoin the delegation at some point. He hadn't intended to be gone even this long, they were likely wondering where he'd gotten off to. Thankfully, Beth realized that — he was just wondering how long they would have to wait before they could politely extricate themselves when she leaned over to ask if he needed to get going. She raised her voice then, presumably saying they had to make their leave, though the only part he understood was his own name. There was some meaningless chatter back and forth, and then Beth was sliding her chair back, moving to stand — he took that as he signal that he should as well.

He didn't step away from the table right away, though, standing behind his chair. "Alejandra." She turned in her chair to look up at him, one eyebrow questioningly arched — the chatter around the table noticeably softened, he tried to hold in a wince at the eyes fixing on them. He would have preferred not to have an audience, but he supposed it couldn't be helped. Of course, he couldn't actually say anything to her — at least not anything that would be understood — so he instead he just held out his hand to her, palm up. Looking a little bemused, she placed her hand on his — bending over, he kissed the back of her hand, in the fashion of certain old aristocratic families Beyond the Rift. He straightened, murmured a farewell in Che̊ņ, then released her hand and began walking away.

The expression he'd caught on her face before he'd turned away was hard to read, but he got the feeling Alejandra had no idea what to make of him. Which was fair enough, because he didn't really know what to make of her either — it always was terribly awkward to not share a language with someone he'd just slept with the night before.

He could tell that Beth had lingered for a moment with the quiet woman as well, but she was moving at more or less the same time he was. They made their way toward the door, pausing at the threshold for a minute to slip on their shoes, waves and words passing between them and the people still at the table. Then, with a final chorus of cries he couldn't understand, Beth opened the door, and they stepped out into the hall. The surfaces here were made with the mage's ceramic as well, decorated with seemingly random paintings here and there on the walls — some the work was sloppy and flat enough that he was certain they'd been done by children. It was rather darker than he'd expected, the lights low, empty and quiet. He supposed most people here were slow to rise, the working hours for the locals starting later in the day, so he shouldn't be surprised it seemed so barren.

Beth started off in a direction that seemed randomly chosen to him, but he assumed she knew what she was doing. "I hope you're not feeling too hungover to apparate back. We can take the gates if you want, but it'll take a lot longer to get to where your people are waiting — or I guess I can conjure a bucket before I drop you off."

"I'm fine. I was feeling a little off when I woke up, but the food helped. I guess you're not sticking around after you drop me off, then?"

"No, I'm coming straight back here. There's nowhere I need to be, so—" There was a call in the local language, Beth cut herself off, stopped and turned to look back down the hall. Alejandra had stepped out, was jogging down the hall toward them. He noticed that the motion made it visibly obvious that she wasn't wearing anything under that thin gown — nothing to support her breasts, at least, but he couldn't tell through the layer of fabric whether or not there was anything—

Wrenching his eyes away to stare up at the corner between the wall and the ceiling, he bit his tongue, forced his wandering thoughts into stillness.

As she approached them, Alejandra began speaking, making some fluttery gesture toward her own head with one hand. She seemed to hesitate for a second, glancing between Jag and Beth, before turning to Beth with a wince and muttering something in a delicate sort of tone. Beth snorted, her lips twitching. Leaning a little toward Jag, she muttered, "She just asked me if Dimitran humans are compatible with humans from outer space."

...Ah. Yes, he could see why that might be a concern, he hadn't considered that.

There was an exchange back and forth, Beth's voice sounding somewhat softer than usual. After maybe half a minute or so of talking, she drew her wand, muttered an alien word with a swish toward Alejandra — Alejandra winced, one hand coming up to touch low in her abdomen, just for a second before quickly relaxing again. There were a couple more exchanges, before she looked over at Jag. She hesitated for a moment, before skipping forward a step, tipped up to quick kiss him on the cheek. And she turned away, started walking back toward their apartment.

"Anyway, like I was saying," Beth said — watching Alejandra, it took him a second to catch on, jerking into motion to continue following Beth. "I don't have anywhere I need to be, so once I'm done dropping you off I'm coming straight back. Figured I might hang around for a few days."

"I see." He considered asking why Alejandra had run out to catch them before they left, if that were the case, but then he figured it out himself: she must have thought Beth might need to ask Jag whether they were compatible. "I take it things went well with your companion from last night."

"Carmen."

"Sure. I was wondering about that, she seemed rather... Well, I was thinking you might have persuaded yourself into an uncomfortable situation."

"I persuaded myself into a quite comfortable situation, thank you. She is a bit unsure of herself, and embarrassed with the teasing — she's never brought a woman home before — but not to the point of regretting it. She seemed pleased by the idea of me sticking around for a while, but, we'll see."

"Good. Because the Fleet has rules about sexual misconduct towards citizens — I would hate to have to report you, Lieutenant."

Beth rolled her eyes. "Well, I don't have to report you either. Seems you made quite an impression on Alejandra there — I wouldn't be surprised if she acquires a copy of that film they made about the Expedition as soon as it makes its way to Dimitra."

"Be careful, Potter, or I'll find some way to spread the story about that Dark Lord of yours throughout the Law..."

Soon after that, they stepped into an archaic mechanical elevator of some kind, started its somewhat jolting descent after Beth pushed a button and the doors slid closed. Jag was accustomed to the smooth, seamless motion of turbolifts, but she didn't seem concerned, so he assumed the unsteadiness was normal. "There will be stores on the ground floor where we can grab your juice package, and then I can teleport out from the street. You never teleport in and out of someone else's home, by the way — there are safety concerns to keep in mind, but mostly it's just considered rude. The corridors here and the shops down on the ground level are only semi-private, but we should still go outside first."

He couldn't imagine why that information should ever be relevant to him, but he nodded anyway. "I understand."

Apparently she picked up on his confusion, turning to give him an exasperated sort of look. "I'm guessing you drank enough last night to forget me telling you that you're a mage, didn't you? Or Force-sensitive, I suppose, if you insist on the silly terminology."

For a second, he stared blankly down at her...but now that she mentioned it, he did vaguely remember something about that. It was fuzzy, though, the details of the conversation were escaping them. "No, I'd forgotten until just now. If I were Force-sensitive, I'd expect the Jedi would have noticed."

"Maybe, maybe not. My own theory for why there seem to be so few mages in the rest of the galaxy is because you're shite at identifying them — you only notice the exceptional, one-in-a-million, absurdly powerful ones. Or just Seers, since all of the Jedi seem to have the Sight, if the stories I've heard mean anything. That fraction of inexplicably long-lived people, that's a magical trait, all of them are mages."

"...You're certain?"

"Yes, Jag — it's subtle, but I can feel the magic on you. You're a mage."

That was an...interesting thought. He wasn't sure how to feel about it, honestly — for all the time he'd spent around Jedi, he'd never harbored any particular jealousy for their powers, he'd never bothered to consider what it'd be like to have them for himself. It'd simply been fact that he did not, so it wasn't worth thinking about. That he apparently did was... He'd need to sleep on it. "So, you were telling me about teleporting etiquette because you think I might need to know some day."

"Maybe. It takes years of study before you get to that point, but I figured it was worth mentioning."

Jag was lost in thought, turning over this revelation, as Beth led them into a shop to find the preserved juice. As interesting of a thought as it was that he might have some magical talent, he wasn't certain if it was truly relevant. He couldn't take the time away from his position for the years of study he assumed it would take to learn much of anything useful. Especially given that he was a singular fighter pilot, and he couldn't see how the Dimitran magic he'd seen would be of any use for that whatsoever — his understanding was that these "spell-glows" of theirs worked by line-of-sight, which would be impeded by the canopy of a spacecraft. Maybe if his curiosity was piqued in future, he'd see if he could find some translated materials to peruse in his spare time, but he didn't think he could justify taking the time necessary to make a proper study of it.

Besides, it was the enchanting and the alchemy that was truly useful, to the average person, and the impression he'd gotten was that those were sciences like any other. It could easily take a decade of study to achieve any true competence, and even then he was certain he would only reach middling skill at best — he simply didn't have the head for engineering. So, as interesting as it was to learn he had the talent, he didn't see how it would be useful to him. He was satisfied with the skills he already had, for now.

Beth handed off the package of concentrated juice, seemingly made out of a thick rough paper of some kind — she suggested he use his comm to translate the directions, the local language was one they'd made a translation package for — and led the way outside. It was rather more quiet and empty outdoors than it'd been yesterday evening as well, people out on the balconies overhead but only a few on the street. This town clearly woke up rather late in the day — it could be an element of the culture, but he remembered Beth's description of the local economy from last night, he suspected the schedule here had more to do with that.

"So," she chirped as she came to a halt, spinning to face him. "Did you enjoy your interesting cultural experience?"

Before he could second-guess himself, his mouth was already forming the words, "I believe her name was Alejandra."

Beth burst into giggles, so high and bright and giddy and infectious he couldn't help smiling back at her.

Chapter Text

70:3:20 (16th July 2002)
— Zero Day plus 06.10.14

The Fleet snapped into existence over the unnamed world — and they came out firing, the defenders in orbit slashed apart by incomprehensibly powerful annihilation reactions before they even realised they were under attack, the survivors of the opening volley scrambling to respond. The Law were outnumbered, but not outgunned, their opponents caught by surprise, quickly tipping the balance in their favour.

Upon Beth's return from leave, the Kośalhath had been transferred to a separate detachment of the Seventh Fleet, working on reestablishing the Hand's presence in regions they'd pulled back from with the wakali resurgence. She hadn't been told the reasoning behind their orders, of course, but her assumption was that someone up in Command had decided the Kośalhath and their group had seen enough combat in the war, and had decided to give them a lighter assignment, by comparison. They'd mostly managed to root out the war parties in the galaxy proper, and the invasion of the wakali home cluster was proceeding apace, and from what Beth had heard the fighting was absolutely miserable. She would have gone if she was ordered to — she was mildly surprised they hadn't sent her, given how useful magic could be in an urban environment — but she wasn't going to complain about being allowed to take it relatively easy for a bit.

The Hand had maintained some presence well outside of their borders, hunting down threats in the surrounding space, making contact with the peoples there, setting up observation posts and maintaining communications infrastructure, that sort of thing. At the very least, they wanted some forewarning before an attack came, as much as was possible, but it was also essential to lay the groundwork for any expedition outside of their space if it became necessary — also, it was just neighbourly, introducing themselves to the people around, enabling interstellar communications and transportation, and so forth. This was generally how they met new members, like how the Hand had stumbled across Earth by accident. People they found weren't required to join, but they often did anyway, since the advantages that came with membership were far better than just trying to go it alone.

In retrospect, they'd realised that one of these monitoring stations, communications hubs things had actually detected Earth some years ago now — they'd found EM noise that suggested there was an industrial civilisation somewhere in the region, but it'd been too weak and fuzzy to get much from. Also, they were rather too busy dealing with the scabs and the wakali at the time to invest the resources in tracking them down. It turns out they're vaguely aware of a lot of civilisations scattered around, because space was fucking big, like... Explored space was like a web, charted hyperroutes connecting blobs of populated areas, all that space between the strands of the web basically unknown, there could be all kinds of shite in there. Most systems weren't habitable, but even keeping that in mind, there could be millions of civilisations tucked away in the spots they just hadn't reached.

Beth was told that the Republic Beyond the Rift had explored a much higher fraction of the space they flew around in...but they had a lot of gaps too, just smaller ones. Which was just bizarre to think about, civilisation had spread out across most of the galaxy but still hadn't explored most of it, the space they knew about broad but shallow. Just, it was interesting was all, they'd had tens of thousands of years to figure this out and there was still so much new shite to find.

This world was one they knew about, from observation, though they'd never actually made contact — which was why the place didn't have an official name on the starchart, just an identification number. Their technology was, like...mediaeval-ish? or maybe closer to a Renaissance sort of vibe? Beth wasn't sure, exactly, she wasn't the expert in this kind of stuff, just that they were pre-industrial but still organised, and that there were hundreds of millions of them all over their planet. There were a lot of planets like this one out there, it turned out — for whatever reason, many societies just never made the jump to industrialisation (there were theories about why, but they went way over Beth's head) — and they were often considered great targets for being fucked with. Their technology and social development had gotten to the point that they could support a pretty big population, but not enough that they could pose any serious threat to someone coming in and doing pretty much whatever they wanted with the place. They were favourite targets for enslavement by the wakali, or various other shitty types, though were only occasionally contacted by the Hand.

Not because of anything like the Prime Directive or whatever — Hermione had only become more insistent on teaching her about Star Trek since they'd made contact with aliens who weren't omnicidal maniacs — but just because it wasn't really practical. The Law preferred to make contact with planets which already had a unified government, or at least world-spanning communications and transportation, so the locals would be easier to deal with as a group. While they didn't have any rules against upsetting a society's natural development or whatever the fuck, they did want to avoid giving one group of natives an unfair advantage over the others, which could easily explode into horrible genocides or something — that was pretty much impossible to avoid before a certain level of development. Well, you could avoid it with, like, hunter-gatherers or whatever the fuck, but it was generally thought that the power imbalance at that point was way too unfair, so they mostly didn't touch those societies either. So, this place was a little undercooked for them for that reason.

Other reasons were just that, well, bringing a world like this up to galactic standards was a big investment — and one that would take time, since a mediaeval-ish society would need to adapt a hell of a lot. The Hand was willing to do it, they just couldn't do it with everyone, all the time, so they prioritised helping out people who were under threat from asteroids or some shite, or were in the path of pirates or slavers, or were suffering a plague or some kind of natural disaster or something. Or if contact were made on accident somehow, due to a mistake or some civilian going rogue, they wouldn't just leave them, even if the locals didn't want their help they'd at least check in every once in a while, to make sure they weren't getting fucked over. There were a lot of cases where they'd gone dark and it turned out people there had needed help, like what had happened with Oxlapś, the Law just hadn't been there due to being invaded by multiple omnicidal enslaving bastards simultaneously. They had a lot of catching up to do, they'd been making a slow cycle of the civilizations they knew about for years now, some like Oxlapś had been in big trouble, others they were just dropping in, Yeah hi, we still exist, you lot still cool here, blah blah...

This wasn't one they'd been in contact with at all. Partly because they weren't at the level of development the Law liked to work with, partly just because they were very much out of the way. They were far outside of the Law's borders, well past the area of space Earth sat in — they were, however, very near the primary route through the Rift to the Law of Bastion. Their system had actually been inside the Rift for most of history. Space was big, so it wasn't guaranteed that any one planet would be stumbled across at all, but they'd actually been protected here by the Rift, the hyperspace disturbance meaning that faster-than-light travel was completely impossible, cut off from the rest of the galaxy. The Rift didn't stay in one place, though, it slowly moved and changed shape with time, even as it weakened, gradually dissolving away over the course of thousands and thousands of years. They weren't sure when, exactly, but this area of space had been navigable for at least a couple thousand years.

They knew it been at least a couple thousand years because there was a civilisation nearby which had been slowly exploring space for that long, making their first FTL jump the latest possible date the Rift could have retreated from here. These locals, called the Pirkalut, had very basic hyperdrives — they needed big damn space stations to accelerate ships into hyperspace — but that was more than enough to point a ship at the next star over and hop across. They'd been slowly crawling across space to settle adjacent systems for a couple thousand years now. Their technology was millennia beyond what they'd had on Earth until the Law showed up, but still far behind the rest of galactic civilisation. The Law had made contact, the Pirkalut knew they weren't alone in the galaxy, but they hadn't extended an offer to join and the Pirkalut hadn't asked, preferring to keep to themselves — they were so far outside of their borders that properly integrating the Pirkalut would have been difficult, and the Pirkalut weren't interested anyway. They were hardly the only space-faring civilisation the Law knew about and were leaving alone either, there were plenty of those around too. They did at least minimal trade with most of them, but if they were far enough out of each other's way, there was really no reason they needed to have much of anything to do with each other.

Or if one of these civilisations were doing something the Law had a problem with.

The Law had surveyed this space while setting up the string of installations to keep an eye on the route between them and Bastion, and had then left it more or less alone. They'd send survey drones through the mapped region every once in a while, keep an eye out for pirates, but besides that they had little to do with it — it was far away from the heart of their space, they really only had a presence here at all to keep communications with Bastion open. Most of their news on what was going on on the other side of the Rift came through here, if they got cut off they'd be in the dark, which Command were too bloody paranoid to tolerate. (It was reasonable to want to be informed, sure, she was just saying.) And there'd been a span there when they hadn't been able to do the proper surveys, since the scabs had made their primary attacks through the slice of space between the Law and Bastion, and then they'd had to deal with pirates, and the war with the wakali going on elsewhere, they'd been distracted.

When their drones finally came around again, they found Pirkalut warships in orbit over their unnamed mediaeval-ish world — long-range images showed massive plantations, worked by locals overseen by armed Pirkalut, construction in cities which seemed like little more than slums to house factory workers. They thought they might have even caught a glimpse of a transport ship loaded up with locals being brought to Pirkalut.

It seemed that someone was being very naughty.

Vice Admiral Chaf-räw-aṙitśåe had requested that Command give him permission to make an expedition against the Pirkalut; they'd turned him down, but instead they'd given him orders to take care of the problem anyway...if in a somewhat more reserved manner than he might have hoped. Their orders were to liberate the planet that the Pirkalut had enslaved, and to make it look good — they were explicitly told to record the whole thing, and broadcast it straight to Pirkalut. Once they let the bad guys get a pretty good picture of what they were doing, and how badly it was going for their people here, they were to jump over to their homeworld and demand that they hand over any of the natives they might have taken, to be returned home. And if the Pirkalut refused to comply with the Vice Admiral's terms, if they determined to make a fight out of it, then and only then did they have permission to kick the piss out of their whole shitty little empire. It shouldn't be difficult if it came to that, the Pirkalut had a lot more ships but were at a big technological disadvantage, they'd be able to handle it.

At the end of it, the mediaeval-ish people would be given protection by the Law going forward, as well as a whole bunch of aid to help them recover from their exploitation by the Pirkalut and ultimately to help bring them up to galactic standards (very long-term on that one). Exactly how that would work out would be complicated, they'd figured it out when it came to it. They were pretty far away from the Law proper, but maybe they could adjust the outposts they had hanging around the route through the Rift...and if they ended up invading Pirkalut, they'd need to support their occupation here too. It was going to be a whole mess, but that part wasn't Beth's problem.

Their job today was just to be big damn heroes — that was the way she liked it. Let the brainy people figure out the logistics and whatever the fuck, Beth was going to go liberate some slaves, thanks.

She was sitting in a flight deck on the transport with the rest of the troop she'd be fighting with today. For some unexplained reason, she'd been bumped up to command of the whole squadron attached to the Kośalhath, despite technically being under-ranked for it. She was the equivalent of a lieutenant now — she thought so, anyway, the Law had more gradations at that spot in the rank structure, and she thought she'd been promoted high enough to not be a second lieutenant anymore a while ago — but squadrons were the cavalry/artillery/whatever equivalent of a company, and were commanded by a captain...or even a major, depending on the unit in question. (Infantry and cavalry/artillery/whatever organisation didn't quite work the same, it varied.) She didn't know what was up with that, maybe a trial run before pushing her up with the senior officers.

Nobody had actually spelled this out, but she thought the ultimate goal was to keep her at a point where it wasn't entirely unreasonable for her to be fighting herself, since magic was fucking useful, but with enough soldiers under her command that she wouldn't be left without backup when she went out to do something fucking mad. In ground battles, putting her with the speeders made sense, because she could more easily get to wherever she might be useful, and her people could keep up with her. Obviously, the problem with teleporting around meant she could end up separated from her backup — that wasn't so much of a problem when she was on boarding parties, since there was only so far she could go, but it could quickly become an issue on the ground. She could still do mad shite like apparating up to spacecraft trying to escape or whatever — she'd pulled off tricks like that a few times now — but speeder bikes were far more capable of keeping up with her than soldiers on foot. If that was the plan, it wasn't really practical to promote her up any further than where she was at now.

Honestly, she kind of expected that they wouldn't — that she might end up with a more impressive title before her name, and more fancy tat on her jacket, but that they'd keep her running a squadron no matter what. Which made sense, and it wasn't like she really cared, just vaguely curious what was going on here.

But anyway, the squadron had four troops, made up of four flights of five people each, for a total of eighty people, plus Beth herself...plus the assistant quartermaster assigned to their squadron, plus her fucking secretary, because she had one of those now, it was bizarre. Those last two didn't actually go into battle with them, obviously, but it was also made slightly awkward by all four of the troops already having their own lieutenants to command them. She understood that it was typical for squadron commanders to hold back at...wherever the senior officers would direct the battle from, but that would be a waste of her talents — and the explanation of her posting when she'd returned to duty made it clear that the Vice Admiral didn't actually expect her to do that. She didn't want to effectively demote any of her lieutenants with her presence, so she'd decided to rotate through them, putting herself at the top of one troop for a week, and then moving on to the next, and then the next, and so forth. She happened to be on Spear C when the battle had come around, so that's who'd she be with this time.

Of course, this was a little awkward too, since the other twenty people in the troop were cleanly divided into flights while she was just...around. But that also worked, in its own way, since she didn't have to worry about keeping track of a wingmate and the rest of her flight, and could just do whatever made sense at the time. She had the feeling she was going to make the Lieutenant and his NCOs nervous, but it'd be fine.

The screens on the flight deck had all been set to monitor the space battle going on outside. Unlike her first few battles that'd started like this, they thankfully hadn't had the alarms blaring the whole time — they'd cut off as soon as they'd made the jump to hyperspace, since everyone knew they'd be going straight into battle anyway. As they dropped back into realspace, an odd clunk-thrum echoing through the floor and rattling in the fixtures, the fleet immediately came in shooting. By the time the data started coming in, painting the state of the battle on their screens, there were already flashing indicators of ships being blown the fuck up, pop-up boxes showing the feed from visual sensors of hulks torn to pieces, the debris glowing white and orange from the intensity of the matter–antimatter reaction. They'd been outnumbered by something like three to one on their arrival, but the opening volley had ripped through the Pirkalut fleet like bullets through tissue paper, a second volley annihilating more ships, red slashes torn through the icons representing the defenders' ships, and only at that point were the Pirkalut finally firing back, little white lines stitching across the display to indicate turbolaser fire.

The room around Beth bucked, throwing off her balance enough she had to grab onto the edge of the counter. She frowned up at the ceiling — that shouldn't have happened. Their shields had held, obviously, but she'd been under the impression that the Pirkalut couldn't hit that hard.

The space station in orbit over the planet that the Pirkalut needed to reach hyperspace was a huge damn thing, cylindrical, several rings maybe a hundred metres wide arranged in a row, the whole structure maybe two kilometres long. As big as it was, the station didn't actually have that much mass — the rings themselves were more or less solid, and there was a sizeable habitation block attached to the middle one, but they were connected to each other with spindly support struts, enough to keep the rings in alignment but nothing more. They needed to do it that way, their understanding was that the Pirkalut added new systems to their network by building the rings at home and then folding them up and pitching them over through hyperspace, unfolding and assembling them at the destination.

This model of faster-than-light travel was called a hyperspace cannon, which was very silly. Apparently it was something that human civilisation beyond the Rift had developed in the early stages of reverse-engineering hyperdrive tech, before they'd been able to make them small enough to fit inside of a ship. To simplify how this all worked, basically the huge damn space station was itself a hyperdrive which, instead of accelerating itself into hyperspace, tossed forward anything that travelled through the rings. Making hyperdrives was extremely fucking complicated, and even getting to the point of hyperspace cannons (stupid name) was impressive, especially because they were pretty sure the Pirkalut hadn't been copying a previous civilisation's notes, like people beyond the Rift had.

While hyperspace cannons did work, they had their obvious downsides. The big obvious one was that the ships themselves couldn't go to hyperspace independently — if there wasn't another cannon wherever you landed, it was a one-way trip. Another one was that it presented a single point of failure. So if, for example, an invading fleet destroyed the station, then any locals would be trapped, with no means of escape.

Turbolaser fire ripped the gangly-looking station into pieces, the rings drifting out of alignment as the support struts were melted, the rings themselves broken in places. Some of the pieces started falling toward the planet, a coordinated volley of missiles zipped in from multiple directions, incinerating the big chunks of metal before they could rain down on the innocent people below. (The Pirkalut ships were too small to be a danger, but those rings were pretty heavy, could actually hurt someone on the ground.) With the station gone, the Pirkalut were stuck here. And they wouldn't be getting backup either — hyperspace cannons could only fire one ship at a time, and sending your forces in a dribble like that was a great way to get your fleet blown up piecemeal as it arrived.

In a word, the Pirkalut occupying this system were fucked.

