Humanity Endures

Part 4 - The Beginning of the End | Chapter 3

Reaching her bridge, Lassarha quickly returned to her command throne, and to her duties: administering a planet, managing its military, and occasionally contributing to the Senate's discourse, as she labored to improve the lot of those who served her on Tehkria. The gilded magnificence of her bridge's architecture went completely ignored — when one was working in a digital space, such physical works went unseen, serving only to please the rightfully proud architects who had designed them. Lassarha was on the verge of accomplishing something, when the beast of interruption reared its seductive head once more; this time Lassarha had been interrupted, not by an alien attack or disheartening strategic reports, but by her own intelligence agency, now joined with Ihndrastar's equivalent. Her espionage ministry was now claiming it had uncovered evidence that someone had illegally harvested and transported a few planets' worth of resources; the nature of the deliveries, along with the purpose of transporting the material there, was unknown, like everything else during those desperate times. All the agency had found was a string of harvested planets, whose resources had been completely exploited, all with no record of the worlds being so much as surveyed beforehand. Indeed, they were so remote that many of the planets hadn't been visited officially in over a thousand years, while some others had never officially seen human visitors at all. The illicit harvest was only uncovered after data had been exchanged between Lassarha's and Cehlarxan's respective intelligence agencies, and suspicious freighter activity could be gleaned from the combined picture; Lassarha couldn't believe it, but she was in Cehlarxan's debt!

The anomalously harvested planets were not the most exciting find, however. Discovered near them was the faint thruster residue of a dozen "super-freighters" — gargantuan cargo ships, the scale of which enabled them to carry such vast loads, while still having only minimal crew complements. Not only did the presence of such ships indicate a significant investment by some party, but most exciting of all, the thruster residue left by these vessels was fresh enough to be traced to its destination: whoever had committed the crime Lassarha had uncovered, she finally had a clue as to their location, and if she had their location, she could kill them. Though it was clear that whatever the project was, it was of a massive scale, Lassarha was not concerned greatly; she had the Ineffable, and the fleets of two planets, ready to investigate it in force. Indeed, in light of the recent assassination attempt, anything large and illegal was worth investigating further — a few illegally harvested solar systems definitely qualified as such.

Though pulling some of her defensive forces from her own world during a time of alien invasion may have seemed foolish, passing up such a golden opportunity to rid the Empire of a domestic threat before the war truly began would be even more idiotic. At present, not a single world that had fended off an alien attack had been attacked a second time, though this was bound to change — Lassarha either committed forces to her side-project now, or she would be forced to ignore it, as she simply defended her planet for the entire remainder of the war.

Having an offensively-focused personality, and being unwilling to abide by treason stirring in the heart of the Empire, Lassarha opted for the former option without hesitation. Ordering a sizeable portion of her world's forces to form into an expeditionary fleet, and ordering that fleet into the Remnant the moment after it had formed, Lassarha sought to clear the Empire of internal threats, and clear her name, simultaneously, so that they could both better contend with the threat of extinction. With an alien menace prowling the stars, and these human enemies being unlikely to simply watch as her investigation pursued them, her actions were not as simple as it seemed, but Lassarha didn't care: to her, adversity and threats were amusing objects.

***

Xertaza, the all-too-familiar confines of her digital desk's simulated reality splayed out before her, gave a moment's thought to the losses her ministry had suffered the past day; facing the true reality of the day-long war's terrible cost to her forces and to the galaxy as a whole, Xertaza was overcome by an overwhelming urge to vomit. Injecting herself with a stabilizing wave of MECS and holding back the feeling through pure force of will, Xertaza managed to shake the urge, yet not the sense of despair that accompanied it: in one insignificant day, her ministry's fleet had suffered losses of roughly three percent. If the Ministry of Interstellar Security were to have any presence in the war to come, not only did it need to replenish its number of ships, but it also had to adapt to the threat that had cost it so many people and materiel. With the Empire's shipyards, fuelled by the resources from a thousand devoured planets, being capable of constructing millions of craft in weeks, and with there being enough reservists among the Empire's immense population to staff these new vessels for some time, many would think that receiving reinforcements wound not be an issue — that would be until one realized that nearly every single one of these ships was placed under the command of the navy, the logistics corps, or the army. For Xertaza to replenish the Ministry of Interstellar Security's numbers and prevent disaster, she had to find a creative way to legally steal these numbers from someone, and quickly. After all, begging for more warships at the table of the Imperator was neither seemly, nor was it likely to succeed.