The Swarm and the Toll of Bells

If there had to be one rule, one tradition within the halls of the Guiding Hand that was obeyed above all, it was the unspoken rule that disturbing Istvaan Shogaatsu while he played with his pet, was nothing short of life threatening and to be avoided at all cost. Forced by the nature of his character to maintain professional decorum at all times, the old man found it necessary to instead schedule certain hours of the day for a private, playful wrestling match or game of fetch between himself and that straw-maned horror, that living chainsaw which rarely left his side. The Slaver had easily been his most loyal companion through all these years, and even now in its advanced age - its once auburn hide now showing overt traces of silver - it retained its mischievous destructive streak, revenging prolonged neglect with ravaged furniture. Shogaatsu did his best to hide all outward displays of affection toward the beast, part due to conservativeness, but part due to an innate need to protect those closest to him.

While surely fond of tearing Shogaatsu’s prized leather armchairs to ribbons, the Slaver -Dominus, or simply Dom as the old man had grown accustomed to calling it - never shed its thoroughbred instincts. The animals were trained for a dual purpose: that of guardian and that of shepherd. On idyllic Amarr agricultural worlds, where flat harvesting plains stretch out in all directions as far as the eye could see, and millions of slaves toil and tend to the harvest that feeds entire star systems, they were a common sight - both protecting the Holders’ investment of workers from local predators with unmatched ferocity, and herding the workers back to their stables after the workday’s end drew near. In the unlikely eventuality of a hot-blooded young Minmatar trying his luck with an escape attempt, or the truly rare slave uprising, packs of starving Slavers were often unleashed as living, breathing terror weapons. Able to track a fleeing slave through scent from miles away, and discerning enough to tell an Amarr from a Minmatar by that sense alone, they were the perfect hunter - and the sight of one’s rebellious compatriots savaged by their razor teeth quickly sapped the impetus from any growing insurgency.

Being an unspoken rule, the only real way to learn of it was by unpleasant personal experience - thus it was no surprise that when Hamish hurriedly blundered into the old man’s office, he scarcely had the time to go pale with fright before the mass of fur and teeth leapt instantly in a terrifying upward arc, and came crashing into him with its hind legs, knocking him flat and locking its jaws at once delicately and firmly around his neck. Its hot, moist breath caressing his ear, the Minmatar lay there motionless in half-shock, feeling the pinpricks of teeth against his skin and distinctive rivulets of saliva soaking his shirt collar.

“Neget!”, Shogaatsu barked in a raised voice - the Amarish word that meant ‘release’ - and the Slaver relented instantly, trotting to its place at his side with the distinctive click-clack of claws against hardwood floor. The old man rushed over to the Minmatar, and helped him up.

“They’re trained to seize any Matari they see moving too quickly, you see”, he explained as he brushed the still stunned Hamish’s clothes clean of dust in an uncharacteristically motherly manner. “A working slave stands still or walks slowly, a fleeing slave runs. It’s a good thing you didn’t try to fight him off or he’d have gutted you.”

Hamish mopped up the spit on his neck with considerable disgust, casting an angry glance toward the Caldari as he led the hound to a darkened corner of his office. “One of the first things we learn in the Republic Academy, old man… when set upon by a Slaver, lie still and wait for someone to shoot it off you. I don’t know how you can justify keeping one of those things around here. You know what they mean to me, don’t you. To people like me.” His voice was thick with malice.

“Yes… I do. However I’ve never been one to allow the morals of others to dictate my choices in life. To you, anything Amarish is poison; to me, they are as beautiful a culture as any.”

Hamish had seen this in his mentor, a trait that still unsettled him from time to time. For a Caldari, a people he had grown up to associate with greed, self-importance and arrogant patriotism, the old man was strangely fascinated with the baroque vagaries of the Amarr - he oftentimes seemed almost tolerant of all the transgressions they had committed as a people, as though their great achievements were enough to barter away those countless unforgivable sins.

“So that’s why I see you holding hands with the Gallente so tenderly”, muttered Hamish sarcastically, throwing the old man’s often overt loathing for all things borne of that nation right back at him. Taking a pause and recalling the purpose of his visit to Shogaatsu’s office, he calmed himself somewhat, and continued. “I came to give you a heads-up… I’m going to book a shuttle to Pator; there are documents that need to be signed regarding the construction of the Trust’s head office. I… actually came here to thank you, for helping me finance it. Even though I can’t help but question the means by which you get money… thank you. I honestly don’t know what I’ll do with all the office space.”