The enemy fleet had had them outnumbered when they arrived, but the first couple volleys had taken them totally by surprise, on something like even numbers by the time they got their shite together. Not that that did them much good, of course, since the Law did have a technological advantage — though, Beth wasn't an expert, but it looked like they were chewing the Pirkalut fleet apart more slowly than they should. They'd known the Pirkalut would have shields — those were kind of necessary for space flight, even civilian ships had them — but their analysts hadn't thought they'd hold up to modern turbolasers well at all, should go down stupid easily. They were winning, obviously, but it didn't seem like they were winning as quickly as they should, the Pirkalut shields holding up to turbolaser fire far longer than Beth's briefing materials had led her to expect.

Of course, they couldn't do fuck all about antimatter munitions — which was fair enough, nobody the Law knew about really could.

As it became clear that the Pirkalut fleet was pretty much done for, the Kośalhath beginning to move into a lower orbit, Beth quick pulled out her comm, set to broadcast to the whole squadron. "Show's over, everyone, the Kośalhath is moving to drop us. You'll get your final orders from your transport captains as you near your landing site. Call any military landing fields or anti-air artillery you come across — there will be bombers at the ready to make runs at anything that looks like it might make itself a problem.

"Remember, we're making deliveries, and hitting hard targets in populated areas: drop off your packages, make sure the locals see them, and make sure no artillery or fortified defences can fuck them up. We'll have our own infantry coming in as well, to help with any concentrations of occupation forces, but the ground belongs to the locals — we're just helping them clean up a bit." There were some chuckles in the room, she saw a few people elbow their neighbours and mutter comments back and forth. "Questions? Any problems come up since final checks?" She waited a moment, there was some head-shaking on her flight deck, some muttered denials, the lieutenants on the other flight decks confirmed they were ready over the comm. "All right, good. The cameras are rolling this time, so let's make this one look good. Stick with your flights. Don't do anything too stupid — that's my job."

There was some laughter and a couple teasing comments at that, some of it cutting off as the floor shuddered under their feet, the feed on the screens winking out. "And that's separation, we're almost up. Finish suiting up and get to your launch tubes, I'll see you all on the ground." She switched off her comm and plucked up her gloves and helmet, raised a hand in response to the chorus of acknowledgements from the flight deck. Then she turned around and excited the flight deck into the rest of the transport ship, navigating the halls down to the boarding ramp at the bottom.

Of course, the kolosam-hal-amika-class transport was designed to host exactly one troop of speeder bikes — there were twenty launch tubes, with no room for a twenty-first. They'd been uncertain exactly how to fit her at first, suggestions going around that they should just ground one out of the squadron at random. Eventually a team of technicians — including Taqšuńi, as it happened — had suggested strapping her bike in with the equipment along the ceiling of the main infantry seats and the boarding ramp. It was a less than perfect solution, since it made maintenance a little bit of a pain, but the techs insisted it wasn't too much trouble, as long as they had enough warning to move her bike from the hanger on the Kośalhath it was kept in onto the correct transport. The infantry boarded through the ramp anyway, carrying some last supplies with while they were at it, moving her bike into place at the same time wasn't that much of a hassle. Strapping it in place so it didn't get rattled loose during the battle beforehand was the most annoying part, really.

By the time Beth got down there, the soldiers had mostly already flooded down onto the boarding ramp, a mess of dozens of men and women in angular black and red armour, a small collection in the shining white of special forces. Many of them were still missing their helmets, revealing an eclectic mix of beings from all over the Law, helping each other straighten or tighten bits of their armour, making final weapons checks. She started elbowing her way through, hadn't been at it very long before an amplified voice called, "Make way for the Captain!" She wasn't a captain, of course, but the infantrymen started parting for her, after a few seconds revealed her bike hovering waiting for her ahead, only a couple metres away from the front of the ramp, good...

There was a tech there, poking at a computer pad, occasionally reaching over to tap at the built-in screens on the bike. Beth set her helmet down on the seat, started pulling on her gloves. "Is there a problem?"

The tech shrugged, wiggled a hand ambivalently in the air before going back to his tapping. "We haven't had time to stress-test all the systems after that scrape you took in your last skirmish — the replacement repulsors aren't quite in sync with the new ones. There's a little bit of interference, you might notice some jittering at high elevation, but it shouldn't be a problem."

"Good. It'd be pretty embarrassing if me falling out of the sky got broadcast over to Pirkalut."

The tech snorted. "I'm sure datasec would edit that out." He made a few final taps, and then twisted something inside an open panel on the right side under the controls, slapped it closed again, folded his pad under his arm. "There you go. Good luck, Lieutenant."

Smirking at him as he started heading for the back of the long, wide room, Beth drawled, "I'm not the one who needs it."

"That's what they all say..."

Once she had her gloves and helmet on, Beth swung up onto the bike, went about syncing her comm and her suit with the bike's on-board computer, running through the start-up sequence, her hands moving automatically, turned thoughtless from repetition. While the bike's systems cycled up, she swiped over to her squadron's status screen, the grid of indicators turning green one by one as they finished connecting to the network — though it was mostly already green by the time she got to it, the time it'd taken for her to walk down to the boarding ramp putting her a little behind the rest. At the same time the final target data was coming in from the transport's computer, she flipped the status screen away to bring that up. "Spear A., confirm clear to launch."

There was a brief pause, before the proper lieutenant said, "We have some minor technical glitches, but we're clear."

"Spear B., confirm clear." This natives of this nameless little planet had distributed themselves across pretty much the whole surface. It was somewhat cooler than Earth, but for whatever reason the heat was more evenly distributed — a higher proportion it what would be the comfortable temperate range, but there was very little tropical climate zones and practically no ice at the poles in summer — so it was actually easier for a mediaeval-level civilisation to settle all of it. Oddly, they didn't have any sizeable deserts either, the climate relatively uniform...like a whole planet of England, it was a little bizarre. There was some variation, obviously, just less than on Earth, the climate very mild and unusually uniform.

"Makusal Lead to Spear Lead, clear."

Since the Kośalhath only had four transports attached to it, and the rest of the fleet only provided another three, covering the whole planet was pretty much impossible. The plan was to hit the major settlements first, anywhere they saw what were obviously Pirkalut installations, come back to check in on everyone else first. Before they got there, the fighter pilots would have already made a run to take out the really big guns, so their job was to hit any other hard points that were too close to local infrastructure to risk targeting with larger munitions, and to drop care packages for their new friends. The planet had been blocked off into segments, several of which had been assigned to each squadron, the settlements inside of it divided up into a list for each individual flight, once they cleared off their list they could move onto the next assignment, working their way around until they'd covered the whole planet, which could take a while...

Huh, her troop's assignment had five separate itineraries charted out. "Spear D., confirm clear." She guessed one of those was meant to be for her — they must figure the magic meant she didn't need the backup. One of the lists was also significantly shorter, she assumed that one was meant to be for her. Carrying one of the cases would significantly slow her bike, so she should clear any resistance before bringing one in, which would mean a lot of flying back and forth, and they might also want to leave her opportunity to go back up the rest of the troop if something came up. All right then.

"I have nineteen spears clear to launch — Liso Eight has a power failure and is sitting out this one."

"Copy that, Lieutenant. Try to give that flight the lighter list. Alert your transport captain, they'll be able to keep eyes on them."

"Yes sir, calling them now."

Switching over to the channel just for her troop, "Lieutenant, are we clear?" While Arsa summarised their troop's status, Beth sorted through the lists she'd been given, glancing over the views of the settlements from space. The locals had relatively simple architecture, wood and stone with ceramic tile or even thatch roofs, but the Pirkalut had built their own additions, the metal and plastic and glass structures in the middle of the mediaeval-ish settlements sticking out like sore thumbs. Though, they'd also made modifications, artillery directly bolted onto the walls of...well, castles, Beth guessed, they didn't look the same but she assumed that's what the big fortified-looking things were. The four longer lists were all more or less equal, but it looked like this one and...this one were slightly better-defended — she assigned those to the first and third flights, which had the more experienced officers leading them. As Arsa finished up, Beth sent the assignments with her annotations over to the flights.

There was a low droning alarm ringing through the oversized room, Beth glanced up. After the third alarm tone, a crack opened up toward the ceiling ahead, reddish sunlight spilling into the transport. The ramp unfolded — she could hear wind tearing into the oversized room, whistling over her armour, some clunking as the infantrymen behind her squared themselves — until it was about level with the floor, a wide rectangle of open air ahead of her, the rolling green and blue countryside of this nameless little world scrolling by several kilometres below, the clouds glowing a funny yellowish-red. (Sunlight reflecting and not any weird chemicals, the air here was supposed to be breathable.) It was almost time.

"All right, everyone, you should be receiving your assignments now. We'll be split up by flights, so keep an eye on each other. Make one hard run to knock out the guns and then come back around to pick up your care packages. They will slow you down, have one person carry them while the rest fly cover. There are bombers in wait if you need to call in a run, intercepters if some Pirkalut try to make a run for it. I have my own assignment—" There was a little twitter sound, a flashing indicator coming up at the corner of her screen. "—but call me if you're held up with something anyway. Forty seconds to launch. Clear?"

There was a chorus of agreements, some terse and professional and others smooth and joking, after a moment Arsa summarised, "We're all clear, Lieutenant."

"Good." Gripping the controls, Beth leaned forward over the bike, her eyes on the surface of the planet ahead — the features already visibly larger than they'd been at first, the transport rapidly descending. "Remember, everyone: we're being big damn heroes today. Get those guns in the hands of the slaves, and fucking terrify the slavers. And don't be afraid to have some fun with it."

Over the laughter and teasing on the channel, Arsa said, "Not too much fun, please. We are on camera."

There wasn't time for much more than that before the channel rang with a harsh bong, and then the transport lurched around her as the launch tubes accelerated the first flight screaming away. Beth took that as her own cue to go herself, instantly slammed the repulsors into full acceleration, in a blink her bike zipped through the open boarding ramp and out into open air.

Of course, as soon as the repulsors lost their grip on the deck of the transport, her bike was in free fall, listing under her from air resistance — they were still flying too high for the repulsors to anchor onto the ground. Normally, a launch tube would send her flying well clear of the transport, where she could safely coast down to the bike's operational elevation, but without the ability to properly manoeuvre she could easily end up being sent into a tumble in the transport's wake, or even crash into the big blocky thing. There were reasons why they used launch tubes. So, as soon as she was clear of the boarding ramp she leaned sharply forward, her momentum making the nose tip down toward the faraway ground, and then kicked on the thruster, rapidly accelerating away from the transport. It was a very bumpy ride for the first couple seconds, the turbulence around the transport wrenching her this way and that, Beth gritting her teeth and holding tight to the controls, at one point as she nearly began to tumble, resorting to a quick burst of wandless magic to force the nose back into line again.

But it only lasted a couple seconds before the air evened out again, the hard burn of the thruster quickly expelling her from the disturbed envelope around the transport. She let out a breath, relaxing a little — cold launches like that were always fucking bracing.

She was still flying straight downward, low green hills directly below her covered in crops and speckled here and there with what looked very much like trees, and moving faster and faster as the thruster and the pull of gravity both added to her speed. Maybe slightly reckless, but she still had a few kilometres before she had to even think about pulling up, couldn't help grinning at the feeling of weightless speed, the acceleration making her feel a little giddy and light-headed. She brought her troop's status panel back up, everyone was in the air by now. "Smooth launch, Lieutenant?"

"We're clear. All flights cruising to target."

Good, good. She had time to quick glance over the other three troops in the squadron — they were also still all green (except Liso 8, who was grounded) — though it looked like one of them hadn't even launched yet. That transport must have further to fly to get into position. By that point, the ground ahead was starting to get pretty big, enough she could easily make out individual trees (they really did look like trees), a flashing indicator marking the direction of her first target down and to the left. She 'dove', putting the ground 'above' her, and rolled, clinging fingers grasping at her as the bike's anti-gravity failed to keep up with her momentum, the repulsors straining against the force as she pulled up—

Beth's eyebrows ticked up as she felt the jittering through the bike, the repulsors whining in a discordant chorus of pitches, but ultimately the bike did level off, skimming smoothly along less than a hundred metres above the ground. Right, she remembered the tech mentioning that her repulsors were a little out of sync, she should have thought of that before taking such a hard dive. It would have been really embarrassing if she crashed right into the ground because she'd forgotten about a technical issue she'd been specifically warned about.

This planet seemed rather pleasant, honestly, far nicer than most places she'd ended up fighting at in the past. The foliage was very green, maybe a little darker than it tended to be on Earth, some of the plants with a funny blue-ish tinge to them, the stalks in some of the fields below topped with what looked from the air like fluffy orange tufts — heads of grain of some kind, maybe? Gently rolling hills, sharper mountains in the distance that way, a deep blue-green stream curling along over there, humble little farming villages constructed of wood and thatch, it was surprisingly nice.

Then she came over a long low hill to her first town, alarms blaring in her helmet as the sensors detected guns turning around to point at her. That was rather less pleasant.

It looked very much like a little mediaeval town, a collection of small wooden buildings gathered around a sturdier-looking palace, between the humbler buildings and the palace a ring wall made of stone. The palace had clearly been taken over the Pirkalut — there were still some original stone and ceramic buildings, but it'd been partly replaced by blocky structures in more modern materials, and in place of more technologically-appropriate...she didn't know, trebuchets or whatever the fuck, there were some kind of artillery atop the towers in the walls. Not a model she immediately recognised, they had a big focussing dish of some kind behind the aperture of the gun, but that had to be Pirkalut tech. The big dishes made it very obvious which way they were pointing, Beth got a shot off at one — the blast easily tore the flimsy-looking thing apart, folding in on itself as a spray of molten metal flew in toward the palace, the dish tipping over to fall off the tower — before they were getting too close to in line and she had to move. She dove, aiming to slip between a pair of houses—

She twitched at the odd blaring bwaaa sounds, a trio of muddy white not-laser blasts slashing through where she'd been a second ago. Well, those were fucking noisy — not a surprise, she guessed, Pirkalut tech was less advanced than the Law's. She was taken aback enough with how loud the things were that she almost slammed right into someone's house, twitched to the side to miss it by inches, oops! Beth went right up to the grey stone walls, murals here and there on the surface painted in a rainbow of colours, turned to hug the wall from only a metre away, the paintings reduced to a meaningless smear, houses whipping by, huddled inside she caught glimpses of shapes she knew would be the locals, but she didn't really look, moving too fast to get distracted, she curved around a tower to—

—there was a blare of alarm from ringing through her helmet, she jerked to the side at the last instant, pulling up to skim over the top of a cart and along the roof of a house, glanced back to see a glowing crater had been carved into the flattened dirt around the wall, the dish ponderously turning in an effort to follow her. Right, okay, the plan had been to hug close to the wall so she could pop up and take each of the guns by surprise, but apparently they could depress low enough to aim right up against the base of the wall...which made sense, when she thought about it. Obviously they'd want their defensive weapons to be able to protect the palace from the locals, she'd been assuming they'd been designed to defend from attack by air but clearly that wasn't a priority here, stupid...

Right, change of tactics. Beth took a hard corner, zipping past the right side of the gun faster than it could aim, skimming low over the tangled halls and corridors of the palace inside the wall, dipping around a few domed roofs, and soon she was on the other side, she adjusted her aim a little— Nope, don't shoot them from this side, she flew past the gun instead, close enough she could have reached out and slapped the dish with a hand. She looped around over the village at speed, coming back at an angle, a pair of shots obliterated one of the guns and the pair of Pirkalut manning it — very human-looking, the same body plan and soft skin and hair at the top of their heads — the glowing-hot debris blown into the wall, over the palace. Most of the locals' buildings had thatch roofs, she could easily start a deadly fire if she shot them from inside the walls, she had to make her attack runs from outside.

The delay caused by first misjudging how the guns were designed and second by the added constraint of not burning the fucking town down had slowed her significantly, but once she had it figured out it went smoothly enough. She kept flying fast, varying her angle of approach enough that the ponderously-turning dishes couldn't get a lock on her, most of them didn't even get a single shot off before they were already reduced to melted scrap. A couple Pirkalut on the ground tried to take snap-shots at her as she flew by, but they all went wide, Beth's return fire sending them scattering into the buildings. She probably could burn straight through the structures to get to them, but she didn't bother — the locals she meant to arm on her second visit could handle that. Parked near one of the more modern-looking buildings attached to the palace was a shape that looked a lot like an airspeeder of some kind, so she quick blew that up too, and there, she was done here. A tap at her computer and her helmet was pointing her to her next target in line, she spun around and kicked up the thruster to full blast, leaning low over the controls as she surged forward, the wind audibly whistling on the angled surfaces of her armour...

Her next two targets were little towns much like that first one, but now that she had her approach figured out, these went much more smoothly. One of them had a couple of airspeeders flying cover, but they were slower and less manoeuvrable than hers. Also, magic was cheating — she picked off her glove so she could draw her wand, tore apart one of the speeders with a breaking curse even as it tried to come at her from the side. The last target on her list, according to the data she'd been sent, was a rather larger city, along an intersection of two rivers, hundreds of buildings sprawling out seemingly at random overseen by a sizeable palace on a hill, bigger and fancier than the others. A capital city of some kind of kingdom or whatever, maybe? There'd be a lot more targets to hit, with how much larger it was, and maybe she should use her wand as much as possible, if the defenders left her enough leeway to fly one-handed, less likely to start an awful fire that way...

She was still some kilometres away when she heard the overlapping screams of different engines, she slowed a little, looking up. Not far away and some distance overhead, there was a dogfight going on — it looked like one Law fighter, the sharp angular form of a clawcraft, being mobbed by two...five Pirkalut ships. The Pirkaluts' fighters were shaped a lot more like fighter planes back home, triangular wedges meant primarily to fly in atmosphere, noticeably smaller than the clawcraft...so, they might actually be fighter planes, not meant for space flight at all. By the way they twirled through the air, though, Beth could tell they were using repulsors, the kind of hairpin turns normal planes weren't capable of, and their guns were firing vivid red-orange blasts, looking much more modern than the super-noisy ones from the dish-guns on those palace walls. Similarly powerful too, by the look of how the clawcraft's shields flared at each hit. The pilot was doing a remarkable job staying out of their guns, looping and jittering around, but flying five on one he couldn't avoid all of them all at once, taking shots here and there, spaced out enough his shields didn't get overwhelmed but he couldn't get an angle on his attackers either...

Beth tapped at the display on her bike, bringing up tactical...got him. She switched over to the right channel, "Kossam Three, this is Spear Lead — dive, hard, make for my position and I'll try to knock out your tails." There wasn't any acknowledgement — the pilot was probably very busy trying not to get shot — but then the clawcraft looped around and dropped in a steep dive, the five Pirkalut fighters scrambling to follow. The engines rated for interplanetary travel ate up the distance down to ground level in a blink, and then it was screaming straight toward her, the black and blue-silver metal glimmering in the reddish-tinted alien sun, the noise incredibly loud, the systems in her helmet adjusting to protect her hearing, but even if she couldn't hear it she could still feel it, a deep thrumming vibration through her bones. They were heartbeats away, Beth hopped up to stand on the seat of her bike, watching them approach, not yet, the clawcraft's rear shields blooming as the Pirkalut fighters came into line, not yet...

...now! Sucking in a breath, Beth disapparated, coming back out in mid air, slightly above the line of Pirkalut fighters, twisting around she cast Sirius's favourite vanishing curse with a wide swish of her wand, straight downward — her timing was perfect, one of the planes bisected to tumble toward the ground in pieces, another clipped along the wing sent veering off at a wild angle — watching the survivors continue flying after Kossam 3, wavering in confusion, she picked a target and apparated again, cast a complex blasting curse down at an angle, one of the Pirkalut fighters zipped into view just in time to slam straight into it, the plane ripped apart in a brilliant blast of yellow-white fire—

She disapparated again, set herself to floating in mid-air with a couple charms, glanced around, searching out where the clawcraft and the survivors had gone. It looked like Kossam 3 had looped around once her attack had come in, even now was lining up behind one of the surviving Pirkalut. The plane she'd nicked was trying to get control back, but even as Beth watched it ploughed down into the ground, a patch of trees lit up as it burst into flames on impact, leaving only two– one, Kossam 3 shot down the one he was pursuing, reduced to a burst of fire and smoke and a rain of scattered debris. Right, she was pretty sure he could handle the last one on his own. Beth apparated back to her bike, teetered a little, her boots skidding on the seat, plopped down maybe a little harder than she'd meant to.

Like she'd said: magic was cheating.

It was maybe only another ten seconds before Kossam 3 managed to out-manoeuvre the Pirkalut plane, and the skies were clear again. "Thanks for the assist, Spear Lead," the pilot said, sounding just a little breathless from relief. Or maybe their species just sounded like that, it was hard to say.

"No problem. Where's your wingmate?"

"Gone. We were hitting the airfield near the city just here, they had a missile battery hidden from our scans. Caught us by surprise." That growl on his voice now was definitely not just a species difference, simmering with anger at the Pirkalut for killing his wingmate.

Tapping at her display, she muttered, "Copy that, Kossam Three... I'll go finish up with that airfield for you, if you want to soften up the big guns in the city for me."

There was a brief pause. "Are you sure about that, Lieutenant? I was going to request an orbital strike."

"I appreciate the concern, Kossam Three, but I've got it. Magic, remember? I'll catch up with you over the city."

"...Copy, Lieutenant. Kossam Three out."

An arrow pointing toward the airfield flickering into existence painted over the landscape under her, Beth twirled her bike around and then leaned hard as she kicked the thruster on full blast, the fields and the trees smearing into a blue-orange-green blur, little patches of villages passing by now and then. She spotted the occasional figure of people — the locals, looking sort of like colourful feathery lizard-people — in the villages or along the roads zig-zagging here and there, ducking out of sight as the speeder-bike zoomed by overhead. (This whole thing was probably very distressing for the locals, more scary aliens coming and blowing shite up with no warning or explanation about what was going on, not really surprised they were trying to hide.) Along the way she spotted what looked like a security checkpoint of some kind along a road — this road was paved, unlike the mostly dirt tracks she'd seen before, a major thoroughfare of some kind coming into the city. Blocky modern buildings on both sides of the road, a tower with one of the dish-guns at the top, a train of waggons waiting in line running up to it. Not a very orderly line, though, Beth guessed the attendants had stopped letting anyone through when the attack started, the locals milling around in confusion, waggons skewed at awkward angles as they tried to turn around and head back.

Beth drew her wand again, as she flashed alongside the tower cast a vanishing curse, the top half of the tower sliding against the bottom with a grinding and screeching of metal before toppling to the ground, folding in on itself like a discarded pair of trousers.

Well before she actually reached it, she could see the streams of smoke rising from the airfield ahead — it seemed like Kossam 3 and his wingmate had managed at least one good run on the place, the runways pockmarked with charred craters, towers reduced to twisted stumps, a few buildings burning. It was obviously still occupied and partially functional, though, she saw a dish-gun turning toward her as she approached, melted it into scrap with a single shot, and then small-arms fire was whizzing up into the air around her, Beth cast a shield angled downward just in case. Flying around the airfield in a tight circle, there were still a couple of fighter planes around but she needed to get that missile battery first, where was—

There we go — one of the buildings had a retractable roof, rockets started firing up into the air, streaking up with a squeal of exhaust much like a firework, except they just kept flying, arcing around in an angle that would ultimately lead to her. Instead of just a single missile they'd fired several little rockets, probably had a modest explosive charge, guided by some automated targeting systems. That was clever: a single rocket wouldn't be enough to shoot down a clawcraft, but pepper one with enough shots from different angles and it would overwhelm the shields and chew it apart. Beth would guess they were cheap and easy to make, but more manoeuverable than modern missiles, designed to simply flood the air, impossible to evade.

Of course, it made little distance to Beth, either would be equally useless against her. A swish of her wand cast a complex illusion — the bike and her own hand and the rim of the helmet visor in her peripheral vision winked out, and a somewhat watery image of a Law soldier wearing somewhat pared-down armour on one of their speeder-bikes angled away from her. The rockets jittered in the air for a second, but then adjusted to pursue the illusion, swinging around as the illusion pulled up, then looped down—

The illusion spell failed, Beth popping back into view, and an instant later the rockets zipped through the open roof of the building, a series of explosions as they went off inside...and then there was a series of secondary explosions, a gout of fire surging up out of the open roof, a shattering of glass as the windows were blown out. The building wasn't obliterated so much as just, fell apart, enough structural support weakened by the blast that the walls collapsed, folding in on itself bit by bit, flames and clouds of smoke and dust tossed up and out across the airfield. Ha, that worked perfectly, loved that trick. It was hard to see the damage through the fire and smoke, but the way the walls had collapsed the launch tubes were physically blocked if not completely destroyed.

