Humanity Endures

Part 1 - The Expeditionary Fleet | Chapter 4

Velan knew he was justified in his belief. The Military Council knew more about the galaxy's threats than any other organization to exist, and closing the galactic stock market, thereby freezing an unimaginable amount of the populace's capital, was not a matter undertaken lightly. By extension, if Light's End held something terrible enough that the Military Council would order the freeze of the galaxy's stock market, being the first one to investigate the system and brave this danger couldn't do Velan's career any harm — unless it ended up killing him, of course, but that was a risk he decided that he would have to take. The idea of venturing to a dangerous black-hole system with nothing but a frigate for the sake of fame and glory having captured his imagination entirely, Velan overrode Terxah and said, "Fortune favors the audacious. This day has been nothing but rewarding, and I can think of no better way to squander opportunity than by waiting this out. One of the greatest scientific discoveries lies in wait by Light's End, and one of the greatest political opportunities we'll ever see sits beside it: I do not intend to let others reach it first!"

Much like the Imperator dictating their will to the Military Council, what Velan ordered done was to be done, whether or not all of his advisors were in agreement. Their destination having been determined, Velan followed his crew's example in dousing the embers of intoxication with a swig of suppressant, adjourned his meeting, and ordered all of his crew back to his ship. Rushing out the door, his legs animated by ambition, and with his eager crew not far behind, Velan, nearly tripping on his overcoat, began to sprint. As he darted from one side of the expansive, gilded atrium to the other, weaving in and out through the masses of bureaucrats and officers around him, Velan was nearly trampled by a sprinting column of fifty marines; before he met a violent end at the hands of their feet, Velan managed to throw himself to the ground, evading the soldiers' boots by moments. As the marines continued to stampede with purpose, towards the Capital Complex's Senate chamber, Velan shouted an apology after the soldiers — he had been in their way after all — before he then carefully walked the rest of the way across the atrium. It would be deeply ironic to get killed in the Capital Complex hours after being freed from the place.

Clambering inside the closest hypersphere, Velan was soon catapulted towards his long-forsaken ship's hangar a few moments later, though, to his hopelessly excited mind, even these moments felt like hours. As he hurtled through the Capital Complex, Velan's other officers — Terxah, Dentor, Yelazar, and Falmenec — began to board other hyperspheres and follow after their captain. Within minutes, the quintet had arrived in their allocated portion of one of the Capital Complex's hangar bays, their hyperspheres bursting open to reveal a modest accommodation for a modest ship with a modest name: the Nemesis.

Velan's eyes caught sight of his vessel, of its docking clamps hanging unused in the rafters of the ceiling, and his awestruck heart fluttered joyfully: his warship looked better than it had ever before, now that it was minutes away from taking to the stars. Despite his ship being an unassuming one, in the Tekran Empire, even the average vessel was impressive: a masterwork of highly-decorated engineering, the elegant craft, decidedly rectangular in shape while its armor and weaponry was inlaid with a fair amount of aesthetic silver, was just over a kilometer long, and possessed a crew complement of just over one thousand sailors and officers. Equipped with dozens of meters of armor in all but the most vulnerable places on the ship, and armed with a multitude of nuclear-missile launchers, hundreds of gauss turrets, laser point-defence, and a similar complement of plasma weaponry, the Nemesis was not only capable of scorching entire continents with nuclear fire, or shattering hostile warships with a storm of metal, but it was also proof that the engineers of the Empire made more than just their buildings excessively large. Adorning the bow, amidst gauss turrets and nuclear warhead launchers all mounted on pyramidal structures, were a few laser-based point-defence turrets — point-defence weapons being ones explicitly built for destroying fighters or missiles, and weapons that, due to the prohibitive cost of building a laser turret powerful enough to melt through fighter armor quickly, had developed into a lethal sign of prestige for a captain. The idea that a weapon on a warship, or even the warship itself, could be a sign of status, was nothing new; the same could have been said of any impressive military object during peacetime.