Which meant she was done here, she could set it on fire and get going. She tipped her lazy circle around the airfield into a tighter spiral, coming in toward what looked like some kind of control/observation tower at the middle. Summoning a burst of hot vicious furious rage, she aimed her wand at the base of the tower, and a long stream of flame came shooting out of the tip, vivid red edged with unnatural black. It spread outward as it travelled, in time resolving into a charging stag — fiendfyre for her always first presented with a stag, like her patronus, she had no idea why — exploding against the tower into a chaotic mess of snakes and wolves and lions and hawks, crawling up the tower and spilling out in a wave across the ground. Beth fed the flames for a few more seconds before cutting the curse off, tipped the nose of the bike toward the sky and flew away.

She'd been a little lazy with that fiendfyre, and the Pirkalut had left a pretty large cleared area around the airfield — the spell should unravel before it spread far enough to reach any locals. The Pirkalut in that airfield were fucked, though, she knew from experience that you simply couldn't run fast enough to escape fiendfyre. They might not know it yet, but they were all dead.

A couple taps had her helmet's guidance system pointing her toward the city again, and she continued on, leaving the fiendfyre burning behind her. There was still work to do.

By the time Beth got back to the first little village, there was a mob of locals in front of the gates, apparently taking advantage of the guns being knocked out to storm the palace. They had a cart, probably loaded up with heavy shite, the doors were banged up a bit but still solid. There were Pirkalut atop the wall, firing down at the locals — they were holding bits of wood or ceramic over their heads, using them as shields, some of the wood burning from the blasterfire, as Beth approached a couple of the locals were hit, pitching to the ground streaked with burns...

She changed the angle of her approach, gritting her teeth and clenching her fists against the controls as the bike was slow to respond, the repulsors stuttering. Switching over to rapidfire, she swept over the wall across the gates, shots stitching along the walkway sending the Pirkalut scattering, a few of them torn apart by the blasts. Beth pulled up, began a turn to bring her looping around — and then hissed a curse through her teeth as the bike fishtailed under her, her stomach swooping, fuck fuck fuck, stupid thing...

Back under control again, she looped around at a more controlled speed, low to the ground, using the houses of the village as cover. There was a street coming right up to the gates, but she didn't continue onto it, coasting a stop behind an extra long building of some kind, maybe a meeting hall or something? There were several locals around, huddling out of sight of the walls, turning to watch her. A couple button-pushes released the huge damn cargo crate attached to the bottom of her bike, falling onto the dirt with a heavy thunk. A tweak of the repulsors sidled her bike to the side, out of the way, and then she hopped off, walking over to the crate. She flipped open the mag lock at one end, walked around the six-metre-long crate to get the other, reflexively ducking as a blaster bolt screamed by over her head — they didn't have a clear shot, Beth standing in the shade of the meeting hall, but the Pirkalut knew she was here. Once both mag-locks were loose, she gave the lid a good kick, flipping it off onto the dirt.

Revealing a long double row of blaster rifles, a few dozen in total, along with nearly a hundred power cells plugged into a portable generator.

Beth shucked off her helmet, tossed it toward her bike, cast an amplifying charm on herself with a swirl of her hand. "Come!" The locals wouldn't understand Minnisiät, of course, but oh well. She gave a beckoning wave to some of the figures standing in doorways or looking out windows, leaned around the corner of the building to gesture at the people assaulting the gate. "Come!"

She turned back to the crate, glancing over the holograms that had started being projected over them. There was only so much they could tell people they didn't share a language with, so the crates were equipped with holoprojectors that used images to provide some very basic information as to how to use the things. The rifles had much simplified controls, just a big obvious button on the panel to turn it on and off — over the section of the crate with a rifle was an image of one of the locals aiming at another local, an inset showing the light on the big button was off; then it switched to an image of a local shooting at a Pirkalut, the inset showing the light was on. Over the generator block cycled a few images showing how to insert and replace power cells, hopefully clear enough for the locals to figure out how to use the completely unfamiliar technology. There were always accidents in liberation jobs like this, the locals they were arming catching each other in friendly fire, which sucked, but the holograms demonstrating their use were at least better than nothing.

Beth pulled one of the rifles out of the crate, even as some of the braver locals started to slip out to approach. The locals were big bastards, many of them stretching a good two metres tall when standing upright — which they didn't always do, they seemed to be equally comfortable walking on two legs or four. Their faces were long, with a protruding snout and a long durved crest stretching back off the top of their head, eyes big and vivid orange. Where she could see their skin, on their faces and their hands, it was blue-green and pebbly, like the soft scales on the underside of a lizard, but she couldn't see much of it, hidden with feathers coming in blue and red and orange and white and purple and black, multiple colours on each individual with no obvious pattern she could see. She assumed there would be, like, sex differences or something, but she couldn't figure it out at a glance, she couldn't even really tell which were men and which were women...or if they even had men or women. Most species did, but that wasn't necessarily guaranteed.

They looked like a funny mix of lizard and bird tossed into a blender, but person-sized — big person-sized — standing upright and with visibly dextrous hands, and wearing clothes, rough hand-woven fabric embroidered with beads and feathers and bits of painted wood. Not that weird-looking people was an unusual concept, Beth had met a lot of different kinds of beings by this point.

They were watching her, but nobody was getting close, hanging back, eyeing her with what Beth decided to interpret as wariness. Which she supposed was fair enough — Pirkalut looked pretty similar to humans, it was possible they couldn't tell the difference. Just as several of them came charging around the corner of the building, in a sort of skipping three-legged gallop so they could keep holding their shields up against the Pirkalut on the walls, Beth lifted up the rifle in her hand. "Blaster rifle!" She leaned over to detach one of the power cells from the generator block, held it up. "Power cell!" She inserted the cell, locked it in place. She walked over to the corner of the building, the group of locals there parting to let her through, hunching down, hands raised defensively, dipping down a little like they might headbutt her at any moment. Leaning around the corner of the building, she sighted down one of the Pirkalut on the walls — there were twitches and funny squawking noises she read as surprise at the first shot, which went a little wide.

The second shot hit him, burning into his chest, the Pirkalut soldier flailing back and tumbling over the inside of the wall.

She spun back around, finding the locals who'd made their way here from the gates staring at the rifle with wide eyes. A quick slap on the button to turn it back off, she tossed the rifle at the nearest one, the being scrambling to catch it before it fell, letting out a vibrant trilling sort of noise. She cancelled the amplifying charm, since they were so close. While she was still inhaling to speak, one of the locals gestured at the rifle in the other's hands, said something in their language — it sounded very bouncy, the consonants jumping and trilling, resonating in their chest...and probably in that crest on their heads too, she thought, sounding very deep and thrumming and echoey. The sort of sounds the human throat simply couldn't make, but it was definitely language. She didn't quite understand what...he, what he was saying, but she could feel the meaning on it.

"These are for you." She walked back to the crate, some of the locals had crept nearer to it while she'd been away, but they retreated again as she came back. She pulled out another rifle, inserted a power cell. Pointing at one of the locals who'd come in from the gates, she said, "For you," and tossed them a rifle. And then she reached for another.

After the third rifle, they clearly got the point, the big feathery bastards crowding around the equipment, their voices ringing in her ears and booming in her chest, deep and loud and trumpetting. Just in case, she gave another quick demonstration, slapping the button to turn the rifle off, putting a shot in the ground, and then turning it off again, pulling the trigger to no effect — but it looked like they got it, chattering to each other and pointing at this and that, a couple of them waving their hands through the holograms, fascinated. Some of them were more business-like though, hefting the rifles before zig-zagging off through the village, leaning around cover to shoot up at the Pirkalut on the walls, some of them creeping back toward the gates, holding planks of wood or big panels of ceramic in one hand as makeshift shields, carrying their rifles one-handed.

Their aim started off very wide, but they'd get better with practice.

This seemed to be going smoothly enough — at least nobody had accidentally shot each other yet — so Beth headed back toward her bike, pulled her helmet back on. It'd slipped her mind that she shouldn't do that in the middle of a battle, she'd just thought being able to see her face would make her less threatening — thankfully, it didn't seem like anyone had been trying to get her attention. She smoothly lifted back up into the air, a couple of the locals letting out sharp trumpeting noises, pointing at her. Beth waved, and then slowly took the curve around the corner, moving into the main street and starting toward the gate.

The locals had already begun a new assault on the gate, shots zipping up toward the Pirkalut on the wall or pounding at the oversized doors themselves. The doors were at least partly constructed of wood, Beth could see some of the burn marks were fitfully smouldering, but at this rate it would take them ages to get through. The gun on her bike could probably do it in a couple shots, but the attacking locals were crowding close to the doors, harder to hit from the walls, it'd be too easy to accidentally hurt them.

So instead she drew her wand, and cast an overpowered blasting curse. The vivid orange-yellow spellglow zipped down the street in a blink, striking precisely in the centre of the doors — with a sharp echoing bang, the material was pulverised, a cone of debris sprayed out into the courtyard. The force of the impact wrenched the doors open, cracking and splitting around the locks still in place, one of the leaves was ripped fully of its hinges, ponderously swinging in the air from one of the locks still fixing it in place high up the wall. There were more snapping bleats of surprise from the locals, but then low erratic bugling noises she read as...some kind of war cry, maybe, beginning to pour in through the gates, holding up their makeshift shields against any return fire, the ones further away skipping along to catch up on three legs.

They could handle it from here — Beth was certain the locals greatly outnumbered the Pirkalut, and she'd already eliminated all their artillery and vehicles. They'd be fine. She took off into the air, arcing up over the wall — she saw an opportunity, a piercing hex aimed at a Pirkalut soldier on the wall bursting their head like an overripe tomato — turning to point toward her transport ship before kicking on the thruster, tearing forward in a skin-tingling burst of speed.

One village down; two to go.

Their transport was visible from miles around, sitting on the top of a hill to give them a good view of the area. There were ruins on the hill of what Beth thought might have once been a castle or watchtower of some kind, but it'd been destroyed long before they got here — by the Pirkalut, she assumed, made superfluous when the local farmers had been relocated into the city for factory labour. They'd made a little forward base, equipment moved out of the transport into stacks here and there, big damn repeater guns at three points around for defence, soldiers and techs milling about working on one project or another. Even as Beth came in, she saw a flight of bikes lifting off, by their profiles two of them loaded up with more cases to bring to the locals, turning off to the east, the unencumbered bikes flying gently to keep pace with the slower ones.

The transponder in her bike would identify her to the transport's computer, but Beth switched channels to call ahead anyway. "This is Spear Lead, I'm coming in from the south for a reload."

"Copy that, Captain. I've got your gift basket for you here on the east side."

While she was some distance away, Beth cut off the thruster, letting herself coast the rest of the way. The transport had landed with its boarding ramp — the same one Beth had launched from, however long ago that had been — facing roughly east, the cases of rifles for the locals and the equipment needed to check over the bikes as they dropped by left a short distance outside. Some of it was rather heavy, they hadn't wanted to move it any further than they needed to. Beth took a curving turn up the hill, coming in on a smooth arc that would bring her hovering right over one of the cases laid out on the grass.

"Hold up, Captain," said a voice through her helmet — Ossalit, the lead engineer on the transport, she spotted him waving at her a short distance to her left. "I need to check your power levels, at least. Some of the other Spears have been running low."

Oh well, that was reasonable. When she was actively fighting, it sure seemed like time passed slowly, warring with the way the seconds blended together when she was flying — she never had a great feeling for how much time was passing, but according to the clock on her bike's computer it'd been at least a couple hours. She sidled over to the maintenance equipment instead, a couple of techs leaping up to start checking over her bike. Leaning back to let one of them tap at the displays, she shucked off her helmet. "You know," she said to Ossalit, raising her voice a little over the whine of the equipment and the low rumble of the transport's engines (idling to keep the shields powered), "everyone calling me captain all the time is going to go to my head at this rate."

"Why, would you prefer my lord?" Ossalit drawled, switching to Monatšeri for the proper address once used for their old sorcerer-lords.

Beth scoffed. "No, I'm good. Though I guess that's better than 'princess' I guess."

"...You're a princess?"

"Back home, yeah. I thought everyone knew that."

"Believe it or not, Your Highness, but not everyone thinks about you all the time."

Before she could voice a retort to that, one of the techs interrupted. "You are running low." He flipped over a panel near Beth's knee, under the built-in displays, plugged a thick cable into something under there. "Give us a couple minutes to switch over."

While the techs replaced the battery packs fitted into the rear of the bike, and topped off the fuel for the little reactor that powered the thruster, Beth used the opportunity of the delay to check in with the officers of the four squadrons directly reporting to her. They'd done pretty well so far, thankfully — out of the eighty people under her, they'd only lost five bikes, and only one of those had resulted in a death. Of the other four crashes, three of them had only gotten minor injuries — they'd already been treated, transferred to the infantry companies picking through the larger cities — one of them hurt more badly, currently up in the transport's medical bay. That was better than she'd expected, especially since it appeared Pirkalut technology was somewhat more advanced than their intelligence had suggested. Most of the targets they were hitting had been designed with suppressing the locals in mind, their surface-to-air defences relatively minimal, most of those softened up by orbital strikes or runs by fighters and bombers. Beth had already known of those five, and her officers didn't have anything new to report, just a few minor burns from small-arms fire, nothing serious. They were somewhat behind schedule, thanks mostly to the Pirkalut's unexpectedly advanced technology occupying their air support, a few minor diversions like Beth's adventure at that air field.

Everything was going more or less smoothly, all told — even their encounters with the locals had been mostly friendly, with only a few minor misunderstandings now and then. Good.

Naturally, that very moment was when things abruptly started going to hell. Beth should know better than to tempt fate like that.

She didn't notice anything was off immediately, the first sign tiny dark shapes in the distance. Squinting at them, after a few seconds she realised they must be clawcraft, flying straight up to return to space. The low rumble of the transport's systems rose in pitch, growing noticeably louder, the techs shooting curious glances toward the ship. Frowning, Beth switched over to the transport's comm channel. "Captain, Spear Lead. Something I should know about?"

The Captain responded after a brief delay. "A large Pirkalut fleet came out of hyperspace a few minutes ago."

...That shouldn't be possible. "I thought they only had hyperspace cannons."

"You and me both, Lieutenant. It seems the Pirkalut are full of surprises."

"Right." They hadn't expected the Pirkalut to send their whole bloody navy in, but even if they had, Beth would still bet on them. From what she'd seen, they did still have a technological advantage, and the Admiral was a clever, vicious fucking bastard — the fight might get ugly, if the Pirkalut had sent enough ships, but Beth was sure they'd still come out ahead. They just might get a little less support here planetside for a while. "Please alert me if it looks like it's going badly out there. I'd want to get my bikes together to coordinate against a counter-invasion."

"Understood. It looks like we're outnumbered, but from what I saw during the battle coming in, the Pirkalut still don't have the force to win. We will lose ships this time, though."

Beth grimaced — of fucking course they would. Someone was going to have to have a talk with intelligence, this shite shouldn't have happened...

When the techs were about finished freshening her up, Ossalit sauntered a little closer, waved to get her attention. "All right, Captain, you're clear to fly as soon as that cable's out. According to these scans, the issue with your repulsors is worsening — if the desync climbs above a millisecond, I'm going to have to ground you."

"Just get me through a few more deliveries, and I should probably join the ground fight anyway."

"That shouldn't be a problem, as long as you don't do anything too crazy. Watch out for any sign of—"

Ossalit cut off as a command tone rang through all of their comms at once, fading in favour of the Admiral's voice. The man was Chiss, but there was only the slightest lilt of an accent on his Minnisiät — more obvious than the accent was the harsh, frigid rage, rumbling on his voice barely contained. "This is Vice Admiral Chaf-räw-aṙitśåe, calling all ground forces. Some seven minutes ago, a large fleet appeared in-system. As I record this message, they have begun accelerating to attack us here in orbit. It seems the Pirkalut have assembled every single ship they have available in an attempt to force us out of their conquered space. This potentiality was not considered in our plans — the Pirkalut were not expected to have access to modern hyperdrives which would facilitate such an action.

"Regardless, I am confident of our ability to prevail. I am contacting not because I anticipate failure, but because of what comes next: the Pirkalut have invited annihilation," the Admiral snarled, his voice turning thick and rasping and smokey. "As soon as the fleet here in-system has been defeated, I will proceed to their homeworld, where I will dictate terms of surrender to their government. I expect they may require some convincing. I am afraid the liberation of this world will need to proceed without air support until Pirkalut has assented or the backup I have already requested arrives. Before we leave, I will drop whatever supplies can be moved quickly. I cannot say how long it will be before we return but I have every confidence in your abilities and your conduct.

"This has been Vice Admiral Chaf-räw-aṙitśåe — Toward Liberation." And then the message ended.

His unfamiliar alien face twisted in what Beth took to be a grimace, Ossalit grumbled, "Well, sounds like things are about to get very interesting down here."

"Sounds like it. Close me up here, boys, I have some more locals to introduce myself to. We might be here for a while, might as well make good neighbours..."

Chapter Text

70:3:22 (18th July 2002)
— Zero Day plus 06.10.16

Beth heard the by-now familiar whining whistle of a dummy rocket, threw up a shield charm, spread wide to cover as much of the alley as she could — there was a flash of motion and then an explosion of noise and fire, the face of one of the housing blocks overhead was ripped apart, debris pinging off her shield in the initial blast and then falling in a flood as the building began to collapse, she grit her teeth, forcing power into the shield to hold it, the draw burning through her chest and down her arm, tonnes of stone gathering against the shimmering silvery border, the locals trumpeting in alarm blaring in her ears...

The effort burning through her like ice-cold lightning, a groan grinding out of her throat, Beth pushed, shoving the debris out of the alley and into the courtyard, a deafening rattle and clatter of stone against stone and metal reverbering through her chest and ringing in her head. Numb weakness prickling through her, she fell to her knees, her head spinning. The building was burning, bits of masonry continued to fall into the alley, but she'd caught most of it, a huge chunk of the wall above missing and the roof collapsed, half-hidden by the thick plume of smoke cast by the fires burning inside...

She hoped that building had been evacuated by now, because if anyone was still in there they were definitely dead. Most of those unwilling or unable to fight had fled the city in the last...however long this had been going on, it was probably fine.

Staring up at the burning hole in the wall, her head spinning, she was startled when one of the locals sank down next to her, a hand on her shoulder. That was Kụħtâp, one of the men in the group of locals she'd been helping fight through the city for hours now. He spoke, two words — she wasn't at a point that she could say almost anything at all in their language, not helped along by human physiology not really being up to it, but with cheating omniglot powers she still knew he'd asked if she was hurt.

"Jıppạh," she hissed, the fingers of one hand brushing over her own clavicles. Kụħtâp nodded, gave her a hand up. A tap of a finger on her comm, "Hasn't someone spotted that fucking launcher already? That one was right on our heads."

After a brief pause, Makolis answered, "We tracked back the position, but it's right up against the hatchery. Spears can't hit it, we'll have to approach on foot."

Beth grit her teeth, forcing through a frustrated sigh. "Fine. All teams move up — they only have so many hands, try to split their attention. Do not linger in the open, those rockets may not have tracking but they'll let you up just fine anyway. We'll be going through the courtyard. Hold pos—" She heard a grinding of stone, another section of the blown apart wall overhead crumbling, she slid back a couple steps, the others in the alley with her scattering out of the way, the hunk of brick and mortar shattering against the ground a couple metres away. "Don't enter the hatchery unless ordered — remember, they have hostages. Check in by teams when you reach the target, go." Without waiting for any acknowledgement, she stepped out of the alley into the courtyard, holding up a shield toward the Pirkalut position, shuffling backward, waving for the locals fighting with her to follow.

Without their air support, the battle to liberate this nameless little planet had gradually deteriorated into a brutal slog. Thankfully, they'd managed to annihilate all of the defenders' own air forces in the opening moments — the Vice Admiral had taken a quick loop around the planet and bombarded any surviving airfields from low orbit before jumping to Pirkalut, just to be sure — leaving the limited number of speeder bikes they had as more or less the only flight-capable machinery on the surface. The Pirkalut did have some aircars tucked away here or there, when one popped up the Law and their local allies scrambling to take cover while the Spears were called in, one Beth had taken out herself with a well-aimed curse. Their bikes were of most use in more rural areas, the tight environments of the cities more treacherous, especially with the artillery the Pirkalut had around — and many of their positions were in dense residential areas, so they couldn't make a run without potentially getting locals caught up in the crossfire. They'd quickly assigned the Spears to run around hunting down any Pirkalut remaining in less densely-populated regions of the world, farming communities, their high speed allowing them to cover greater distances than infantry could on foot.

And so the foot soldiers were left to pick through the cities, where they had a mix of advantages and disadvantages. The Law had fielded far too few hands to conquer an entire planet, but they didn't really need to — they were greatly outnumbered by the locals who'd stepped up to fight against the Pirkalut, armed with the rifles they'd brought along. The Pirkalut had a pretty sizeable occupying force here, to keep the locals in line, but the Law and their allies together easily outnumbered them, in many engagements by as many as a hundred to one. Of course, most of the people on their side were untrained locals, the vast majority of whom had never even held a blaster rifle before. They had more volunteers than they had weapons, the locals fighting with them sometimes carrying these things that looked sort of like a sword on the end of a spear, some had these huge fucking crossbows — in proportion to the locals' size and strength, Beth had seen bolts punch right through Pirkalut and then like a foot into the wall behind them, leaving them pinned like butterflies on display — some just using improvised spears and clubs, or even throwing stones, whatever they could get their hands on.

What the locals lacked in training and equipment, they made up in sheer enthusiasm. Beth had seen them charge heedlessly into blasterfire, hoping to strike at the Pirkalut before they were cut down, do enough damage to open up an opportunity for those coming after them, or drawing attention to themselves intentionally to give others the space to manoeuvre, even if it meant they would almost certainly die, she'd seen people running into burning and collapsing buildings to try to rescue those trapped inside, countless heroics of all sorts that blurred together into a featureless smear. While being transported from a liberated city to the next target, she'd been told of something she hadn't been present for, locals rushing a fortified position until their bodies piled high enough to block the defenders' line of sight, allowing them to approach close enough the Pirkalut couldn't react in time...

Beth hoped the Law gave these people a seriously good deal, because after this they fucking deserved it. It was their fault, if they hadn't underestimated the Pirkalut they would have had air support, would have been able to take care of this much more efficiently. As far as she was concerned, they owed the locals for the fuck-up.

And the liberation was proceeding in slow and bloody fashion because, despite their advantage in technology (if by a smaller margin than expected) and in numbers (with the locals included), the Pirkalut were dug in hard, and were making them fight for every inch. The Law had only minimal contact with the Pirkalut, but they were known by reputation, at least — they would know that the Law had no intention of taking prisoners, and even if any Pirkalut surrendered they'd just be handed over to the locals to be tried for their crimes anyway. (In the regions of space they were known in, the Law had a certain reputation when it came to their dealings with slavers.) Their only hope for survival was to pray that their navy prevailed against the Law's fleet, to hold out long enough for them to return. That wasn't going to happen — they were getting occasional updates from the fleet, so Beth knew that the Pirkalut had effectively already lost — but the Pirkalut's subspace comms had been knocked out early in the battle, so they wouldn't have any intel on how the greater war was proceeding, and couldn't know that the Law's fleet outmatched their entire bloody civilisation. They had one hope, so they were holding on to it.

All things considered, they were doing an impressive job holding on this long, the devious bastards. Their administration of the planet had already been organised with the goal of suppressing revolts of much greater numbers in mind — they'd had little in the way of air defences, but once it became primarily a ground battle, that wasn't so much of a concern anymore. The Pirkalut had built defensive positions with high walls, so the locals couldn't climb over them, and placed a lot of artillery, high rate-of-fire blasters or explosives meant to chew through large crowds in short spans of time. The big dish-guns, Beth had learned, were actually intended to set fire to the thatching used primarily in rural areas, basically holding their homes hostage, in the cities they tended to just mow people down with repeaters or blow the fuck out of anything and everything with rockets.

And because the Pirkalut were fucking bastards, they were doing it while holding the locals' babies hostage. Beth was pretty sure by this point that the locals' concept of kinship was...odd — they didn't really do families the same way as most people she was familiar with. How it'd worked before the Pirkalut came, as she understood it, was that a community would keep a shared nest, where they would put all their eggs, the infants cared for by members of the community who'd volunteered for the job until they were old enough to leave the nest, whereupon the rest of the rest of the adults took a more active role. It was possible there was a means by which they'd kept track of which eggs (and the resulting children) belonged to whom, but honestly she suspected they hadn't bothered, and instead took the adage that it takes a village very very seriously. She was pretty sure they had had, like, feudal lords or some kind of equivalent, but a large part of why those smaller towns she'd been to had those tall walls around those palaces was to protect the nest, which would have been at the centre of the structures there.

When she'd figured that out, she'd been very glad in retrospect that they hadn't just bombed the fortresses and shite they spotted from orbit. They'd elected not to, reasoning that there could be domestic staff, or some of them could be held by collaborators the locals would prefer to deal with themselves. The Law's introduction to the locals could have gone much worse if they'd unknowingly murdered all of the infants.

The Pirkalut must have looked at the pre-existing social organisation, and realised that would be an excellent way to enforce their control over the locals: after all, revolt might seem much less attractive if the Pirkalut were effectively holding all their children hostage. (Granted, Beth suspected whatever leadership class the locals had had before this might have been doing the same thing to begin with, but that was beside the point.) Everywhere the Pirkalut had firmly under their control — which was most of the planet, if not quite all of it — they held all the nests. They were fortified, with thick walls and cameras and gun emplacements, meant to be held against any local resistance, and presumably to be used as a bargaining chip, the locals threatened with the children being executed at any moment if they didn't cooperate.

Beth didn't speak the language well enough to pick up the details, but she understood that the locals hated these places. It could just be because aliens had come in and took their babies hostage, but she didn't think that was the whole of it. (Especially since she suspected their previous rulers had basically been doing that anyway.) No, she thought the routines of how this stuff worked had been changed with Pirkalut rule, in the recent past. Her sense was that it'd been a very...communal sort of thing, you know, with a lot of old traditions and religious stuff wrapped up in it — and then the Pirkalut had swept in and stuck their fingers in it, fucking it up. She'd been in a few of the hatcheries by now, and they seemed almost industrial, regimented and sterile, without all the...cultural stuff she assumed would have been around it before.

They put the infants in cages overnight. It was very gross.

She'd witnessed one of the attendants, in the confusion while a hatchery was being liberated, tear a Pirkalut apart with her bare hands — Beth hadn't gotten an explanation, but she didn't need to to understand the sentiment. Fuck the Pirkalut, seriously.

Unfortunately, the way the hatcheries had been set up had given the Pirkalut excellent fall-back positions to hole up at. They were centrally located in neighbourhoods, with a lot of courtyards and open boulevards and gardens around to give them clear line of sight in all directions. The structures had been turned into fucking fortresses, equipped with both nonlethal crowd-control devices as well as high-powered rapid-fire blasters and fucking artillery — unguided rockets, mostly, either fired straight at the target or sent in ballistic arcs. The munitions were primarily designed to hold back crowds which might attempt to storm the hatcheries on the ground, but they were also a threat to aircraft, so the Law were forced to approach by foot, advancing street by street. Most of the time, Beth would then have to slip in herself, to reduce the risk of the infants being killed in the crossfire. It was a slow, dragging fight, had been going on for days now, she'd honestly lost track...

The local fighters she was with spilled out of the alleyway after her, firing blindly around her — which she'd been nervous about at first, but their accuracy had improved pretty quickly — the shots passing straight through the one-way shield she was casting. Running as fast as she could while still holding the shield up, the locals shuffling along after her, she felt the impact of blaster shots against the shield, the surface undulating like ripples on water, "Ṃak, ṃak!" pointing at the street turning off the courtyard ahead, the weight of shots hitting her shield increased bit by bit, some missed shots screaming by above her head and to the sides, scoring burning craters into the faces of buildings or against the paving tiles, Beth gritting her teeth against the interference crawling up her arm, burning claws tearing from the inside...

They reached the next street, the locals starting to slip out of the courtyard and back into cover, Beth lagging a moment to cover them. The fire hitting her shield eased off a little, she let out a breath—

—there was a sudden, bone-shivering explosion, fire surging into existence only feet away from her face. Her shield mostly held — keeping the flames back, turning the shrapnel away, absorbing most of the shockwave — but she was still flung back to crash hard on her back, her wand spinning out of her hand to clatter against the tile. A little dazed, her head spinning, Beth struggled to suck air back into her lungs, thrumming head to toe with a mix of adrenaline and dull that was going to be a bruise later pain, clumsily turning to get back on her feet. Before she quite made it a pair of the locals had rushed back out of cover toward her, one aiming a steady stream of fire toward the hatchery and the other hooking one hand under her shoulder and beginning to drag her toward the street. Flailing to get her feet back under herself, it took three trees to get her magic to cooperate, her wand zipping back into her hand with a wordless shout and an overhead slash of her arm she cast an oversized blast of Sunflame, the golden flames rising in an arc, flashes of blaster fire tracking up to aim at it, as though hoping to shoot the curse out of the sky...

Long before it actually landed Beth and her rescuers were back in cover, the locals huddled against one wall while she stood with her hands propped on her knees, taking shaky breaths, her skin prickling with hot-cool pins and needles. That had been close. They gave her a moment before one of them — this one was Iħqa̎, she thought — asked if she was okay. "Jıppạh. Hold on, I want to check..." After thinking it through for a second, she cast an illusion of herself stepping out into the courtyard and casting a shield (the locals twitched, little out ringing blares of surprise), and then followed it a second later with a real shield, between their group and the courtyard.

It was only a couple seconds before another rocket came, flying straight through the illusion to burst against the flooring of the courtyard — the shield easily held back any of the debris sent their way. Once the worst of the explosion had expended itself Beth dropped the shield, hissed out a sigh. Of fucking course. The Pirkalut didn't know shite about magic — they weren't really part of the 'civilised' galaxy, didn't have the holonet and whatever — but their planetary communications were still up. Beth guessed she shouldn't be surprised that some of the defenders at the previous hatcheries she'd been at had managed to warn their fellows about the Law soldier with the ridiculous superpowers, for them to try targeting her specifically. She'd already had a suspicion they might have, given how many rockets had been fired near her so early on in their advance toward this one.

It wasn't really a surprise, but it was still irritating.

"They've got at least one of the rocket launchers pointed at me, I'm pinned down. I'm going to see if the locals can get me directly through the buildings. Someone get a close view on the gardens, I want to see what their defences look like." While acknowledgements rang in her ear, Beth walked partway down the street, some of the locals watching her, others glaring at the smoking, smouldering crater blasted into the street — they'd probably also realised that the speed of the reaction meant the Pirkalut were specifically targeting her. Coming to a stop just past the pack of locals, Beth slapped her hand against the brick wall of the building. These were mostly housing blocks here, she was pretty sure, tall and made out of heavy brick and mortar, tenements packing together dozens and dozens of families. Closest to the hatcheries tended to be housing, markets and the factories the Pirkalut were pressing the locals into labour at further out. "Is there any way to get through here, without being seen?" She was speaking in Minnisiät, of course, but she tried to get across what she meant with gestures.

Most of the locals didn't seem to get it right away, letting out little uncertain hoots or glancing at each other, but one of them popped up — Kụħtâp, she was almost certain. It could be hard to tell apart individuals of different species until she got familiar with them, and while the locals didn't really look too similar, Beth had a hard time keeping track of individuals' features. She'd noticed by now that the patterns of the colouring in the feathered bits of their bodies were all slightly different, but slight differences were hard to remember sometimes. She thought they actually had more variation between them than, say, human faces, but obviously the human brain was hard-wired to recognise the distinctions in one but not the other, it took practice. But anyway, Kụħtâp said something she didn't quite follow, except for the bit at the end, which she was very sure meant follow me. The rest of the locals got the message that someone had a plan, getting up and following Kụħtâp as he led them further down the street.

They didn't go far, though, soon coming to a set of heavy wooden double doors, hanging open, the residents not having bothered closing the place up behind them when they evacuated. The doors seemed pretty tall and wide to her, but the locals were big bastards, she didn't think they were at all out of proportion with their size. It was dark inside, the sunlight let in through the open doors a shaft through the shadows, speckled with swirling motes of dust. Beth cast a light charm, letting the orange glowing ball float up ahead of her — they were in some kind of...she wanted to say like a lobby or reception hall or something, but that gave a more grand impression than what it was. Pretty plain brick and concrete, swirls of colour painted on here and there, there was a desk at one end with a bunch of cubbies set into the wall behind it. To hold mail for the residents, maybe? The room was a bit of a mess, furniture overturned and assorted clothing and trinkets left abandoned on the floor where they'd been dropped, the residents clearly having gone in a hurry.

Kụħtâp led them through a door in the back, stepping through a much narrower hallway lined with a couple doors inside, a short distance bringing them to what Beth immediately recognised as a kitchen. It was very simple, of course, without any modern appliances of any kind, but the work surfaces and the knives and the pots and pans were familiar enough for her to identify them, baskets holding unfamiliar vegetables and fruits and greens, strings of something hanging from the ceiling which might be some dried product or, like, sausages maybe? (She thought the locals were herbivores, but she wasn't entirely certain.) This place was also a mess, tools and crockery and unidentifiable food products scattered all over the floor — she thought the residents had grabbed armfulls of food on the way out, just in case the battle dragged on long enough for feeding themselves to become a problem — but Kụħtâp led them on without slowing, through the kitchen and into a large dining hall on the other side, and then into another hallway...

Eventually, after a bit of wandering through hallways, they stepped out of the building into sunshine — they were on the next street along the courtyard, one down from where they'd been. Navigating through the buildings was much slower than going straight through the courtyard, with the number of turns they had to take, but it was better than being blown up with fucking rockets. Just to keep the Pirkalut on their toes, Beth cast another illusion out into the courtyard, and then gestured to Kụħtâp to lead on. There was a brief discussion between the group, debating which door to take next...asking if anyone lived here and knew the quickest way through, she thought. Soon they were on the move, making their way through to the next street, and then the next.

"Captain, Butɬkšorr." Beth twitched at the low, burbling voice, coming in through her personal channel. "I'm in position. I have that view of the gardens you asked for."

Absently following Kụħtâp through yet another building, it took her a moment to place the name: Corporal Butɬkšorr, a sharpshooter in one of the special forces units here with the infantry. "Good. Are you clear up there?" A few of the locals glanced at her, but quickly realised she wasn't talking to them — they didn't have access to communications tech themselves, obviously, but they were familiar with the concept from dealing with the Pirkalut.

"I have my holoblind up, they can't see me."

"Excellent. Hold a moment, I think we're almost there." She switched over to their division's channel, "Officers, check in."

While the other teams in their forces encircling this hatchery — Beth was the only one with a team composed entirely of locals, most of them mixed groups of locals and Law soldiers — reported their status one after the other, Kụħtâp continued leading them through the building. Eventually they reached another dining hall, Beth's magical light throwing wild shadows, one of the locals glanced through a door on the other side of the room before ducking back, gesturing at the others and speaking in a hushed sort of coo. There was a discussion at the door, Beth didn't follow it but it was clear that they weren't moving on.

Their group all clumped up on either side of the door, when Beth approached Kụħtâp she snapped her fingers, casting an auditory illusion — a single syllable, ɢ̃u̎, which she knew marked questions. Unfortunately, the human throat couldn't really pronounce it — it had one of those vowels that resonated in those big crests the locals had on their heads, which obviously humans couldn't reproduce — so she had to cheat with magic. A few of the locals, Kụħtâp and who she understood to be his cousins or something, tried to explain with a combination of short, simple sentences and gestures.

...The gardens were ahead, but the rooms around them had windows they could be spotted through. She wasn't sure about the windows part, but the point was that they couldn't advance any further without possibly being seen, she was pretty sure. Holding up a hand, then brushing her fingers over her brow, "Uqṇttạh." Then she made a downward motion with both hands, palms down at her hips, which she knew would be understood as wait. While the locals settled in, a few of them slipping back toward the kitchen (probably to grab snacks), Beth wormed her comm out of its compartment built into her armour. "Okay, Corporal, I'm ready now. I'm sending you an uplink for my comm — show me what you see."

"Copy. One moment." There was only a brief delay of a handful of seconds before their equipment was synced up, and an instant later the display was showing her video captured by...probably the scope of Butɬkšorr's rifle, judging by the curved edges of the image. Once the video was being piped through, it started to gradually scan over the gardens and the hatchery building at the centre, Butɬkšorr giving her a view of the whole thing. "Tell me if you want a closer look at anything, Captain."

"Thank you, Butɬkšorr, just keep panning for now. Fuck, they're dug in good, aren't they..."

"Yes, sir, looks like it. Any ideas?"

"I'm working on it."

The hatcheries she'd been to so far didn't all look the same, some obviously older, the base structure at least well pre-dating the Pirkalut occupation, possibly by centuries, others far more modern, the entire construction presumably done by the Pirkalut. They were made with different materials, in different sizes and designs — she'd seen what she suspected were class differences, some of them seeming rather nicer than others. Of course, the Pirkalut had significantly stripped them down, most of the decoration she'd assumed must have been on the outside before hidden with plaster and plasteel tile and modern equipment (and the fucking cages), but there were still signs of it in the underlying materials, the layout. The immediate surroundings were also indicative. There would be some greenspace around all of them, courtyards around the compass points she assumed were for community gatherings — Beth's team had been trying to advance down one of those courtyards before the Pirkalut had gotten those rockets pointed at them — but the size and quality of the gardens and the courtyards varied dramatically. The mapping they'd done before their air support had left had told them this would be an especially difficult one to take, due to the size of the open space around it, the large gardens and the courtyards, the size of the building itself, how thoroughly fortified the building was.

Apparently the Pirkalut had had the same thought: it looked like a significant chunk of the occupation forces in this city had decided to gather here, to pool their numbers and firepower to better resist an attack. That thought was concerning — if they'd abandoned the other hatcheries in the city, they might have executed the infants and smashed the eggs before leaving — but she had to worry about what was in front of her right now. There would have been trees and bushes and...she didn't know, rock and sand features and shite before, but the Pirkalut had flattened most of the gardens, the blue-green of local plants still showing itself all over but any taller objects that might obstruct their view gone. They'd brought in some kind of construction, digging equipment to do that, big boxy vehicles...which they'd also used to dig trenches, bordered with heavy concrete barricades, giving them some cover. There were multiple ranks of trenches/barricades...three rings, it looked like, Pirkalut soldiers huddled waiting.

And then of course they had heavy guns too, repeating blasters and multiple rocket launchers. They'd put the ammunition for the rockets right next to the hatchery, so the Law couldn't hit it without the risk of the resulting secondary explosion killing the infants, bastards...

And then there were the men on the roof of the hatchery — she spotted sniper rifles, and more heavy weapons. All together there were dozens and dozens of Pirkalut soldiers, more than she'd ever seen in one place since the start of the battle. They must have gathered from all over the city...and possibly even from further out? This was an especially large city by local standards, on a centrally-located sea port. They thought it was an old city, likely inhabited for millennia, maybe the center of the Pirkalut occupation? a natural fall-back position?

Whatever the reason, this place was going to be a bitch to take. The last few teams were checking in, taking up positions around the gardens, but she told everyone to wait. She could definitely kill all the Pirkalut no problem — she wouldn't even need the rest of the soldiers to do it, just toss a big progressive curse in there — but there were two big reasons why she couldn't do that. In these liberation operations, they preferred to help the locals and not just do it for them — mostly for morale reasons, she didn't fully get why, but she didn't need to to follow the directives she'd been given. There was that, but also any big curse would kill the infants being held hostage just as well as the Pirkalut, so, that was out. But the firepower they'd need to dig out a position like this would also be risking the infants...unless they wanted to do an old-fashioned infantry rush, try to take the barricades and trenches directly, which would be bloody as fuck...

Or they could try to be sneaky. "Okay, I think I'm having an idea. There are gaps in all three rings, right?" In response, Butɬkšorr swept around, focussing on the gaps in all three layers of fortifications — there was only one single way through each ring, and they weren't lined up with each other, practically on the opposite ends of the circles, but they were there. "Good. Show me the roof." Butɬkšorr zoomed in on the roof of the building, slowly tracked over the open spaces in the middle, the walkways, the positions where the Pirkalut had set up...good, she could use that. "Can you tell which building I'm in?"

"One moment." There was a brief pause, and then the colours in the video abruptly leached out, reduced to greyscale — save for undulating coloured halos here and there in and around the gardens, a visual representation of some kind of data overlaid on the image. Centring on one of the halos, Butɬkšorr said, "This beacon here is your comm." He zoomed in a bit, the image scrolling around to trace along the edges of one of the buildings right on the gardens. From this side, Beth could see the bottom two floors on this side opened up into a gallery looking out over the gardens — there weren't windows, but no solid walls at all, pillars holding up the upper floors, some wooden lattice here and there shading the interior. Butɬkšorr zoomed back out again, so she could better see where she was located in relation to the fortifications around the hatchery.

"All right, I've got it. When my team comes out on the roof, I want you to eliminate the artillery teams as fast as possible. Can you hit all three of them?"

Butɬkšorr paused for a moment, the image — back in full colour again, the overlay gone — bouncing here and there across the gardens, taking in the different positions of the three different rocket systems. "Can I assume the sharpshooters on the roof will be gone?"

"Yes."

"Then yes, I can hit all three of them. At least one of them will be able to get a round off first, but they won't have spotted me. One of our other teams could be hit, if we're all coming out."

"Or they could hit my team on the roof."

"That would be my concern, yes."

Beth grimaced, gritting her teeth. They'd have to take that risk — hopefully the Pirkalut would hesitate to catch their own people in the blast long enough for Butɬkšorr to eliminate all of them. "That'll have to be good enough. Be ready to start firing as soon as you see movement on the roof."

"Understood. How are you getting your team over there?"

"Magic, Corporal."

"...Yes, sir. I'll be ready. Butɬkšorr out."

With that out of the way, Beth called up all the officers, quickly explained the plan — making it very clear to wait to come out until the proper moment. The confusion would be enough to split the Pirkalut's fire, but a single shot from the rockets could kill too many of them at once, she didn't want to risk them moving on the hatchery until they were gone. Once they all had their orders, she had to explain the plan to her team...which wouldn't be easy, with the language barrier.

A demonstration, then. Beth stepped up into the middle of the dining hall, clapping her hands a few time to get everyone's attention. Once they were all watching her — some of them munching on hunks of bread or sipping at mugs of some kind of drink taken from the kitchen — she drew her wand and cast an aversion paling. Some of them physically jumped, several trumpeting with surprise as she suddenly disappeared from their vision. She waited for a second or two before letting the spell lapse, fading back into sight. Walking up to Iħqa̎, she took his arm at the wrist, placed his hand on her shoulder — looking around the room to make sure everyone was watching, she cast the spell again, both of them disappearing from sight. Then she had another of the locals (she didn't remember this one's name offhand) take Iħqa̎'s hand, before placing Iħqa̎'s other hand back on her shoulder, and casting the spell again, all three of them vanishing. She reached over to where the men had joined hands, tugged at Iħqa̎'s; he got the message and let go, the other man becoming visible again, but the two of them remaining out of sight; then she released the spell, Iħqa̎ and Beth fading into view again.

Then she cast an illusion, a reproduction of the hatchery and the trenches and barricades around it appearing spread out on the floor. There were some noises from the locals, um, distressed and angry at the gardens being destroyed, she thought. Once they got that out of their systems, she traced a looping path through the fortifications, made a spot on the wall glow red with a poke of her wand. Then she pointed out the big guns on the roof. Straightening again, she linked her arms together, gripping the opposite wrist with each hand, shaking and tugging but holding tight — hopefully communicating that they should not let go of each other, by any means.

She hoped they understood what she was getting at. If the shooting started before they could get inside, they were probably all going to die.

Without her directing them, the locals came together in two parallel rows, snaking around the dining room — she had nearly two dozen fighters with her, so even splitting into two rows still made a pretty long line. Though, they came up with something she hadn't thought of, the tail of each person coiling around the waist of the person behind them, um, she guessed that worked? Hadn't occurred to her, since she didn't have a tail, obviously, but sure, as long as they were touching. The ones at the front of the line — one was Iħqa̎, who'd stayed near her since her demonstration, but she'd forgotten the name of the other, a woman (she thought, it was a little hard to tell) — each put a hand on one of her shoulders. Beth reached up to pat the backs of their hands, glancing back at one and then the other, hoping to communicate they needed to hold on. She got little booming chirps in response, their heads bobbing — she hoped everyone was on board, anyway.

So Beth cast her concealment spells and stepped through the door, after a walk down a short hallway coming into the gallery she'd seen from the outside. The place was a bit of a mess, furniture and bits of cloth or tools or whatever else scattered about — presumably the evacuation had been a bit rushed. There was also damage from a fight, debris scattered across the floor, chunks blown off of walls or bits off of the lattice between the pillars overhead — quite pretty, the wood carved into a woven net, painted in bright contrasting colours — scorched bits burned into the wood or the tile floor here and there. She wasn't entirely surprised to find a few corpses lying out, all locals. She'd seen a lot of dead people over the last couple days, and it wasn't unusual to penetrate territory that'd been controlled by the Pirkalut only to find massacred locals around — at least it was just a few, Beth guessed most of the people who'd lived here had evacuated as the fighting started...

Or, more likely, they'd stormed the hatchery to try to rescue their children, and had been mowed down by the heavy weapons on the roof. They did have digging equipment here, she wouldn't be surprised to learn later that the bodies had been shoveled into a mass grave already hidden from sight under the gardens, just to keep their lines of fire clear.

The hatchery was at the centre of what had been a large open greenspace, most of it ground flat and converted into layers of fortifications. She felt the hands on her shoulders tense a little — she'd lost most of her armour over the course of the battle, so she could actually tell — a few cooing or hissing noises, as they came into sight of the Pirkalut soldiers waiting behind the first ring of barricades. Though they weren't in their sight, of course, her concealment spells making their eyes slide right over them, unseeing. Beth lifted a hand, gesturing to the right, leading the group in an arc around the Pirkalut defences. It didn't seem like they were moving, the Pirkalut keeping an eye on their surroundings, tense but their weapons not held at the ready — obviously, they didn't know Beth and the others were here, simply waiting for the next attempt at an advance.

"We're making our approach," Beth called over the comms — there were some twitches from the locals behind her, surprised that she was speaking, but they quickly realised that the Pirkalut couldn't hear them either. "Hold fire until we're inside the second barricade."

"Captain, Butɬkšorr. I don't have eyes on you."

"That's the idea, Corporal. I'll alert you when we're in position." As large as the gardens were, it took at least a couple minutes at a slow even walk (to avoid breaking anyone's grip) to make their way around to the gap in the fortifications. The Pirkalut had a big damn gun on a tripod to either side of the entrance, several soldiers standing around to guard it, their helmets turned toward the buildings around but seemingly chatting with each other to pass the time. Beth couldn't hear it, the sound contained by their helmets, but by the way they gestured and glanced at each other she assumed. Most of the entrance was clear, but the soldiers to both sides were milling about a little — so Beth went straight through the gap and continued all the way to the next barricade, near enough to make out the Pirkalut sitting in wait on the other side of the wall. She was close enough to reach out and touch the barricade when she turned to the...left, the next gap in the walls was a little closer on the left. If she remembered the layout, anyway, but it was a circle, they'd get there eventually no matter what...

Thankfully, the space between the barricades was mostly clear. They'd dug a trench just inside the wall, so the Pirkalut could comfortably duck into cover, soldiers gathered in little clumps every so often, the ground between the trench and the second wall flat and mostly clear. There was the occasional bit of equipment here or there, recharging stations for power cells or cases of water bottles or rations, but there was easily room enough for them to pass without incident. Beth had to pause for a moment, raising both hands over her shoulders telling everyone to hold, when one of the soldiers climbed out of the trench and walked over to one of the cases. Glancing back at his fellows in the trench, some silent conversation went back and forth, the soldier gathered an armful of supplies before moving back over to the trench, Beth continuing on once he was out of the way.

After a long, slow, tense walk — she could almost feel the locals behind her practically vibrating with nerves — they reached the gap in the second barricade. This one wasn't so thoroughly defended as the outer ring, Beth guessed they expected the survivors of an assault on the first ring to be able to retreat back here to hold it. Since there were fewer people around, she wasn't nearly as careful about how they navigated through the gap, just led her group in a gentle S-curve, continuing along their little spiral.

Glancing over her shoulder now and then, she waited until the tail end of their train was fully through the gap before flicking her comm. "We're inside the second ring. Begin cover fire — outer ring and the roof only, if you shoot any of us I'll be very annoyed."

There were a variety of acknowledgement from the officers, a few chuckles or teasing comments managing to get through the line. After a brief delay, shots started to zip out of the surrounding buildings toward the hatchery, fizzling out against the outer barricade wall or the structure of the hatchery itself, the Pirkalut jumping into motion and beginning to fire back. The blasterfire was pretty sparse, not a deluge of concentrated fire so much as a slow trickle of staccato bursts, coming from one direction, and then another, and then another, at random. Beth wanted them to keep the defenders' attention turned outside, but not on any specific place — if the Pirkalut knew where they might be gathered, then they could blow the fuck out of it with the rockets, which could get a lot of them killed. Instead, they had orders to take a few quick shots at the defenders, only lingering for a moment before running through the insides of the buildings to another position, where they'd take some more shots, before picking up and moving again. The teams were supposed to take turns firing to keep up a more or less constant slow stream, but never from any particular direction for more than a few seconds. It should be clear to the Pirkalut that they were avoiding concentrating their forces to prevent being hit by the rockets, perhaps hoping to slowly chip away at their numbers until they could take the walls more safely.

They were maybe halfway through the second ring when the Pirkalut got frustrated with the tactic, and started retaliating with explosives — a small portable shoulder-mounted rocket which reminded Beth very much of RPGs on Earth, she'd seen the Pirkalut break them out countless times now, especially against vehicles. (A few of her Spears had been shot down by them, in fact.) The little pellets zipped out from the inner ring with whistling whooshes, when they struck the walls of the surrounding buildings bursting with roars of flame and ear-piercing cracks of brick and mortar being shattered, smouldering fires left behind in a few places where they'd managed to catch something flammable. In a gap in the noise, Beth called, "Pull back if you're under threat. No stupid heroics, we'll need you for the final push."

The tempo of fire coming from around them declined somewhat as the RPGs collapsed more and more of the buildings' outer walls, forming piles of crumbled bricks here and there all around the gardens, the officers of the other groups presumably acting to minimise the risks to their people. Though, all the rubble formed from the RPG strikes would give them cover — Beth meant to call the idea in, but she overheard someone on the line point it out before she could. The initial sharp tension from the Pirkalut had loosened a little as the blasterfire reduced to a trickle, possibly coming to the conclusion that the Law had decided they hadn't the numbers to storm the hatchery, deterred at least for the moment.

"Captain, Butɬkšorr." He sounded a little breathless, his voice low and grinding, as though withholding a cough. "One of those grenade strikes hit near my position, I'm relocating. I don't have eyes on the roof right now."

Beth grimaced — yes, of course, she should have guessed that might happen. She hadn't realised the Pirkalut would be quite so enthusiastic about randomly firing RPGs at the buildings all around. "Copy that, Corporal. Check in when you're set up again."

"Yes, sir. Butɬkšorr out."

The gap through the third wall, like the second, was mostly undefended, so it wasn't difficult to pass through. However, the inner ring was rather more populated than the other two, with more equipment set out — including the artillery, of course — making it more difficult to navigate. Beth led her group on a curling winding path between equipment and clumps of Pirkalut, more than once having to wait for the path ahead of them to be cleared, stopped for a good minute or two as someone moved a crate from a collection of supplies along the wall of the hatchery over to the trench. (Ammunition for the RPGs, maybe?) With how busy it was in here, how long the train of people behind her, there were a few near misses, more than once the locals had to squirm out of the way of someone moving by, though thankfully they kept a grip on each other, even when they had to rush to avoid bumping into anyone Beth's palings stayed unbroken.

The nearest they came to disaster was where someone came wheeling a cart loaded with something toward them — they'd steered around a clump of soldiers themself, soon turned straight at their train of hidden people, too close to avoid. Thinking fast, Beth cast a tripping jinx, the Pirkalut sent sprawling to the ground at an angle that also had them tipping the cart over, the contents (metal discs and boxy hunks of plastic she didn't recognise) sent spilling over the dirt. That wouldn't have felt natural, but she immediately followed it up with a light confundus, should prevent them from realising anything was off. A couple of the soldiers they'd just circled around turned to laugh or snap at them... Yes, good, the Pirkalut she'd tripped seemed more confused and embarrassed than suspicious, they were in the clear.

Thankfully, they made it around to the clear section of wall she'd noticed through Butɬkšorr's scope without any more serious incidents. Walking right up to the surface — the fortifications the Pirkalut had added to the original structure, she thought, looked a lot like modern poured concrete — Beth first cast a series of aversion spells, preventing the Pirkalut from paying any mind to this particular section of wall. Then she started carving into it with vanishing spells, digging a circle out an inch at a time. She could open a door wide enough for their whole group all at once, but she didn't know what was on the other side of the wall — she didn't want to accidentally vanish any infants or eggs. After several times casting her vanishing spell, she punched into what looked like some kind of ring hallway, wide and undecorated — part of the Pirkalut's additions, she assumed — she cast a mirror charm through the gap to get a look around, and yeah, just a corridor, there wasn't even anybody around.

As thick and dense as the wall was, Beth took two vanishing spells to open up an archway tall enough for the locals and wide enough to let both rows through at the same time. It was noticeably drier inside — it was somewhat warmer here than the first places she'd visited, but still reasonably comfortable, and very humid this close to the sea — the tone of the lights seeming faintly greenish after growing accustomed to the red-tinted sunlight here. Once they were inside she reached up to pat the backs of the hands on her shoulders, hoping to signal that they should keep holding on. She wanted to find where the Pirkalut inside the building were, see if they could be effectively ambushed. Once they were all through, she quick carved a couple runes into the wall with cutting charms, tied her aversion palings into them — very sloppy work, it probably wouldn't hold for very long before building up too much interference, but it would be good enough for now.

These hatcheries, she'd learned by now, were all laid out more or less the same. The nests themselves were sizeable bowl-shaped depressions in the floor, there would normally be a few of them in a single room, with a few attendants on hand. Depending on the size of the neighbourhood the hatchery was for, you might only have the one nest room, or you might have several, sprawling out in a maze or stacked up into multiple levels — she'd noticed they seemed to prefer to put the nests in basement levels, if that was at all practical to do where they were. Besides the nests themselves there were, um...nurseries? She guessed that wasn't really the right word, since the babies weren't literally nursed — the locals weren't like mammals, they didn't produce milk at all (she honestly wasn't certain what the infants did eat) — but somewhere the babies were raised for however long they stayed here, anyway. Eventually, they got old enough to leave the hatchery, and would be sent off home with people from the neighbourhood, though she really had no idea how long that took. There would be common areas, exactly how many and what kinds depending on how big and/or nice the hatchery was — there would be a cooking/dining area, obviously, and play areas, and what she took to be a clinic, various things.

Some of what had been there she could only guess at by looking at the layout, though, because things had obviously changed since the Pirkalut had taken over. There was the putting babies in cages thing, of course, but there also seemed to be more modern technology bolted on, like, heat lamps in the nests, and various devices to monitor shite, whatever. There would be what was basically a guard station, either taking over the common areas or as a growth out of the side...or maybe they were just taking over stuff that would have belonged to guards commanded by the previous local authorities, and it just looked like an addition because they'd touched up the construction and brought in their own tech, hard to say. The kitchens seemed very modern, with appliances she assumed the Pirkalut had brought in, many of the surfaces redone with more modern materials, the lighting often fully replaced. Some of the ones she'd seen, there'd be electric lighting in the common areas — tuned to the Pirkalut eye, their sun was a white-yellow very similar to Earth's — but the nests and the nurseries (or whatever) would have more traditional lighting, maybe on the assumption that it'd be better for the developing locals. Some didn't bother though, she guessed it depended on how willing the local commanders were to humour the locals' preferences. The places did seem to be very inorganic, and regimented, and almost...she didn't know, corporate? It felt wrong somehow, bolted on, definitely not what these places would have looked like even a few years ago.

This was one of the more heavily-modified ones, Beth could tell almost immediately. The larger ones, that they thought were more critically important to hold for whatever reason, it wouldn't be unusual for those to be transformed into what was basically a...police station, she guessed? Or, they didn't have jail cells or anything, so maybe more like a guard post or a barracks or something. The structure had definitely been added to, taller, thicker walls added with a modern concrete-like material, between those and the additions on the roof almost entirely concealing the original structure. The corridor they stepped into was built into the additional defensive wall, a ring all the way around the building, to make it easy for troops to reposition themselves to whatever side of the building the locals were approaching from. Every so often there were windows with retractable metal shields, which could be used to shoot out at an approaching mob and then sealed if they got too close, and she was sure the single entrance would have a guard post and multiple doors and security systems and whatever the fuck, the place locked down tight.

They didn't actually see the main entrance though — they came across a door leading deeper into the building first, which wasn't lined up with the entrance, presumably for an extra layer of defence. Thankfully, the door was open, so they could walk straight in. This was clearly a mess hall, Pirkalut sitting here and there, their helmets discarded, eating and drinking and chatting. Beth had been a little surprised to see that the Pirkalut looked very similar to humans, though as far as they knew they weren't actually related. It was possible they were a human off-shoot — there were dozens of those around, either descended from sleeper ships flung out from Colussan (like the Chiss) or from pre-historical slave populations abandoned on worlds scattered across the galaxy — but the experts said it was more likely that this was a case of convergent evolution. That did happen, normally you could tell who was human-related and who wasn't by looking at their skeletal structure — Chiss basically were humans, just with funny colouration due to certain chemicals in the environment (those who lived away from their homeworld took supplements specifically to retain it), but if the shape of them looked noticeably off, then it was probably coincidence.

The Pirkalut did look very human, but they were off enough that they probably weren't distant cousins. They had the same basic body plan, with the legs and arms and trunk and head, but that was pretty common in all kinds of beings — not universal, but common. When they were out of their armour, it was more evident that the slope of their shoulders and the set of their hips was a little off, their gait not quite right, and the knuckles at the join of their fingers to their hands was far more prominent, something off about the shape of their thumb. Also, they didn't have fingernails, their fingers instead coming to a bony tip, which looked a little odd. Their faces were similar, with the same general layout, though their jaws seemed to be set a little further back, their noses long and flat and noticeably downturned, their ears sort of...swept back? like, in a different spot on their heads and not sticking out as far, like they were being pressed down, sort of. There was also something off about their brows and the set of their eyes, but it was hard to put words to exactly. She'd never seen one without their clothes, but she assumed there'd be more structural differences that'd be obvious then. But their skin was almost human-looking — very similar texture, though there was sometimes an almost greenish tinge to the brownish-bronzish colour which seemed a little off — and their hair covered a pretty similar part of their heads, black in a colour and texture which could just as easily be on a human.

Looking at them, Beth could immediately tell they were a different people, but they did look pretty similar — enough that she tended to be met by new locals she encountered with surprise and surreptitious glances when they thought she wasn't looking. She suspected the locals thought she actually was Pirkalut, but a defector or something, which she guessed was fine. It wasn't an important enough of a point to clarify just now.

There were display screens around, some of the Pirkalut poking at hand-held devices of some kind. She hadn't managed to pick up more than a few words of the language, so she couldn't really tell what they were talking about — but she thought they were going over updates on the fighting in the city and the rest of the planet, and how they thought things were going at their homeworld. Someone brought up a map of the planet at some point, colour-coded and with various indicators she couldn't read scattered here and there, so that seemed very likely. The Fleet had knocked out their subspace communications before leaving, so, while they could probably still talk to the other Pirkalut on the planet, they would be getting absolutely no information from outside of the system. She saw a couple going over images of the Fleet, huddled together muttering about something, probably evaluating how the space battle had gone and trying to estimate whether the Law had the power to force their entire homeworld into submission.

They did, of course, Beth didn't really doubt that. They couldn't occupy Pirkalut with the personnel and equipment they had on hand, but they definitely had the firepower to force a surrender. If it came down to it, they could always figure out where the person in charge was located, bombard the place from orbit, and then call the next person down the chain of command and ask them ithe same question — surely they'd find someone willing to surrender eventually.

Between the mess and what looked like a conjoined guard station comms hub...thing, there were maybe a dozen Pirkalut in here. Beth would prefer to double-check that there weren't more in the nests or the nurseries, to secure those first, seal the doors or something, but she knew the corridors would be pretty narrow, it'd be difficult to avoid being discovered if people were moving around. They might as well use the element of surprise while they had it. There were two rows of tables, the gap between them leading through to the comms hub — one hand held over her shoulder, she led her train of locals deeper into the room, then turned into the aisle between the tables. As many of them as there were, by the time Beth got near the comms hub they were filling practically the entire aisle, the double row allowing half of them to point their rifles at one side of the room and the other half the other. She guessed an advantage of the locals using their tails to keep a grip on each other was that they could handle their rifles at the same time, ready to fire as soon as the order was given.

There was a crackle on the comm, unexpected, making Beth twitch. "Captain, Butɬkšorr. I'm in position, I have eyes on all three rocket systems. Clear to shoot on your mark."

She bit out a thin sigh. "Fuck, Butɬkšorr, your timing is excellent." Flicking her comm over, she noticed one of the Pirkalut getting up, carrying a tray and moving toward the aisle, she rushed through the rest. "Potter, ambush is go, wait for skies to clear before coming out." Her wand jumping into her hand with a flick of her wrist, that one Pirkalut just a few steps away from the nearest local, she called, "ṃak!" a jab of her wand sending a blasting curse into the comms hub, exploding with a crack-fwoosh of flames bursting into existence, the Pirkalut shouting and scrambling for cover as the room rang with the harsh screams of two dozen blasters going off at once.

Taken by surprise, the skirmish lasted only seconds, the Pirkalut chewed up by blasterfire or curses before they could even get their weapons to hand, scorched and mangled bodies falling limp, furniture and walls and floor pockmarked with burns from stray shots. "The door!" she shouted, pointing at the exit. While a couple locals rushed that way, Beth continued to the comms hub, glanced over the mess her opening spell had made of the equipment — good, looked like she'd knocked most of it out in the first shot. She quick put a few piercing curses through any boxes or displays that still seemed operational — if they were lucky, this would mess with the defenders' communications and targeting systems — before turning right around. Some of the locals were quick going through the Pirkalut's equipment, scavenging weapons (they were well away from the nearest recharging station), Beth stepped up onto the tables to get around. Someone had gotten the door out into the ring hallway closed by the time she got there, she reinforced it with a couple spells and transfigurations, enough that the Pirkalut would probably need explosives to get inside. That should hold at least long enough to take the roof, at which point the Pirkalut would have other problems.

She caught the backs of a few of her group disappearing through a curving passage she guessed went down to the lower levels, presumably to check that the nests were clear of Pirkalut — they still had to take the roof, but she let them go, they shouldn't need literally every one of them to do that. There was a sharp bouncing cry, "Doṇkirr pish qũ͒!" Beth glanced around, one of the locals was waving at her. Not just her, several others had turned at the call, started streaming across the room in his direction, one of them kicked a table that was in the way, sending it flipping over to crash to the ground, the plates and cups scattered to spill their contents all over the place. (The locals were stupid strong, that hadn't even seemed to take any effort.) She really only had the absolute basics of the language, but she got that this one had found the way up to the roof. They charged down a hall, Beth couldn't really see much, caught in the middle of a stream of a dozen of the big damn colourful feathery bastards, but it was tall and wide enough that she assumed this was part of the structure dating to before the Pirkalut had arrived, and they were flying up a curling flight of stairs — the locals went down on all fours to climb faster, much more quickly than she could, slowing down the ones behind her — and then they were in another hallway, catching glimpses of what she assumed were play rooms or whatever.

The ones who'd gotten ahead of her had paused, exchanging ringing words with someone in one of the rooms — there was a figure standing in a doorway on the hall, Beth could tell she was older at a glance, multiple strings of glittering glass beads looped around her neck, one of the people who kept the nests here. As she got closer, she could see deeper into the room, small children huddled inside — a lot spindlier than the adults, slender to the point of almost looking like a bundle of sticks, feathers covering smaller portions of their bodies, in paler pastel colours and looking oddly fluffy (she wasn't sure if the thinness was because the Pirkalut weren't feeding them enough or if the children just looked like that) — tentatively peaking at the activity out in the hall, eyes big and blinking in the shadows. The older woman belatedly spotted Beth, and let out a harsh throbbing cry, pointing at her, one of the fighters gently took her wrist, muttering...

She'd definitely mistaken Beth for Pirkalut — that happened all the time, humans just looked too similar to the locals.

They didn't delay for more than a few seconds longer — just explaining to the old woman what was going on here, she was pretty sure, telling her to keep her head down for a few more minutes — before continuing their rush down the corridor. This was one of the larger hatcheries she'd been to, but it wasn't very long before they reached another spiraling staircase, charging upward, the reddish-tinted sunlight of this world spilling over her face partway up—

The deep thrumming booms of the locals rung out from above, the scream of blasterfire burning through the air, and then Beth finally reached the roof. The surface was uneven, the door coming out on a flat circle, a dome there and then another there, walkways looping around that she assumed were additions made by the Pirkalut. There were over a dozen Pirkalut around, but they weren't really prepared for an attack from their backs — there were sharpshooters sitting ready, teams at the big guns, some didn't even have small arms with them, caught with their pants down. The first wave of fire from the locals chewed through a few people, and then more were coming out of the stairwell behind Beth, Pirkalut scrambling for cover, piercing curses lanced through one, two, one of the sharpshooters managed to take a shot from extremely close range, the supersonic bullet (she assumed) punching a fist-sized hole through one of the local's chest, but he was still coming, leaped at the sharpshooter with a warbling cry, both of them tumbling to the ground...

These people were tough bastards, they went down hard — that was a lethal wound, but he'd live long enough to break that sharpshooter's neck with his bare hands first.

It'd only taken a handful of seconds before the Pirkalut were all dead. But even with them down, the noise of blasterfire didn't cease, the other teams were jumping out of cover, bolts zipping across the flattened gardens, "the guns!" she shouted, gesturing at the tripods at the corners. The locals were mostly new to modern weaponry, of course, it wasn't guaranteed that they'd be able to figure them out, but they might as well try. Beth quick apparated across one of the domes to the gun furthest from the entrance—

She jumped as a figure in Pirkalut armour spun around, bringing a pistol of some kind into line, a wild wandless charm slammed into the man's chest shoving him against the side of the dome, a piercing curse punched through his chest a blink later, he slid down to the floor, twitchy hands grasping blindly at the wound ,a second curse aimed at his head put him out of his misery. Letting out a shaky sigh, she took a moment to breathe, trying to force her heart thundering in her chest to calm the fuck down. Must have been a survivor of the gun team, she hadn't seen him there, almost caught her by surprise...

Once the shivers had mostly gone out of her fingers, Beth ran up to the big gun, shoved a dead Pirkalut out of the way with a foot, glanced over the controls. Odd, this was definitely not Pirkalut tech — that logo, just at the bottom of the control panel, a golden outline of two four-pointed stars, one laid over the other rotated to make an eight-pointed shape, belonged to BlasTech. There weren't really any major private arms manufacturers in the Law — some of the members might have some that operated internally, but they would be small in scale — but she'd learned that that was standard beyond the Rift, most weapons and military produced by for-profit corporations, or at least in public–private partnerships. BlasTech were one of the larger ones, familiar to her primarily because they'd had a stupid number of contracts with the Law of Colussan, so a lot of the equipment brought across with Mítth-räw-nuruodo's original fleet had been manufactured by BlasTech. Of course, very little of that was actually used anymore, but she'd seen them in films before, there'd been a few old blasters sitting around in the firing range at the academy back on Komfar. She'd noticed the logo on those old guns back then, read a little bit about the corporation in the history materials she'd been given. Supposedly they were still huge in the Law of Bastion, and did some business in the Republic, just not as much as they used to, pushed out by producers who'd made the smart choice of supplying the Rebellion on the sly. You basically never saw anything made by them on this side of the Rift, mostly isolated from that side of the galaxy as they were.

So what the fuck was a BlasTech-manufactured weapon doing here?

Shrugging off her confusion, Beth unlocked the tripod with a slap of her hand, the gun whirring to life with two quick flips of switches. The gun was set up close enough to the wall that she could depress it pretty far, her arms reaching up over her shoulders to keep a grip on the handles, she pressed down on the triggers and a rapid stream of bright orange high-powered blaster bolts came screeching out of the nozzle, so close together she could hardly even see the gaps between them, her hands vibrating with the little kicks and vibrations carried through to the grips. Her aim was slightly off at first, hard to be very precise at the awkward angle it took to fire down, but she adjusted quickly, stitching fire across the Pirkalut gathered in the trench behind the innermost wall, sweeping across once to leave most of them already dead, glowing holes melted into the wall behind them — they hadn't seen the attack coming, like shooting fish in a barrel. The survivors jumped into a scramble, some charging closer to the hatchery, too close for her to aim that low, others jumping up and rolling over the wall, the ones in the second rank swirling in confusion, torn between Beth and the mix of Law soldiers and locals charging toward the walls, rifle bolts flying in at the first ring, chewing into the wall or occasionally finding an unlucky Pirkalut. Beth heard a second turret elsewhere on the roof start up — the locals must have figured it out — even as she swept the turret back the other way, this time burning along the trench behind the second wall, Pirkalut scrambling to climb out of the trench but they were too slow, the high-powered bolts leaving blackened and mangled bodies behind, armour superheated enough to visibly glow, there were a tight series of booming noises, flares of thick greenish-yellow flames as grenades burst against the outer wall in multiple places all at once, the barricades either shredded apart or blasted out of the way, Pirkalut soldiers rushing toward the new gaps in their defences, taking an occasional potshot at the quickly-approaching attackers, Beth saw a couple locals hit, a bolt pinging off of Law armour, she lined up—

At the last second, she saw someone she'd missed aim an RPG right up toward her — Beth apparated away, landing on top of one of the domes, her boots skidding a little on the polished white and yellow ceramic. A blink later, there was an explosion of fire as the corner her turret had been on was obliterated, flinging countless shards of shattered duracrete into the air, a wide-angled banishing charm sent the stuff back around to fall over the Pirkalut instead. The gun was a total loss, she glanced around at the other emplacements on the roof, a pair of locals were operating one, sending staccato bursts of fire down into the defenders, the other firing an occasional shot down alongside (aiming for anyone trying to shoot back up at them, she thought), another pair were just figuring out how to work a second gun—

—a blink through the tight blackness of apparation and she appeared next to the pair of locals at the third gun. They jumped a little at her sudden appearance, but she ignored them, reached over to switch the power on and set the firing mode, unlocking the tripod with a kick. Leaving the gun to the locals, she took a step away, she could make out the top of one of the rocket launcher things, and, yes, there were a bunch of rockets stacked up here, she sent a vanishing curse through the whole thing, bisecting them — that should hopefully mess with the innards enough to prevent them from going up — the locals had figured out the last heavy blaster, shots burning through the Pirkalut making them scramble for cover, the man– the woman at the controls swivelling back and forth to paint over them before they could escape, with high booming nasally sounds Beth read as almost hysterical laughter, she spotted someone handling an RPG, tore them apart with a blasting curse, a crate of ammunition nearby going up in a secondary explosion, Beth reflexively ducking at the noise, a pillar of flame erupting up out of the fortifications...

By that point, the attacking soldiers and local recruits were reaching the outer wall, pouring through the gaps. The Pirkalut were already fucked, it was just mopping up from here.

Everything seemed to be going smoothly enough here, so Beth took a step back, keyed her comm over to the right channel. "Colonel, this is Spear Lead. Target neutralised, we're just cleaning up at this point. I'm heading down to unlock all the cages, and then my group will be ready for a new assignment."

"Acknowledged, Spear Lead. The Colonel is on another call, I'll pass along your report." Not really surprised he was busy, given that he was attempting to coordinate the liberation of the whole planet — far too many teams to keep track of all at once, she was sure that was a fucking pain. Shrugging it off, Beth took a final glance around the roof — part of the wall near one of the other gun teams was crumbling, it looked like someone had taken a shot with an RPG and missed — but it seemed like they had everything more or less in hand here. She apparated back down to the mess, startling a couple locals. She hadn't expected anyone to be here, they must have been some of the ones who'd gone downstairs earlier, they were...going through the Pirkalut's pockets? What were they—

Oh! They were looking for a key to the cages! That was fine, she could take care of that. Waving them on, she turned to start down the stairs — given how often she was mistaken for Pirkalut, it was probably best if at least one of the people she'd fought through here with came along, just in case one of the attendants got the wrong idea...

She was vanishing the doors off of the cages in the third nest when her comm crackled to life. "Lieutenant Potter, you and all teams at Kerrim-Green-Seven are to hold position and await further instructions."

Beth frowned, glancing around the nest. This was one of the more high-tech ones she'd seen, presumably due to this being a major city, a place where the Pirkalut were enforcing more control than the less important areas of the planet. She knew from the less thoroughly altered ones that the big shallow bowl the eggs were put in would normally be set into the floor, but here it was instead elevated, the rim at about waist height. The bowl of the nest was filled with some kind of pinkish-white fluff, which kind of looked like the insulation you saw sometimes in muggle houses? She thought it was meant to trap the heat, and also as a cushion to prevent the eggs from hitting anything hard enough to crack. The eggs themselves were very dark, black with a little bit of green or orangeish mottling, only slightly oblong — they weren't so obviously oval-shaped as, like, chicken eggs, but they were definitely tapered somewhat — with these tiny little ridges along the surface she'd never seen in eggs before. They were actually rather smaller than she might have expected, given how fucking huge the locals were. Like, maybe only two or three times the size of her fist? a little more than that? Still pretty fucking big for an egg, sure, but the locals were bigger than person-sized, so they actually seemed small by proportion. But what did she know, she didn't think she'd actually seen eggs belonging to beings before, she could be totally wrong with that impression. The bowl was a few metres across, enough room for a few dozen eggs in there, though she'd never bothered counting.

Hanging down from the ceiling were heat lamps — maybe designed as sun lamps, but the tone of the light didn't match the local sun, too yellow-white — and cameras and sensors and shite, grasping arms to help pick up the eggs closer to the middle. There was computer equipment in here, monitoring and managing the environment. Apparently they had sensors that could look inside the eggs somehow, at a different hatchery Beth had once seen a computer-generated image of an unhatched baby inside its egg, very cool. Very not cool were the stacks and rows of cages along two walls, little baby locals kept in there. The cages weren't, like completely hostile, big enough they had room to move around in, the surfaces padded with fabric lining, even little toys and whatever in there, but still, they were putting the babies in cages.

As kind of neat as some of the sensors and shite pointed at the nest seemed, she couldn't really appreciate it, because she realised it was designed with an absolutely awful purpose in mind. The Pirkalut were trying to efficiently make the perfect environment for the eggs to hatch, so they would have more locals to use for their labour. Beth would guess that the locals had had a relatively low survival rate before — she understood that the advantage of egg-laying was that it took less out of the mother, since they were basically 'born' super premature, but the disadvantage was that a smaller fraction of the eggs made it to 'term' — so the Pirkalut were using all their fancy tech to help boost the rate. She wouldn't be surprised if they were doing medical shite too, and hell, part of the reason they were keeping the babies locked up could even be for their 'safety', keeping them isolated and carefully monitored until they were hardy enough to survive bumbling around without too much risk of getting hurt. Of course, the only reason the Pirkalut gave a damn was so they'd have more slaves, and also the system seemed really gross and impersonal to her, just, fuck the Pirkalut, that was all.

With the doors of the cages vanished away, people were coming up to take the babies out, the attendants who worked here, some of the fighters who'd come with Beth or the other teams, even some older children. A few of the babies basically immediately leapt for freedom — those ones had to be caught before they fell if they were anywhere but the bottom couple rows, too high to be safe — others more tentative, a few even hiding at the backs of the cages. Not a big surprise some were reluctant to leave, or scared, since they were babies, didn't understand what was going on, and they'd lived in those cages for as long as they could remember. (Beth kind of doubted they could remember hatching, and after being washed off and getting a medical check they went straight in there, so.) The babies were scrawny spindly little things, even more obvious than on the children, since they didn't have much in the way of feathers, just little tufts of fluff here or there. Sort of like the fuzz on baby chickens or ducks, just less of it, not covering their whole bodies. Their faces didn't look quite right to Beth, a little squashed, their nose too blunt and their eyes too big, and their head crests were only tiny little nubs. Their tails were also widely out of proportion, much longer relative to their bodies than on the adults, narrow dainty ropes whipping around as they moved. She assumed they grew into those as they aged.

They were also tiny — were human babies this tiny? She didn't think so. Some of them were less frightfully small, she assumed those were the ones that'd hatched a while ago, but the littlest ones were, just— They seemed too small, it made Beth faintly nervous. Could easily curl up in the palms of her hands, and they weighed basically nothing, ridiculous...

One of the ones on an upper row leapt out, there weren't any of the locals nearby, a blare of alarm from one as she noticed, but Beth took a step to put herself in the baby's arc, catching them in the crook of her arm. This was one of the larger ones, maybe the length of her forearm (not counting the tail), but even at this size still barely weighed anything. (She assumed they must have hollow bones, like birds.) Their tiny little fingers clung at Beth's uniform, its sides visibly swelling and shrinking with their breaths, it turned around to blink at Beth with their big black eyes, head tilting in obvious curiosity. Smiling to herself, she reached over to nudge the little thing on its tiny little head crest with a finger, getting a thin little squeak in return, before bending over to release them onto the floor from a more comfortable height.

"Sorry, Colonel," Beth said into the comm, "had my hands full for a second. Did you say we're to hold position? What for? Aren't there still more hatcheries out there?"

There was a brief delay — the Colonel was busy, she was sure — but only for a handful of seconds before he responded. "The Fleet is on the way back. I understand they have someone aboard who will broadcast an order to all Pirkalut elements to surrender. We're to wait to see if the Pirkalut here will respect the surrender and for the Admiral to evaluate the situation before taking further action."

...Oh. Well, good then, hopefully the Pirkalut would throw down their weapons and they could be fucking done here already. She wasn't optimistic, honestly, but it would be nice. "Understood, Colonel. Standing by." The comm channel going dead, Beth glanced over the adults and older children fussing over the babies, then turned to walk out, carefully checking the placements of her feet to make sure she didn't step on anyone. Maybe the battle was over, but there were still other nests in this hatchery — there were more cages for her to open.

She heard faint clicking on the tile, glanced down and behind her to notice that a few of the babies were following her. One of them was definitely the same one she'd caught earlier, she guessed the others were just curious. Drawing her wand with a flick of her wrist, she cast an illusion of colourful sparks skittering across the floor, and the babies went chasing after them — on all fours, she guessed they gained the ability to walk upright later in childhood — with a chorus of high little squeaking and chittering noises. Smiling to herself, she turned to continue out, some of the adults following her to help.

Apparently the same charm fascinated both human and alien children...

Chapter Text

70:3:25 (21st July 2002)
— Zero Day plus 06.10.19

As the high twitter of a comm alarm rang through the room, she let out a low groan, burying her face deeper into the soft warm fur of Taqšuńi's neck. Her voice rasping in her throat, half asleep, Taqšuńi whispered, "Is that mine or yours?"

"Ugh, mine."

"You should check it. Fancy officer type, might be important."

"Piss off." Beth was sure that idiom didn't make any sense at all literally translated into Monatšeri — Taqšuńi let out a shivering little huff, bemused — but she didn't bother responding, just flopped over onto her back, grimacing at the cool air against her chest. Blindly grasping, it took a moment for her fingers to find her comm, a moment longer for her dark-adjusted eyes to make out the letters through the glow of the screen. It didn't help that the words didn't immediately make sense, Beth's confusion making it unreasonably difficult to parse what the message said. "Get up. I've been tapped for the first contact team." Which was bizarre — she was a soldier, not a diplomat, this wasn't her fucking job. She guessed they might want to lean on her omniglottalism, to help smooth things over a bit, having seen how much help it'd been at the Law's first contact with Earth. Not like she'd picked up that much, and who knew if they'd be talking to any of the locals who spoke one of the languages she'd heard yet, but fine, whatever...

Taqšuńi let out a low grinding snarl, irritated. "We're supposed to be off-duty until midday."

"Don't complain to me, I'm not the one who— Ugh, I'm supposed to report in like an hour and a half..." Well after the morning shift-change, of course, that would be perfectly fine on a normal day, but she and Taqšuńi had both been given the morning off — a lot of them were on light duty, after the battle — she had not planned on needing to be awake early. "I have to go, I'm going to be fucking late..."

The uniform system in the Law didn't work quite the same as it did back in Earth militaries. They had similar ideas about the minimum necessary while in barracks (or on a ship, same concept), the full proper version of the uniform for the most part only needed in places where they might be seen by other people, like a base in a city somewhere or a space station that had civilian areas. There were proper events where they were supposed to wear the full uniform, with all the accessories and nicely cleaned and folded and shite, normally including medals with it, but that was as close as they got to a real dress uniform. They weren't separate designs, for the most part — there were a few exceptions for senior officers or special units, but generally. But in especially formal events there was a code that was referred to as diplomatic dress, which was different. While there was a default uniform they could wear for that, they were also allowed to wear cultural dress if they preferred. That is, formalwear appropriate to the situation from their homeworld — the Law was an alliance of a whole bunch of different cultures, some of whom were new to spaceflight so still had their own unique local cultures, and at formal diplomatic events they preferred to advertise that. She'd only been to a handful of things before, mostly holidays, everyone being dressed differently made the space very colourful, it was interesting.

Her orders said she was supposed to arrive in diplomatic dress, so that's what she was going to do. Of course, since she was the only person in the Fleet from Earth, she was pretty much allowed to come up with whatever she wanted and call it Dimitran formalwear — if she did, who was going to call her on it? She could have, sure, and she'd been tempted, but she'd felt it would be better to play along with the spirit of the thing...to a certain degree, anyway. She didn't like wearing dresses if she could help it, and fucking space aliens weren't likely to know shite about gendered expectations when it came to formalwear on Earth, so she could get away with that. Also, robes were stupid, but there was no reason she couldn't just avoid that too.

What she'd ended up with was somewhat underdressing by the standards of magical Britain, but she didn't give a fuck — she wasn't in magical Britain, and it's not like bloody space aliens would be able to tell the difference. The clothes were made out of pretty glittery alchemised silk, the shite they had in magical Britain, which at least looked fancy, especially when the light caught the metal thread the enchanting had been done with here and there. The trousers were black, which didn't really match the rest of it, but did match her boots — her duelling boots, a style that wouldn't register as formal back home, but with the enchanted bits done in silver it looked nicer to foreign eyes — a blouse in white, and over that a waistcoat in bright Potter red with curling embroidery done in white and gold, random pretty swirling spiralling patterns but also resolving into rearing hippogriffs, because the Potters loved their hippogriffs, put them on fucking everything. There was an actual nice wand holster, prettied up with glittery golden metalwork, and a little bit of jewellery, but pretty subtle, because she didn't really like wearing jewellery. Just, you know, helped the relatively basic stuff look more special than it really was, was the point.

Subtle enough that the medals and shite were actually way more obvious than the jewellery. Over the whole thing went her uniform jacket — the nice must be on best behaviour for civilians one, vivid red edged with white, the hem dropping as low as her knees — and then Beth walked out into the office side of her quarters, upturned her box of medals on her desk and started pinning them in place on the lapels of her jacket. She did have a stupid number of these, thanks to hoping around all through Europe during the initial invasion and then the long war in Indochina...and then from the renewed attack a year later...and then a couple more in incidents over the years since then...and soon she was going to have a couple from her time in the Law too, because of course. (Definitely one for the liberation of Oxlapś, everyone involved was going to get one, but probably a couple others too.) She was just accumulating these things, it was fucking ridiculous — it turned out, when you bled for a country they liked to give you little prizes, as though that meant anything, but whatever. Some of them that were actually supposed to be hung around her neck she'd fiddled with to pin on her jacket instead, because having too many of those at once would be silly...as though having all these on her jacket wasn't already kind of silly.

Taqšuńi joked that she was going to run out of room if she stayed in the military much longer, yeah yeah, very funny. The lion's share of these were from fighting the scabs on Earth anyway...

They got a few glances passing people by in the corridors, probably because Beth looked rather silly at the moment — it wasn't a secret that she and Taqšuńi were sleeping together, but nobody cared about that. A short walk brought them to the officers' mess, which Taqšuńi technically wasn't supposed to be in, but nobody cared about that either. It'd been long enough after the battle that Beth's appetite had properly come back by now, and also she definitely wanted some muqsa before needing to talk to anyone important. She'd been up late last night, okay, she hadn't expected to need to be awake in the morning.

Beth was able to linger for a little bit over breakfast, muttering with Taqšuńi, occasionally chatting with someone else who came by — the rest of the officers living in this section were at least vaguely familiar to her by now — but before too long it was time to go. She stood up, smooshed her face into Taqšuńi's hair for a moment, Taqšuńi reaching up to run her nails along the back of Beth's neck, and then she turned and started off. The orders she'd been sent were to report to the conference room attached to the state landing bay, which she'd never been to before, but it wasn't difficult to find. "State" here wasn't really a great translation — it was a small landing bay meant more for diplomatic use than military. The Kośalhath was of a size that it could act as a flagship, which meant it might need to receive dignitaries, or admirals or whoever shuttling in to take command. This landing bay was right on the command deck, very near the Admiral's quarters, as well as the special nice rooms for important guests, so any important people visiting the ship for whatever reason would have only a short walk to get to where they were going. A short walk which also didn't bring them past anything too sensitive, in case that was a concern. It was pretty common for landing bays on ships and stations to have conference rooms attached, used for various purposes depending on context, though the one on the Kośalhath was actually rather nice, with all the weird environmental shite the Chiss used for formal greetings worked in, just in case.

When she got there, none of the neat environmental shite was actually on, though, a few people sitting at a table in the middle of the plain white room. There was a pair of Chiss, one in a military uniform and the other in Chiss-style diplomatic dress (in Law colours), a pair of Monatšeri, one in the diplomatic uniform and another in the same uniform Beth remembered the guards had worn for first contact — a somewhat more elaborate version of the normal Fleet uniform, with extra sashes around their waist and over a shoulder in black and yellow. Now she knew that that uniform was specific to the guards assigned to diplomatic staff, she hardly ever saw it. There were a couple other diplomatic staff people around, muttering with the Chiss—

"Oh, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe! I didn't expect to see you all the way out here."

Smiling over at her, he said, "Hello again, Beth. It has been some time, hasn't it?" She hadn't really expected him to explain why he'd pulled this particular assignment, but the bland tone to his voice made her feel like he was avoiding the question on purpose, almost hinting. That was odd — she suddenly had the very strong feeling she was missing something.

"Not since the party after the treaty signing, I think. I've heard you've been back to Earth, but—" Approaching nearer the table, Beth got an angle on the other Chiss from the front, belatedly recognised Chaf-räw-aṙitśåe. She cut herself off to clap a fist against her chest in a salute, dipping her head a little. "Admiral."

Chaf-räw-aṙitśåe nodded back at her. "Lieutenant. Have a seat," he said, nodding at one of the open chairs. "I believe Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe means to explain the plan and ask you for some advice before you set out."

"Advice? I'm not sure how much I can tell you about our new friends down there — I'm not even sure what to call them, honestly." She'd heard a few terms she thought might be national groups, but she didn't know what their name for their people as a whole was...or if they even had one? They might not, she'd learned that wasn't unusual in pre-spaceflight civilisations...

"I've been told that you've spent a few days with them, have learned to communicate at least a little."

"Well, some, I suppose, but I wouldn't say it's all that much." Sinking into a chair, Beth nodded across the table at the Monatšeri diplomat. "Quńalhi. Still following this old man around?"

With an almost enigmatic sort of smirk, Quńalhi drawled, "When the situation calls for it." Yeah, Beth was definitely missing something...

Anyway, some introductions went around, before Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe started a little presentation. Beth had been the last to arrive, but it wasn't just directed at her, describing what the plan was for the day to everyone present. These things could be somewhat more complicated in less developed planets, where they didn't have a planetary government...or even sufficient technology to reasonably expect them to arrange a spot to receive their delegation. Like they'd done on Earth, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe meant, flashing a signal and waiting for their hosts to prepare and flash the signal back at them to call them down. Earth had gone more smoothly than most of these meetings did, honestly, but ones with relatively primitive societies like this one were extra complicated.

Since they couldn't do one nice efficient landing, they'd selected a list of major cities distributed around the world, would introduce themselves at each of them. Some time ago, they'd sent beacons down outside of each, which would be projecting a simple illusion which should explain that they'd be landing there, with a timer counting down. (Not with numbers, obviously — Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe didn't explain what it looked like, but Beth was sure the fancy diplomat types knew what they were doing.) They'd go to one, introduce themselves, drop off some gifts, maybe hang around a bit, and then they'd hop to the next, and the next, and so on. The shuttle could only carry so many supplies at once, they'd have to come back up to reload after a few trips. Altogether, the process would probably take a couple days, which Beth guessed made sense. It was a whole planet, getting decent coverage would take no small amount of time.

The gifts they were dropping off weren't anything super impressive, by modern standards — some food, some medical equipment and supplies, some basic communications equipment, that kind of thing. Little things by their standards, but to the locals they'd probably seem pretty fucking cool, especially the medical stuff. Assuming it was any good to them at all, anyway, but Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe said it should be, so. She didn't think they'd get much use out of the food, though? They did have a lot of farms, they were pretty much an agricultural society and all, so they should be set on that one. She'd assumed so, anyway, but Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe said they should actually expect famine to be a huge fucking problem. The Pirkalut had been uprooting people to move them into the cities to work in factories and shite, which meant taking them off the farms. Even the natural process in industrialisation could get messy, with intermittent famines breaking out over the period — oh yeah, that had happened in Earth history, hadn't it — but it got a whole lot fucking worse when people tried to force it. Without supplies coming in from Pirkalut (assuming they'd bothered), the locals could be in a lot of trouble very soon. Which, yeah, that made sense, never mind.

She wasn't really surprised that her intuition had turned out to be way off — this wasn't her job, Beth just blew shite up.

The project here would be going on for some time, obviously. There was Pirkalut itself to deal with, and the other settlements they'd spread out to. This was the only other inhabited planet they'd subjected, but they'd also had Pirkalut in what was basically slave labour — different conditions than the locals, who they gathered hadn't had any rights at all, but still. And the locals here would need a lot of assistance, for a long time. They would have an effectively permanent relief effort here — even after the risk of famine was over, now that they were here they'd committed themselves to helping the locals join galactic society if they wanted, which would take ages — they were already working at getting the infrastructure for that set up, made somewhat more complicated by them being so far past the edge of Law space. After the first few shipments, they'd try to communicate the offer to bring some people up for the language-learning programme, the same one Beth had done for Earth, until they could train translation algorithms this was going to be very awkward.

Not impossible, they had dealt with similarly underdeveloped societies before. It was just going to be delicate, and awkward at times, and take a long fucking time. There were reasons most other states often enslaved primitive people they came across, or just stole any valuable resources around and killed any of them who got in the way — actually helping people took a stupid amount of effort. The Law normally didn't involve themselves, since they didn't have the resources to help everyone out there, but now that they'd committed themselves they sort of had to. Oops?

Chaf-räw-aṙitśåe seemed completely unapologetic with effectively creating this situation, which, he had nothing to apologise for, as far as Beth was concerned. They'd just freed an entire fucking planet from slavery, they were the big damn heroes here. But he also didn't stick around through most of the conversation, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe had barely started his presentation when the Admiral got up and walked out of the conference room. Had other work to do, Beth assumed.

But anyway, the big long project that would follow the initial introduction wasn't really any of Beth's business. Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe just wanted her to try to help smooth over the initial introductions, since she'd learned to communicate at least a little. If they were lucky, some of the locals might even recognise her from the battle — not likely, it was a big planet, but it could happen. Depending on how things go, it was possible she might become a known figure here, in which case they might have her called away from duty to participate in one diplomatic event or another, but that probably wasn't going to happen very often. Their footprint here was going to be relatively light for the time being, just dropping in supplies, helping to accelerate their technological and social development at a reasonable pace that their society could tolerate, taking it slow like. It wouldn't be her problem after these initial meetings, was what Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe was saying.

Dismissing the hologram showing tables and projections and shite (over Beth's head) with a wave of his hand, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe turned back to her. "The Lieutenant here has met with our new friends already, and may have some useful insights. What can you tell us about them, Beth?"

Well, that was a broad question. "What about them?"

"Anything that might be useful to know going into this project, whatever you can think of."

...That clarification didn't actually clarify much, but whatever. "Well, I guess they're not an especially weird species, or anything. They're big bastards — two metres tall easy, some of them well taller than that, and stupid strong. They've got men and women, like normal, and they... I think it's like menopause in humans?" She didn't actually know if there was a proper term in Minnisiät, she just smashed a few roots together that made sense to her, a quick glance around the room and nobody seemed especially confused. "But anyway, they look a little different, their snout and their crest go a little bony, and they get these little spines growing along their back. I think they have some spiritual shite around it, you know, elder stuff, I don't know — I didn't ask, just the impression I got. There's also—

"Do you have pictures you can bring up?" Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe gave her a little raised eyebrow, but he tapped at a display built into the table without comment. Soon a hologram of one of the locals appeared over the table, an adult, all big and thick and colourful and feathery. "Right, so, notice how colourful the feathers are, especially on the head and neck — no two people are exactly the same, I assume it's enough to tell each other apart, but it takes some getting used to. There aren't any obvious sex differences, at least not that I can make out, so I can't really tell you if this one is a man or a woman. Their voices sound a little different, though I'm not sure anyone who's not an omniglot would be able to tell. As far as I can figure, their society is very egalitarian on gender lines, and they don't really dress different either, so you can't use that sort of thing to guess.

"Um, not all of their crests will look exactly like that, they're shaped a little different, with more or less of a curve. And some of them their snout will have, like, two notches down the length, kind of dividing it in thirds? When the notches are really deep, it looks like it stops the end from closing properly, a little circle open in the middle — I think that's basically a birth defect? sort of like cleft palate or something like that? From watching them at it, I think it'll make eating a little more difficult too, but, there are plenty of people around, so I guess they must take care of people who have that. Some of them have these little boney clubs on the end of their tails, like—" She pressed both of her fists together, which was pretty close to the right size. "Sometimes with notches or little blunt spikes in it, sometimes not, depends. Oh, and some of them, look," pointing at the hologram, "there's a thumb and three fingers, but if you look really close there's a blob on the side of their hand there, which looks like it might be the nub of a fourth finger. That's most common, but you'll see some people who don't have that nub at all, and some people who instead have like a whole extra thumb, mirroring this one. One in ten, maybe, something like that? It's more common than you'd think. Those ones had trouble handling our blasters, not meant for that kind of hand shape, but I got the impression it's a desirable trait, common in...artists and musicians, that kind of thing?

"I don't really know what you want from me, is any of this helping?"

There were a few titters around the table, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe giving her a soft, crooked sort of smile. "The physiological details are interesting enough, but we're more concerned with the psychological, the social — elements which may be useful in attempting to make a friendly first impression. Your impression of the minimal sex and gender differences and that they seem to care for their disabled is useful."

"Right, right, that kind of thing. Then, um, they seem to be super communal, you know. The eggs of a whole community are kept in the same nest and raised together. I'm not even sure they keep track of which kids belong to who? When they get old enough to live outside of the nest, they just go home with whoever steps up, I think."

"And you're certain this isn't a behaviour imposed by the Pirkalut?" one of the men around the table asked. "It's not an unusual tactic by slavers to split up families."

Beth started shaking her head pretty much as soon as she figured out where that was going, waited for him to finish to say, "Very certain. The Pirkalut made the day-to-day operation of the nests shittier, definitely, and they were basically holding all the babies as hostages. But the basic idea was how that always worked. Maybe the locals actually do have a way to tell which kids belong to who, but if they do I didn't see any sign of it. I honestly don't think they have families in the way, um, not every other species does — I know there are some people who do things differently, but— I think their idea of kinship is more, like, community-based? It's hard to explain.

"So, there are some concepts like that where we might trip each other up, but one of the bigger problems with communicating is just going to be the speech part. I actually think it might be easier to deal with them than we'd expect of a young society like this, because... You know, in some of the lessons I got at Komfar, they said that sometimes people have trouble industrialising? that the necessary circumstances just don't align, and they can get stuck at a pre-industrial level of technology. Well, I think these people have been there for a long time, enough that there's more, um, worldwide organisation than you might expect. They have a common language, for example."

"They all speak the same language?" Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe asked, surprised, a few murmurs and wide-eyed glances elsewhere around the table.

"No, no, no, that's not what I mean. They have a common language, like the Law has Minnisiät. It's like... I can't think of a great example you'd be familiar with, actually." She was thinking like the position of Latin in mediaeval Europe or Classical Chinese in the East, but no comparable language used by any of the people in the Law she was familiar with was immediately occurring to her. "It's the language of science, and literature, and diplomacy, whatever else, that all the educated people learn. Not everyone speaks it, or at least not very well, and I'm sure there will be regional variations, but people from anywhere all around the world can communicate, more or less. Even if they have to write it down. I assume some common cultural stuff comes along with that, to do with...um, whatever the language is connected to — I think maybe a religious thing, but I'm not actually sure — but I don't know much about it. The point is they already kind of have a common language, which could make it easier.

"The problem with that is that we can't speak it. You see that crest on their heads," Beth said, pointing up at the hologram again, "well, it's connected to their...vocal stuff somehow. They can make funny whistly sounds, which I think are connected to that somehow, and the resonance can do all kinds of funny things to their voice, hooting and booming and blaring. They use it for vowel quality, like how some languages have nasal vowels, or Che̊ņ has säthku. Some languages also do stuff with the consonants, like..." She hesitated for a second, and then just said I don't know what you would call them in Gobbledygook. "Like those popping sounds, except using their crest instead, but the common language only does it with vowel quality. Except these are sounds the human throat just can't make, physically. Or kharson or most other people, I'm pretty sure — you'd need one of those big crests on your head to do it. I've had more trouble picking up even basic stuff than usual, because the sounds are just weird, and I can't even say them. I cheated a little with auditory illusions, but." She shrugged.

"This would hardly be the first people we've contacted who possess incompatible vocal physiology," Quńalhi said. "Given the great variation seen throughout the galaxy, it is not unusual for people to not be able to speak each other's native language — it may be inconvenient at times, but it is not prohibitive. Do you have any reason to expect they will have difficulty pronouncing Minnisiät?"

Frowning to herself, Beth thought back to the local speech she'd heard, sorting the different sounds in her head. "...No. No, I don't think so. They have a lot of extra, but I think they can do all the basic sounds. Though some of them might come out a little odd, so, new people might have trouble understanding them, as happens with some people in the Law. But mostly, yeah, I think they should manage fine."

Quńalhi and a couple of the other people around the table had a few other questions from there, but Beth couldn't really answer most of them. Even with her cheater omniglot powers, she didn't actually know that much about the locals — besides her instincts about their whole it takes a village vibes and not really giving a fuck which sex someone was, the rest was pretty fuzzy. She would want to be very certain none of their landing sites were near the nests, with how high emotions were running around that whole situation she'd expect them to be a little jumpy. All the beacons were at the edges of settlements? Then yeah, that shouldn't be a problem, the nests were all toward the centre of neighbourhoods. (So there would be plenty of adults between the babies and any attackers, she was pretty sure.) If there were going to be any permanent outposts on the planet, for aid distribution or medical assistance or whatever else — Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe suggested there probably would be — they would also want those to be far away from the nests. If they wanted to provide some medical stuff for the nests specifically, at the very least they should ensure that the locals remained in charge, that they didn't give any appearance of looking like they were taking the place over. She had a feeling that it would be very important to avoid reminding the locals of the Pirkalut, and keeping back from the nests would be a big sensitive point.

Some of the questions were about their government and shite, how they would have organised themselves before the Pirkalut occupation, which, Beth had no fucking clue. She didn't speak the language well enough to ask, and hadn't exactly seemed like a pressing issue at the time. Her feeling, from the palaces around the nests in more rural areas and the differing character of the neighbourhoods in larger cities, she assumed there must be some sort of class divisions, that there must have had rulers of some kind, but she didn't know what it'd looked like. It didn't seem like they'd had any collaborators, but that didn't necessarily mean anything — it was possible their rulers had sucked just as much as kings and lords and shite on Earth, and might have been willing to fuck over everyone else for their own benefit, but the Pirkalut were just too racist to tolerate even a nominally local administration. Honestly, it was possible the Pirkalut had just fucking murdered all the rulers, and they only had the peasants and, like, the merchants and artisans and scholars and shite left. They had seemed very egalitarian in general to Beth, and that could be because they were just like that, but it could also be because any previous distinctions that might have existed had been flattened during Pirkalut rule, since they were all in the same boat now. Um, she thought they had some kind of religion, but she really knew nothing about it. She was leaning toward a highly polytheistic, nature spirits sort of thing? She didn't know...

Then there was some quick discussion of the introduction itself. The standard video had already been edited to show the locals in it at certain points, as they often did with people entirely new to spacefaring society. (They hadn't bothered altering Earth's, since there were humans in the video already, and they hadn't realised how ignorant they'd been about the rest of the galaxy yet.) Apparently they'd already done some tests to be certain the food and the medicine wouldn't poison the locals, but they couldn't be certain whether the former would be nutritionally complete or if the latter would work properly — Beth didn't ask how they'd done that, but privately suspected it involved stealing at least one corpse to do their tests on. Beth didn't think anything in the introduction should be a problem. The intro video might be slightly startling — the Pirkalut didn't have holograms, the locals had never seen them before — and of course they had no idea who the scabs or the wakali were, but she thought it should be fine. She wouldn't expect to have a single leader at any of the landing sites to deal with one-on-one, though, this was going to be a somewhat more chaotic group thing, for the reasons discussed earlier.

They weren't going to have to sit for a meal at every single one, were they? She thought they had a lot of introductions to do. Right, they could just take a bite to get the point across and move on, good...

Beth did have to do meetings these days — mostly small ones with the officers under her, or with logistics people, occasionally called up to staff meetings way up on the Command level. (The latter tended to be very boring, as most of the topics had little to do with her and she usually had nothing to contribute.) She preferred to keep the ones she had to do informal and super short, normally over drinks or something, at least partially because she had absolutely no confidence in what she was doing and didn't want to make a complete fool of herself. Being more casual about it seemed less...she didn't know, something, it was hard to explain. Like making a mistake would hurt less, if that made sense. This meeting with the diplomatic team was more like her meetings than the long dragging boring ones in the Admiral's conference room, but it did seem to go on longer than it really needed to. Especially since Beth wasn't sure they were accomplishing anything here? They really didn't know that much about the locals, there was little use in speculating about how it would go — at a certain point you just had to do the thing.

Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe seemed to come to the same conclusion eventually, said they should get going. Thankfully, it didn't take long to do that, since the ship was already loaded up. They were taking one of the same diplomatic shuttles Beth had seen several times by now — in fact, it was possible this was the same one she'd seen the first time she'd met Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe, since he and his team had flown here to meet them — a curved arc with swept-back wings, the surface shining like polished silver. She knew now that that material was actually armour, the same stuff that was on their military craft, if in a somewhat different mix — the Law's diplomatic shuttles were unarmed, but highly armoured and with top-notch shields, just in case. There were a few shuttles in here, which they'd probably need, since they had so many landing sites to get through, there'd be multiple teams going. Before sending the others out, though, they'd wait for Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe and Beth to do a couple, in case any serious issues came up. Quńalhi and most of the rest of the staff were left behind — Beth would be stepping into Quńalhi's usual assistant role for this one, Quńalhi leading her own team — while Beth followed Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe onto one of the shuttles. After a short conversation with the guards and assistants already on the ship, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe signaled the pilot, and then they were away.

This little shuttle was nice enough that Beth hardly even felt them lift off — there were no windows, if not for the displays on the walls set to show the outside she wouldn't have been able to tell they were moving at all. Much of the ship space was functional or for storage, the big exception what she took to be some kind of formal meeting room. It was pretty nice, padded chairs and gleaming coffee tables and shite, the frames made of wood, matching the floor and the walls, some of the shelves here and there, the light a pleasant warm reddish tone she knew was tuned to Monatšeri preferences. She knew now that most other spacefaring species considered the Law's common use of wood in decoration on ships to be a bit eccentric — wood was a more rare material in a lot of places, especially where the native life has suffered a lot due to millennia of industrial exploitation — but it was something they'd adopted from Monatšeri style, just stuck around because people liked it. Besides, the incongruity of something that should be expensive being used for everyday things made people give them second glances, and the Law didn't really mind diplomatic contacts thinking they were a bit eccentric.

A couple of the guards were standing around, but the assistants had mostly gone elsewhere. Final checks of the holoprojector and the supplies and shite, she assumed, she hadn't really noticed which way they'd gone. Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe had sat down in one of the armchairs, silently poking at a datapad. For a moment, Beth wavered uncertainly, not really sure what to do with herself, before stepping closer to one of the displays — cringing a little at the tinkling of all her medals and shite made in the silent room, ridiculous. The planet, already growing large in the display as they approached, was a deep green and shining blue from space, thick with glowing clouds, very pretty.

Beth had fewer opportunities these days to really look, too busy, but she still thought space was, just, ridiculously pretty. She'd gotten messages from Sirius talking about checking out nebulae and landing on icy moons or comets and shite and bouncing around in space suits for the hell of it, star-speckled blackness above and the crystalline world below glittering like diamonds. She was slightly jealous, honestly — it sounded fun, just wandering off and doing whatever he wanted...

She twitched a little when Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe finally spoke, out of nowhere. "I was wondering, Beth, if you might have any insight on this matter." He was, oddly enough, speaking in Che̊ņ. Beth spoke the language reasonably well — she'd met enough Chiss over these months to pick it up — but her grasp of multiple Monatšeri language was still better.

Frowning, her eyes flicked over to the guards in the room, neither of whom were Chiss. She would guess neither of them spoke Che̊ņ, few non-Chiss did — she'd guess Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe wanted this conversation to be at least somewhat private. "What matter is that?"

"Oh good, you do speak Che̊ņ, I wasn't certain. I am curious of your impression of the Pirkalut."

"You like your vague open questions, don't you," Beth drawled. She wasn't sure if the tone actually carried right on Che̊ņ, but he'd get what she meant. "You're going to have to be more, ah...specify, more specific."

"Fair enough." He lifted up his datapad, the display turned toward Beth. She couldn't make it out from here, obviously, but he went on to explain what he meant, so she guessed that didn't really matter. "The reports I have seen have made some implications concerning the Pirkalut's unexpected technological development. It doesn't seem to have arisen de novo."

That last bit didn't sound like it fit at all, maybe from some kind of literary language or something — she got the general impression anyway, because cheater omniglot. "No, they definitely got it from outside. It's not their technology, I mean."

"Yes, that was the conclusion the Admiral's analysts came to as well. Did you notice anything curious about this technology?"

...Well, a couple things, really. For one thing, the sheer scale of it. She didn't know exactly what proportion of the Pirkalut fleet had modern hyperdrives — some had managed to jump here during the battle, but apparently there'd been others over Pirkalut or their other settlements which hadn't, and none of the ones they'd ambushed here had even attempted to flee — but ones powerful enough to move ships that size were no small thing. Especially since Pirkalut reactor tech probably hadn't been good enough to power it, and then the shields and guns on top... It couldn't just be pirates or gun runners or something — only state actors had that kind of volume. But the big one that was still niggling at her was, "BlasTech."

Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe frowned, his head tilting a little. "Excuse me?"

"The heavy repeaters at the last nest we took, they were made by BlasTech. But that doesn't make any sense — BlasTech doesn't operate out here, they're all beyond the Rift. How did the Pirkalut get their hands on that?"

"It's not impossible — there are merchants and smugglers who are known to trade past the Rift. But that is an interesting observation, yes. It would align with certain other points we have noticed." Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe returned to poking at his datapad, long enough that for a second she thought the conversation had suddenly been dropped. "BlasTech does operate in the Law of Bastion."

"Um...yes?"

"An observation only, of course," he said in a casual, innocent tone, which Beth didn't believe for a second. "It does seem implausible that the Pirkalut might have managed to gather such a large volume of modern military technology in such a short time, especially given their isolation from the rest of the galaxy. Or, we had assumed they were isolated — they had no other contacts with galactic civilisation at the time we last communicated with them, but it seems that intelligence is quite outdated. Someone has been to Pirkalut since we left, someone has given them this technology. Given, I suspect, as the Pirkalut economy isn't of a scale necessary to support such an exchange, not without suffering for it. BlasTech is a corporation, they do not do such things simply out of a sense of charity — someone has done this with purpose."

Beth wasn't sure where Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe was going with this, but she wasn't so stupid she couldn't figure out what he was not quite outright stating. "Should you be telling me this? It feels like this is above my paygrade."

"An advantage of having you along for the ride down to the planet. You are considered to be among the civilian leadership within Dimitra, so it is permissible for me to share certain intelligence which I might not with an ordinary lieutenant, while your commission in the Fleet suggests I may put a certain degree of trust in your discretion when it comes to the handling of sensitive information."

...She couldn't really fault the logic, but she still ended up somewhat irritated by it. "Fine. I'm not sure what you think I can tell you, though. I'm not some swotty intelligence analyst or whatever the hell, I just blow stuff up."

One corner of Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe's curled up into a crooked smile, wryly amused. "Quite. One must wonder what possible purpose Bastion might have had in such a project."

Beth noticed that he was suddenly not dancing around the point, just, blatantly saying that the Law of Bastion had armed the Pirkalut. Not sure what the sudden change of tactic was about, but fine. "I don't... I want to swear, but my Che̊ņ isn't good enough." The ambassador let out a little huff of a laugh. "But, I have no idea why they did this, I can't see what they get out of it. We might have been in trouble if we didn't...have surprise — we got in a few clean shots before they could do anything. But this is only a small part of the Fleet, and we were still enough to overpower all of them, not just the fleet here. Pirkalut could never have been a threat to the Law, no matter how much tech Bastion gives them."

"Perhaps," he admitted...in a tone like he didn't quite agree. Which was absurd, honestly, they were only one planet. Even if Bastion had been able to arm them up to parity with the Law, they would never have been able to keep up — the maths just didn't work out. The Law could probably take Bastion if they had to, as far as Beth knew, there was no way they could make the Pirkalut any kind of threat. "Perhaps they never intended for us to fight the Pirkalut at all."

"...What?"

Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe gave her a bland smile, and went on to not clarify what he meant at all. "Regardless, any further discussion of their intent would only be speculation. The true question, Beth, is this: do you trust the Law of Bastion?"

Letting out a little scoff, Beth switched to Monatšeri to say, "Fuck no. I may not be some fancy smart diplomatic type, I don't know everything, but my understanding is that the Empire in Bastion is some shitty corporate dictatorship. They may not be big-time genocidal human-supremacist bastards like they were under Palpatine, but they still suck. Fuck 'em."

"Colourful," he drawled, amused. Turning back to his datapad, he made a couple taps, the conversation apparently done with — Beth could clearly make out the land out the displays now, little villages scattered around, they'd be arriving any minute now. But a moment later, he said, "I may not have put it quite so bluntly, but I suspect we are in agreement on this matter."

"Then why the fuck are we still working with Bastion?" She got why they had to start with — Mítth-räw-nuruodo's original fleet had come from the Empire, back when it'd still been centred on Colussan, and then he'd even temporarily taken it over decades ago now — but a lot had happened since then. They couldn't just go fuck them up, because the Republic might join in on a war against an outside threat (like they had the scabs), and the Law would be fucked in a war with the Republic. But there were a lot of possibilities between the present state of affairs and going to war.

His voice bland, casual, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe said, "In light of this incident, I suspect we won't much longer."

...Oh. Well, all right, then.

As the shuttle came around to a gentle landing, the display showing a surprisingly large crowd of locals gathered nearby — hundreds of them, probably — it suddenly occurred to Beth that the Admiral might have just blown up diplomatic relations with the Law's first and oldest ally. She was aware that they had a treaty with Bastion that neither of them would engage in various kinds of military actions in the corridor through the Rift between them, considered neutral territory. Under the circumstances, she just hadn't considered it relevant. If she had to guess, Command denying Admiral his requested expedition against the Pirkalut had been meant to keep them arguably within the bounds of the treaty, but he'd then broken it when he'd decided to just go ahead and force a full surrender on the Pirkalut anyway — and in the process, they'd discovered Bastion had broken the treaty first. She thought Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe was trying to suggest that things were happening because of that, even if most of this was above her head and she didn't really follow what he was getting at, and they were done with Bastion now. Oops?

Worth it, honestly. Bastion sucked anyway, so she didn't really consider that a bad thing — she got it might make some things more complicated, especially where intelligence concerning space on the other side of the Rift was considered, but whatever. Fuck them anyway, if torpedoing their relationship with the Bastion was the price of liberating the people here from Pirkalut, so be it.

Beth had been on the other side of one of these first contact meetings, but she'd never seen it from this side, obviously. Once they were settled, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe got up, led the way over to the corridor coming off of the boarding ramp. The assistants with the holoprojector were already here — the ambassador quick double-checked that everything was working as expected, yes, they were all good. There was a hiss as the hatch unsealed, the pressure equallising, warm damp air mixing into the corridor, fragrant from alien plantlife, carrying the mutters and whistles and hoots of alien voices. After a brief pause, the guards descended the ramp first, taking their positions at the bottom. Beth hadn't asked, but she assumed the point of the guards going first was in case they got a hostile reaction, so they could hold the hatch as the ship lifted away again.

There was a brief pause, long enough for the guards to get to the bottom of the ramp, before Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe moved. He stood at the threshold, pausing for just a breath (dramatic bastard), before smoothly descending. Beth couldn't remember exactly what Quńalhi had done at their meeting — she'd been focussed on Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe, and trying to interpret what was being said for Yuri João — so she decided to, as he had done, wait a moment for him to descend alone before following. The ship was sitting on a shallow hill, covered in faintly blueish-green grass and...um, little leafy plants, wildflowers or whatever. (Alien planet, she had no idea.) There was a sprawling city a short distance away, the ramshackle hovels and tents that sprouted up around seemingly all the major cities less than a kilometre distant. She didn't know what was up with that — their best guess was that the Pirkalut were uprooting farm labourers from more rural regions to the cities for industrial labour, but that their construction of housing for them wasn't keeping up with the new residents, hence the development of shanty towns. They assumed the cities would also been surrounded with farms and shite, you could still see signs of ruins here and there, but the Pirkalut had cleared them out at some point, presumably for security reasons.

There were also rather more people here than she'd expected, though she didn't really know why she was surprised. The diplomatic team would have put down the beacon counting down to their arrival — Beth could see it at the edge of the crowd over there, a plastic-looking white post standing about a metre high — so presumably it'd drawn whatever curious onlookers from the city felt like checking it out. She could hardly count them at a glance, but she'd guess there were hundreds of them, the big damn bastards with their colourful feathers, clothes made of rather plain fabric but decorated with features (animal feathers, she thought, not their own) and glass beads.

She noticed plenty of them were armed, with a mix of local sword-spears and huge bulky crossbows, but also with the blaster rifles the Law had brought, plus some recovered from the Piraklut. She noticed one bloke even had a heavy repeater — the kind meant to be put on a tripod and used as a turret, but these people were big and strong enough he was just carrying it. Those mostly had to be plugged into a generator, so she doubted he'd get many shots out of it, but points for effort, and also just looking like a badass. The locals were a bit tense, watchful, but it didn't look like they were expecting an attack, weapons held loose and not aimed anywhere near them, more curious than wary.

Enough eyes moved away from Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe to notice her, a few people pointing at her and muttering to each other. She actually didn't know whether this was a city she'd been to or not, so it was possible they were people she'd met during the battle. But it was probably more likely that they were just mistaking her for Pirkalut — having her here might not be the best idea for that reason, but Beth had pointed that out back on the Kośalhath...

Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe stood on the grass a couple metres from the end of the boarding ramp, seemingly waiting. The locals apparently got the same message — after a moment of milling around, a group of people split away from the group, started climbing up to the top of the hill to reach them. Beth had been hanging back, but she quick skipped forward a few steps, leaning close to whisper near his shoulder. "I think these are elders, informal local leaders, with a couple fighters for bodyguards." There were eight people in the group, five of them with features she'd learned indicated age — it was hard to tell, new aliens being difficult to get a hold on, but the more extensive stitching on their clothes was obviously a modest status marker of some kind — along with three armed people, two with blaster rifles (Law make) and the last with one of the local spear-swords.

The ambassador acknowledged her with a nod, so she backed off a few steps again, letting him meet the little informal delegation representing the city alone. As the group neared, stopping a short distance away, one of Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe's hands came up to his chest — she assumed, couldn't see from this angle — his head dipping in a shallow bow. "Hello. My name is Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe, and I speak on behalf of the Law of Five."

"Tshonıppạh, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe ʉsh ĩɢũ͒. Ãzhạkh..." She had no idea how she was supposed to say Law of Five — she could maybe guess the number, but she had no idea how to talk about governments, at all. "Itsa͒q me kụssaħ pu͒j tâk." The ambassador was glancing back at her over his shoulder, she gave him a helpless little shrug. She'd told him she didn't know the language very well, not that she knew none. As long as he kept to very simple statements, she could make a guess, at the very least. She did have to cheat to make the a͒ vowels, adding an illusion of the proper resonance to her voice with a wandless charm — she wasn't certain it came out quite right, but hopefully it was at least identifiable.

There was some muttering between their group, um...translating what she'd said, maybe? This was the lingua franca here, but that didn't mean everyone spoke it. Of course, it was also possible she'd just fucked it up — she'd tried to say that Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe spoke for their people, but she wasn't entirely positive how the grammar worked. She thought it was close enough. At least they seemed to get the general idea, the elders going about introducing themselves in response. Beth didn't bother translating, since it was obvious from the format what was going on, and Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe probably wasn't going to be able to pronounce their names anyway.

By the time that was all done, there were a couple of assistants bringing down the projector. The ambassador said, "It is my pleasure. Here, we have prepared a simple invitation from the Law of Five."

...Shite. Didn't know what to do with that one. After a moment of fruitless wavering, she said just, "Ħirrak, kụs ãɢoshpạk." There, hopefully that made any fucking sense at all.

The elders and their guards startled a little as the hologram jumped into life, a couple weapons moving around to point at it — which was understandable, since this was new technology to them, and this time it'd come out surprisingly big. The by now familiar insignia of the Law of Five, but it was huge, taller than the ship, and loud, enough that Beth cringed a little at the fanfare, nearly clapping her hands over her ears. She guessed since they had such a big fucking crowd, they'd decided to project it big enough that everyone could see. Once she'd adjusted, the noise wasn't actually that bad, it'd just taken her by surprise. After holding on the image for a moment, it transitioned to scenes of people being conquered and enslaved by the wakali, images of workers in factories or on plantations, and then to the Law attacking, giving slaves of several species a hand up to join them, focussing on hands gripping hands, resolving into the insignia again; and then the attack by the scabs, quick images of the devastation they'd wreaked and the slaughter and the enslavement, and then the Law pushing them back again...

Beth suspected it was the exact same video they'd brought to first contact with Earth, um...was that a year and half ago now? Jesus. But anyway, she didn't remember it perfectly, of course, maybe there were a few minor details that'd been changed — like editing in the locals here and there — but it seemed very familiar. Except for being much bigger and louder, anyway.

The hologram held on the insignia for a moment at the end, the triumphal music continuing for another few bars, before the video was over and the display winked out. Transfixed by the presentation — new technology, not to mention all the alien shite there would have been glimpses of in there, probably a little overwhelming — it took them a moment to look back down and realise that Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe was waiting. Holding a hand out toward them, the repeated motif from the introduction video hopefully making it clear what he meant by the gesture. There was hardly any hesitation at all before one of the guards was stepping forward, clasped hands with the ambassador. The elders were muttering between each other while the guard and Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe exchanged greetings — in different languages, of course, but that hardly mattered — and then the elders were stepping forward too, whistling mutters running through the crowd.

Beth was a little surprised when the first guard continued on to greet her too. He actually just came out and asked if she was Pirkalut — no, she was Dimitran, from somewhere very very far...

She was getting the clear feeling that the locals didn't entirely understand the distinctions between herself and Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe and the assistants and the guards, working their way through to clasp hands with everyone. The Law people seemed slightly tickled by this, if not really surprised — after a second of thought, she guessed it followed with her description of the locals as very egalitarian in most ways, they might not entirely understand that Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe was in charge. (His uniform didn't look much different from the assistants', and of course she was dressed completely different, and they were all different species...) While introductions were still going on, one of the guards turned to face the crowd, raised his voice loud and booming to say...um, that these new people from the sky were friends, she was pretty sure.

The cheering was even louder than the video, the hoots ringing in her ears and booms echoing in her chest. There were words, but she couldn't really make any of it out — she picked up that it was definitely a positive reception. She sidled closer to Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe to tell him that, which got an almost sarcastic yes, Potter, I can tell in response. Well, sheesh, excuse her for trying to be helpful, she guessed...

The rest of the introduction from there was somewhat more of a mess than first contact on Earth, but it went more or less smoothly. Crates being unloaded off of the ship, once the handshakes were finished and the cheering had calmed down Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe made a demonstration of how the water purifiers worked — he had Beth just conjure some water for him, since they didn't have any on hand at the moment — which the locals thankfully picked up on easily enough. They got it well enough that, while the explanation was still sort of ongoing, a few of the locals were opening up the crate, and started passing the devices out into the crowd. The assistants tried to stop them, but Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe waved them off — the elders here didn't seem to mind, presumably the locals had a better idea how the resources they were being given should be distributed. The food was a little more iffy. The normal way this was supposed to go was for the people making contact to quick make up a batch, both to demonstrate how it worked and to demonstrate that it was safe — also, it was common for cultures to have an idea of new friends sharing a meal, hardly universal but enough for trying it to be a good idea — but on Earth they'd kind of gotten ahead of them on that one by having a welcome banquet prepared themselves.

While one of the cases was brought over, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe demonstrating how it worked by quick making up a couple bowls, Beth tried to explain the limits involved. This stuff was intended to provide everything a person needed to live in a single bowl. This was easier to universalise than you might expect, since it turned out people of different species were made out of very similar stuff — they sometimes needed different ratios of stuff, but for the most part they were running on very similar chemistry. At the very least, the food might have extra nutrients you didn't need, since that was meant for a different species, but it wasn't poisonous for you, just went through your system and it was fine. (As long as you didn't eat way too much, anyway.) But, there were cases where species had significantly different chemistry, or even only somewhat different chemistry, there were additives that they could swap in and out to target things more precisely. They were positive that this mix wasn't toxic for the locals, but they weren't certain it would actually give them all the nutrients they needed, in the right amounts. Their study hadn't been extensive enough to figure that out for sure. Also these blokes were fucking huge, but they could just make slightly bigger bowls, she guessed that was fine.

Unfortunately, Beth did not speak the language well enough to explain that very well. It didn't help that the elders were a little distracted with the stuff cooking itself just with a squirt of the stuff in one of the bottles, which she had to admit was very cool. It was a chemical reaction, there was some stuff mixed in with the...grains or noodles or whatever, that one bottle had a catalyst, spray and swish it around and you're golden. Very convenient to get a hot meal in places and times you weren't certain of having any cooking methods available. (The Fleet's field rations were similar, actually, though they were designed to self-cook on contact with air when the tin was opened.) She thought she might have gotten the idea across? The locals at least got that they were trying to help, but it was alien food, so, she thought they got it. They did ask what it was made out of, she was pretty sure, though she didn't know how to answer that question — it wasn't real food, some industrially-produced stuff, designed to be extremely nutritionally dense and shelf-stable...

Since this was the Law, there'd been Monatšeri on the team that made this stuff, so at least it wasn't bland. (The Law's field rations tended to be surprisingly good too...or at least having spices covered any deficiencies in other areas.) The sauce part — which she'd initially assumed was some kind of protein thing, but actually the protein was in the part that looked like grains, a lot of the less stable vitamins like were found in fruits and stuff were actually in the sauce — was noticeably spicey, if not really burn your tongue and make your lungs prickle when you inhale hot. She'd had way more intense Monatšeri food, just, it was noticeable. The locals were a little tentative at first...slightly wary the self-cooking reaction might hurt them, she thought, but their first bites got some surprised hooting, chattering with each other, going back and forth and...

The spices weren't quite like anything they were familiar with, she decided, leaning over to mutter something about that to Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe. Either they didn't have that kind of flavour on this planet — which was plausible, since the common one on Earth came from fruits and the Monatšeri one was from nuts, totally different — or if they did those spices just didn't grow anywhere near here. It didn't seem like a bad thing, she didn't think, they were just surprised, and curious.

That was the point at which this quickly became a big fucking mess. The locals were pulling the first crate of food apart and passing the cases out, Beth quickly tried to explain that each of these cases could feed a family for a week, you really only needed a modestly-sized bowl a day — there were vitamins you could overdose on pretty badly if you had too much — and there were big damn blokes going around trying to explain that, shouting over the chaos of the crowd, and she hoped that message got through, people were opening the cases and trying to— Fuck it, Beth just started conjuring bowls, dozens and dozens of bowls. The locals so far had hardly even blinked at her doing literal magic in front of them, probably didn't realise it was a different thing from the advanced space technology, and this time it wasn't any different, people coming up and grabbing armfuls of bowls as she conjured them, passing them through the crowd. Those wouldn't last very long, but long enough to be used to eat a meal, better than people making a mess of things.

While people were figuring out all that mess, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe was trying to explain everything else, Beth trying to help translate when she wasn't distracted with conjuring bowls or making sure people actually knew how to mix the food. Their big gathering on the hill had turned into a complete mess, people passing around the cases of food and bowls and sitting together and mixing things together, hooting and chittering as it cooked itself, fascinated, very noisy and confused. But anyway, they had a set of standard medical supplies, which came with some caveats — particularly, species with scales sometimes had some weird reactions to bacta, they couldn't be certain the stuff would work as advertised. The other stuff was all, again, certainly not toxic to the locals, but they couldn't be certain it would actually work correctly...especially since they hadn't exactly done a survey of the native infections agents, like, exactly what kinds of bacteria and viruses and shite they had to deal with. It was a mixed bag, was the point.

Around here, Beth could tell the elders were starting to get a little nervous. But Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe kept charging right on, showing them some basic comms technology they meant to drop off. It could be difficult to figure out how to use this stuff if you couldn't interpret the tech well enough to use comm codes, so what they planned on doing was just set up a station in every major settlement, pre-programmed so they could just tap at a settlement on a map and make a call. That should be doable, hopefully, and should help the locals better coordinate things in the future. Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe showed them some videos on his datapad of other things they might ultimately help with, some vehicles, some machinery — especially agricultural equipment, which might be useful for a society like this — a few examples of big construction projects...

One of the elders interrupted to say...Beth didn't quite follow it. Not the literal words, anyway, but she got the general impression. The woman (probably) was concerned that this would be just another occupation — that they would be gentler masters than the Pirkalut, but still masters. Unfortunately, she didn't really speak the language well enough to explain what she wanted to. After briefly conferring with Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe, she resorted to a series of illusions, to hopefully communicate what she wanted to without words. She made a reproduction of their world, with the hyperspace cannon still in orbit, a flash of travelling through hyperspace, and then Pirkalut with its hyperspace cannon (also destroyed now). The elders seemed to be following so far, good. The next image was 'zoomed' out showing what was supposed to be this section of the galaxy (it wasn't accurate, just blobs of colour), an arrow from a little figure of one of the locals pointing to one star and another from a Pirkalut at another star nearby. This seemed to be a bit much from them, muttering and whistling to each other, she guessed they didn't actually know much about anything beyond their world and Pirkalut.

Anyway, she added little branching rivers running through the galaxy, and then made a little model of the shuttle behind her, sent it whizzing along the paths. Trying to get at the idea of hyperroutes being a thing, in a way that might make sense to the locals — and that none of the routes went close to them, one long road between the Law and the Empire and that was it. With their stars still labelled, she shaded a section for the Law, labeled with an arrow pointing from the insignia (which they should hopefully remember from the introduction video). She made a little Chiss figure in the shaded section, holding a telescope, pointed toward the locals' star. She showed Pirkalut again, with its hyperspace cannon, and then this planet without one, hopefully suggesting this was in the past. Shuttles zipping along the road past their stars, aware they were there, but leaving them alone.

Then, she added two figures, a wakali and a scab, who they'd hopefully recognise from the intro video. Arrows pointed from these figures to shaded areas in different colours, biting into the shaded area of the Law — she showed little flashes of people being enslaved copied from the intro video, and then the Law fighting back. While this was happening, the little shuttles that had been zipping by were gone, and the Chiss figure with his telescope was looking at the wakali and the scabs instead. More little flashes from the intro video, the more triumphant we're kicking arse now fuck these bastards ones, the wakali and the scabs pushed out. When the scabs were pushed out of a spot, she pointed at another star, and then cast an illusion of first contact on Earth — on the edge of the Gobi, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe and Quńalhi meeting Yuri João and Beth, her finger flicking between herself and the illusion Beth and the two Shár-ÿḳl-korlåes to make it clear they were the same people. She focussed on Yuri João and Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe clasping hands, like in the intro video, the shaded area of the Law expanding through that region of space. Making it clear that Beth's people had joined the Law, not been conquered by them, hopefully.

Once the shaded areas of the wakali and the scabs were fully gone, then the little Chiss bloke with his telescope turned back to look in this direction — except now there was a tiny shaded area around the Pirkulat, another illusion showing that this planet had a hyperspace cannon over it. She made a few illusions of the locals being worked on plantations or in factories by the Pirkalut, copying from scenes with the wakali from the introduction video, as though the little Chiss figure were seeing them through the telescope. Then she had the figure — who looked a lot like the Admiral, not coincidentally — pitch down the telescope, his little fists clenched and little feet stomping in fury, tilted his head back and let out a high bugling bellow — copying something she'd heard the locals do countless times rushing into a fight, which should hopefully make it clear. And then she showed illusions of the Fleet showing up, blowing the fuck out of the ships over this planet, and the hyperspace cannon, and then jumping over to Pirkalut to fuck them up, a few flashes of scenes from the ground battle. Back to the image of this part of the galaxy, she made an arrow moving from Law space to the locals' star, carried along it the cases of food, and the water purifiers, and the tech and stuff — but the arrow only went one way, and the shading of the Law didn't extend into this portion of space.

She was trying to explain that the Law had known they were here, and had thought they were safe, that the Pirkalut invasion had happened while they were distracted. And they felt bad about it, which was why they were giving them things. Hopefully that made sense.

There was some discussion between the elders, before one of them turned to Beth and said, um...she did not follow that. Trying to clarify what was going on here, that much she got from context, it was just multiple sentences, and too complicated, she didn't understand. Her confusion must be obvious, because one of the elders said something about it being a gift, out of, ah... There was some cultural thing she wasn't picking up on, something that was done out of, like, sympathy, sort of? The vibes she was getting was sort of reminding her of Monatšeri mourning, where the mourners would hold a vigil, and locals would bring them gifts — food to get through the vigil, sure, but also whatever else, mostly practical things. (It was sort of like sitting shiva, but not really the same thing, just analogous enough that she'd gotten the idea right away.) What they were referring to wasn't a mourning thing, but for some reason the vibes she was getting were similar. So, yeah, it was a gift, that was the idea.

She hoped they were communicating correctly, at least — turns out diplomacy was hard.

Anyway, there was a bit more discussion of the supplies they were dropping off, trying to explain who they were and what they were doing here with a combination of pre-prepared videos from Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe and stabs in the dark from Beth. But eventually all the crates were unpacked, and they'd gotten through everything on their list, and they should really get going to their next destination. Beth got the clear sense the locals had been intending on hosting them for some kind of party or something, were a little blind-sided that they were planning on leaving. It took some stumbling about trying to explain, with the use of some more illusions to explain why they had to go, that there were other people they had to meet.

This created a bit of fuss, several of the people who'd ended up sitting with them near the top of the hill huddled together discussing something — Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe asked her what that was about, but she just shrugged. She got her answer when a pair of people (a man and a woman) were presented to her and Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe, and an elder explained that they'd be sending these two with them. And that was fucking confusing, so then they had a discussion about that, which was a bit difficult, considering the language barrier, Beth bumbling through it like an idiot...

When she thought she had the general idea, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe actually agreed to take them along. The elders had realised how awkward and difficult communicating could be, obviously, so they wanted to send two of their people along to help smooth it over, to explain to the next batch what was going on. These two had actually been picked specifically for the purpose — as part of the explanation, Beth had shown an illusion of a map showing the other cities, and these two, um...were either from there or just spoke the local language, she wasn't sure. The idea was that they were trying to help, and Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe thought having locals along to help with the introductions was a good idea, so sure, why not.

The next meeting did go more smoothly, in fact...for a certain definition of more smoothly. They moved on over to the second site, at the edge of another city a short flight away — the pair of locals they'd brought along poking around the main room with Beth and Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe, clearly curious about the equipment and the furniture and the light fixtures and just about everything. (The flying itself didn't seem to fascinate them that much, presumably familiar with the idea from Pirkalut tech.) The general format of these meetings the Law clearly had was immediately interrupted by the pair shouldering past Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe to follow the guards down, calling out to the locals here, getting surprised and confused calls back. By the time Beth got down their pair were huddled up chattering with another group of elders, er...explaining who Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe was and that they were friends, Beth guessed, as much from the faint shades of meaning she got through omniglot powers and the way they were gesturing at the Law people and the shuttle.

Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe did still end up showing the introduction video, and demonstrating how the water purifiers, food rations, and medical equipment worked, but it probably wasn't even necessary.

As confused and out of order as things were, it did still end up going much more efficiently, the local elders clasping hands with Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe and Beth and whoever else with less hesitation...though not only because of their local helpers. It turned out this was one of the cities she'd helped liberate, she was recognised — one of the guards came up and gave her a big bloody hug, squeezing her to her chest and lifting her up off her feet, achh, ow ow ow, strong bastards...

The crates were being broken down and the contents distributed much more smoothly than the first time, some of the locals even volunteering to help move them off the shuttle in the first place. That wasn't necessary, they had antigrav lifters for that, but Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe picked up that they were trying to be helpful, just shrugged and suggested the assistants let them help. This time, the locals actually started the conversation about the next stop on their itinerary. They had to go back up to the Kośalhath to reload supplies first, but after that they'd be going, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe brought up a map, here, this one. Before they hardly even knew what was going on, the word was being passed around through the crowd — turning over the water purifiers and poking at the alien food, spread out around the shuttle in a big talkative blob — and then a few people were picking their way up the hill, and—

Woah, okay, slow down for a second. They weren't going straight to their destination, they had to reload first, and that would take a little bit. And also coordinate with the other teams who'd be making introductions and drop-offs — since these had gone so well, Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe would be sending the other teams out, after making some final recommendations — so this was a rather longer trip, you know. It did take some time to communicate that, language barrier and all...also, weren't the pair they'd brought here still around somewhere? They probably shouldn't just leave them here...

Beth did manage to explain what was going on, but bizarrely that actually ended up getting them more volunteers — she didn't entirely follow what the elders were saying, but she was pretty sure some of this group spoke the local languages at other spots on their list, and others were fluent in the common language, so could help communicate anyway. That was... Well, fine, whatever. Bringing them up to the Kośalhath with them would be more efficient than having to come back, since they were volunteering to go with the other teams, so...she guessed there was room for them. Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe actually found this whole thing very funny, chuckling and smiling to himself, agreeing to the proposal all light and good-natured. She got that having locals making introductions for them would help prevent misunderstandings, it was good that the locals were so enthusiastic about making friends, just, this was quickly getting away from them, that was all...

Rather like the liberation itself, she guessed. It was probably appropriate that the locals take a hand in this whole thing, as confusing as it was getting...

The main room of the shuttle was rather more crowded than her and Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe's flight down or the jump from the first landing site to the second, several locals packed in here with them. They weren't any more disruptive than the pair last time, quietly poking at the contents of the room, muttering to each other, a couple watching the outside world dip and swing around as the shuttle lifted off. Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe had the displays wrapped all around the room set to show the environment outside of the ship, almost three-sixty coverage — there were camera artefacts, but it still looked pretty neat. They flew on repulsors for a bit, gliding all but silently along, until the world outside canted at an angle (the internal gravity preventing them from feeling it) and the floor jerked under their feet as the thrusters kicked on. There was some surprised hooting from the locals, those who had been poking at various things moving to the displays instead, watching as the ground below grew smaller and smaller, the cloud layer left far behind...the horizon beginning to visibly curve, the colour of the sky deepening, the daylit surface below seeming to softly glow...

Soon they were surrounded with blackness, the planet behind blue and green and white and violet, stars showing themselves like scattered diamond dust. The locals had gone quiet, staring out through the display, some with their hands pressed to the surface, looking down at the planet or out at the speckled blackness of space. Hardly anyone spoke, still and watchful, she could all but feel the awe radiating off of them — there were locals who'd been relocated to Pirkalut to be used as labour there, but Beth would guess none of these people, at least, had ever been to space.

She felt herself smiling, without quite knowing why.

70:3:27 (23rd July 2002)
— Zero Day plus 06.10.21

Beth leaned back against Taqšuńi, a mix of alien voices and music ringing in her ears, food and drink both recogniseable and not thick on her breath, overwhelmed with a feeling she couldn't put a name to.

After a couple days of work, they'd gotten through the initial introductions — there'd been a few tense moments here or there, but partially thanks to their local volunteers there'd hadn't been any serious incidents. Shár-ÿḳl-korlåe claimed that was somewhat unusual for contacts like this, if not unheard of, thanks to how complex of a project they could be, conducting several separate meetings with peoples who might be understandably wary of space aliens. They had made a good introduction for themselves, appearing out of nowhere and kicking the piss out of the Pirkalut, but still. Reinforcements had arrived, both to handle the occupation of Pirkalut and the mission here — separate projects, the former military and the latter civilian — their task force in the process of putting themselves back together so they could move on.

They wouldn't be heading straight back to their previously scheduled duties, though. Their fleet had sustained damage in the fight, obviously, and as talented as their engineers were they couldn't fix all of it out here on their own. They'd be flying in to the Expeditionary Fleet's nearest shipyard for repairs — several of their ships would actually need to be towed there, too badly damaged to make the jump to hyperspace under their own power. (Taqšuńi had explained that was perfectly doable, so long as the towed ship could maintain its own shielding — you did not want to jump to hyperspace without functional shields — though the calculations were somewhat more complicated and they'd be burning far more fuel to make the jumps.) Their final day before leaving, the locals had invited their new friends down for a feast, everyone who'd been involved in the battle given shore leave to attend the various parties going on all over the planet.

Apparently the locals liked a good party — she gathered now that that was at least part of what the big courtyards and gardens in the cities were for.

There was one party, in one of the larger port cities — the shape of this one was familiar, Beth assumed she'd been here at some point in the last week, either during the liberation or in the meetings afterward — which was attended by a number of VIPs. While the send-off celebration had been being arranged, they'd helped the locals coordinate it, with some stumbling translation assistance from Beth. Locals had been flown in from all over the planet, who she gathered were...some kind of political leadership? She couldn't say what kind, like, what their authority was derived from, her command of the language wasn't good enough yet. Representatives of some kind of traditional leadership who'd been forced out of power by the Pirkalut? Whatever, Beth could tell they were from separate nations — there were physical differences (though the diversity within groups was broad enough it was hard to tell), their dress and jewellery in different styles, they spoke distinct languages, held themselves differently and used different gestures. The existence of a common language greatly aided communication among the locals, but Beth could tell they were still stumbling a little, she guessed due to regional differences. After all, without modern communications and transportation technology, this one 'shared' language probably wasn't actually all that similar place to place — they could understand each other in writing just fine, but spoken was more iffy.

Beth wasn't sure if she'd been invited to the special party because she was the best translator they had, or because she was technically considered a head of state and was therefore a VIP, and she hadn't asked. She'd been permitted to bring Taqšuńi with her, so, gift horses, mouths. Their VIPs here included the Admiral, which was kind of a big deal — the locals understood now that Chaf-räw-aṙitśåe was their leader, and was responsible for the decision to liberate their planet. Given the language barrier, Beth wasn't entirely certain whether the locals understood that the Admiral was only the commander of the fleet here, and not the Law of Five as a whole, but she guessed the distinction didn't matter so much just for today.

There had been a brief awkward moment at the beginning of the party. When the Admiral showed up, some of the local leaders had approached him, crouching low and ducking their heads, and... Well, Beth read it as analogous to humans kneeling in obeisance — the gesture wasn't the same, both because it was a completely different culture and due to the demands of the locals' physiology, but she thought it was the same idea. She'd been following at the Admiral's elbow at the time, acting as translator, but before she could put it together Chaf-räw-aṙitśåe was already stepping forward, reaching a hand down to the...woman in the lead. There'd been a brief pause before she'd taken his hand, and Chaf-räw-aṙitśåe had tugged her up to her feet, reaching up to clap her shoulder and telling her that nobody kneeled to anybody in the Law, and especially not to him. Beth tried to translate it, but she thought Chaf-räw-aṙitśåe taking each of their hands and pulling them up, imitating the element repeated several times in the introduction video many of them had likely seen, got the message across more effectively than she had anyway.

The party was a loud, chaotic mess. They'd gathered in one of the big courtyards at the compass points around one of the nicer nests, scars from the recent battle still visible all around. Food had been prepared right out here in the courtyard, people milling about to help with the cooking seemingly at random, picking up bits here and there of whatever. She was aware some of the people from other places had brought supplies with them, so presumably the different foods on offer represented several different local cultures, though she wasn't familiar enough with their cuisine to really tell what was what. Not that she ate any of it anyway — they couldn't test everything for possible toxicity for every single species in the fleet, so everyone had been advised to simply not touch any local food. (After a few attempts, Beth had made a written note that had been sent to everyone's comms, so they could display it to hopefully prevent any perception of rudeness.) Like the local foreigners, the Law people had brought their own food and drink, which was hardly anything special, just the normal stuff they could get at regular meals. The only exception were things with intoxicating effects, which they weren't allowed to have when on duty.

Beth had brought some of her unacimiś, feeling very floaty, and warm, and relaxed, and pleasant. She and Taqšuńi had done some dancing, earlier — the local music was unrecogniseable, of course, produced with unfamiliar instruments, but it had enough of a beat to it that she could tell it was meant to be danced to...even if the dances themselves were also unfamiliar. She'd been to several parties with the Fleet since joining up, danced to several different kinds of alien music, so it being unfamiliar wasn't really an impediment anyway.

Apparently, even being alien to each other, Beth and Taqšuńi were obvious enough that the locals had recognised them as being involved, she assumed that was what the curious looks were about. (Though some of it could be because Beth was magic, she guessed.) She didn't think it was because they were both women — she had no idea how the locals felt about gay stuff, nor was she certain the locals could even tell which gender they were anyway — but much more likely because they were different species. There were peoples who looked similar enough that the locals, unfamiliar with aliens, might not realise they were different species anyway, but humans and tewari were very obviously distinct. Nobody actually said anything, so she really had no idea what they were thinking about it. The impression she got was that it was mostly just curiosity, so.

And Beth was having a very odd feeling. Tight and hard and warm and big in her chest, but not really in the kind of bubbly giddy way that made her want to do something, more...calm than that. No, she didn't think "calm" was quite the right word. It'd been building for a while, but now it was so much she could hardly move. Not that she wanted to move, Taqšuńi warm against her, her fur smooth and soft and tingly against Beth's skin, sharp fingernails idly wandering along her arm, gripping her hip...

Watching the party, listening to the bright hoots and cackles and trumpetting of the locals, she was definitely feeling something. Not bad, just, she didn't know what it was.

Her...whatever kind of mood must be noticeable from the outside. Shrugging her shoulder a little, making Beth shift against her, Taqšuńi muttered in Monatšeri, "What are you thinking about in there?"

"...I don't know."

"You don't? You mean you're so oblivious you can't even follow your own thoughts, I'm amazed..."

Beth elbowed Taqšuńi in the gut, making her release a little hhup sort of noise (like an oof, but in a tewari way). "So mean to me."

"I'm the mean one?" Taqšuńi breathed, in a sort of low smokey growl. Not a mean growl, Beth was more than familiar enough with her by now to immediately clock it as a sexy voice. "You just hit me."

"I still have scratches from earlier."

"Liar, you healed those."

"Pff, details." Beth twisted around to stick her tongue out at Taqšuńi, then relaxed against her again, letting out a breath. "But really, I'm... I don't know, I feel weird."

"Weird like you're having an off reaction to the drugs?"

"No, that's the same as always. It's a..." Beth trailed off, frowning to herself. She eyed the various locals around the party, dancing to alien music, eating alien food, chattering away and laughing, bright and cheerful. She was definitely feeling something, she just couldn't put a word to it. "I don't know. I guess I'm glad we were able to help."

"We did a good thing here," Taqšuńi agreed, voice firm and...something. Her face turned into Beth's hair, breath coiling along the back of her neck, "You did a good thing here. I know it was a hard fight, that things got messy when we flew away to Pirkalut."

"It wasn't that bad. Uxlapś was a lot worse." Things got a bit 'messy' here, sure, but Uxlapś had been horrifying. She still had nightmares about that place, fucking wakali...

"I should hope so." Taqšuńi hadn't been on the ground for Uxlapś, obviously, but she would have seen reports and whatever recordings had come out. Also, Beth had talked about it with her, a little, mostly times a nightmare had woken them both up. "I'm not in your head, I can only guess what's going on in there. It's..." She shrugged, gestured out at the party with one hand, the lights catching on her nails. "Look at 'em."

"...Yeah. Look at 'em." Feeling all warm and floaty on the unacimiś, that emotion she couldn't put a word to sharp in her chest, all hard and big, the party loud and chaotic and colourful around her. One of her hands found one of Taqšuńi's, the other reaching up over her head to rest on the side of her neck, the fur on her skin smooth and warm. The hoots and burrs of the locals' voices echoing in her ears and the fluttering colours of their feathers bright in her eyes...

She felt like there should be something to say. This moment felt big, somehow, like that feeling she couldn't put a name to. But the words just weren't coming. She knew there was something going on her head, she just couldn't quite see it.

A little flat, hollow, she just said, "We did a good thing."

Her free arm hugging around Beth's waist, her face buried in her hair, Taqšuńi didn't say any words, just let out a long, breathy hum. Which was fair enough, Beth wasn't sure there was anything else to say.

They did a good thing here, she was glad they'd come. Her own head might be a mess, the feeling too big for her to quite make out its shape, but she understood that much.

(It was worth it, all of it. She knew that.)