Shogaatsu smiled warmly. “Have some ambition, good man. You’ll have those offices bustling. I’d like you to take Joaquin with you, he’s invaluable… for some inexplicable reason, he makes the construction workers very ill-at-ease, they find it very difficult to swindle extra money out of the contract with him mincing about.”

Hamish couldn’t help but groan. He found the lewd bisexual Farrad’s shameless advances irksome. “Fine, I’ll take him… I should go, shuttle leaves in less than one hour. Tell him to hurry up.”

Istvaan followed the Minmatar with his eyes as he left, closing the door behind him. He whistled to the Slaver, which bounded giddily toward him, its tongue lolling comically from the side of its dripping maw.

“Ravished! Taken advantage of, without choice in the matter! Is there no greater indignity, I ask you?” Sisterhood canoness Rolette en Bilal’s sermon carried vibrantly through the small audience hall where she chose to hold her impromptu assembly. Present were representatives from organizations friendly to the Sisters of Eve, some listening enraptured, others merely watching with ill-concealed bemusement - all summoned through private channels by the canoness, who had made clear to them her intent to cash in on all favours owed.

The spectacle unfolding amounted to nothing more than spin control. After her inappropriate liaison with one Tetsuo Shogaatsu in the darkened recesses of the Guiding Hand Social Club, Canoness Bilal found herself cruelly ostracized by her peers, ridiculed both behind closed doors and, worse, to her face. She went in as a negotiator for a righteous cause, and emerged a filthy harlot willing to spread her legs for individuals as un-wholesome and contemptuous as the Shogaatsu family.

So there she stood atop that table, shaking with mock rage and falsified indignation. There she stood, spitting venom and deception - for the only recourse remaining to salvage her tarnished status within the Sisterhood, she had deduced, was to claim that the sordid events of that night were beyond her control. Simple claims would not do, she decided, still possessed with unsuppressed hatred, hatred of herself for being so weak and hatred of that stranger she wound up unceremoniously dry-fucking. She had to demonstrate her virtue in so public a manner that there would be no doubt as to her innocence. She had to bring about the downfall of the Guiding Hand.

A small delegation of men and women sat huddled close together off to the side and rear of the audience hall, occasionally casting expressionless glances toward the ranting Sister of Eve, but mostly conversing among themselves. Unlike the others present, they wore no identifying uniforms - their reputation served better to identify them than any squad patch would. This hastily assembled group of representatives - consisting both of infamous spokesmen and fighters of the line - belonged to the Jericho Fraction, a group deeply tied to the Sisterhood through bonds of history and loyalty.

While that inter-organizational fidelity could hardly be questioned, Jade Constantine regarded Rolette en Bilal with a measure of puzzled caution. Something about the canoness’ demeanour set off her internal alarms, specifically those subconscious bells that rang loud when someone was attempting to manipulate her. Such senses were well honed in a cowboy-diplomat of miss Constantine’s calibre - shrewd as she was however, she knew her limitations. No one could read minds.

Save perhaps for one of the pilots who accompanied her to the meeting.

She sometimes marvelled at the quasi-human enigma who had sequestered himself in a corner of the audience hall, somehow managing to appear completely alone even though his peers surrounded him. Outward appearances told most of his story; the unsettlingly tall and gaunt man was clearly a Minmatar, whose body - usually hidden behind long sleeves and loose clothing, and rarely if ever glimpsed - was a massacre of highly unconventional body-mods. Beyond the readily apparent, little was known about the morose warrior. Even the ritual Voluval mark, intrinsic to the Minmatar, was conspicuously absent, perhaps erased by countless surgical procedures.

As with all her collaborators, Constantine had attempted to trace his history. The pilot, Wahpekute Assiniboine, could be linked to a family on Pator to whom he refused to acknowledge any relation. She had not probed deeper into the matter, in part out of respect; but also because far more worryingly, he could also be linked with some uncertainty to the Endless Corporation - a now defunct corporate monolith of the Caldari State, which rose to power, and faded into obscurity as so many are wont to do. In their heyday, the Endless committed nothing short of atrocities, and she would not have considered the warped Minmatar for employment, were it not for a set of unique talents he brought with him. Towering over others and radiating an unexplainable aura of terror, he was an extremely proficient enforcer - his tentative connection via affiliation to the Shogaatsu family, which at one brief point headed the Endless Corporation itself, would undoubtedly be an asset as well.

Jade turned to the sullen Brutor. “Does the story hold water?”

Wahpekute Assiniboine inhaled deeply. A single breath of air was all that it took to activate the artificially concocted polyomnor gland that lay at the base of his brain. One of the sadistically innovative creations of the Endless Corporation’s Inquisitor bio-convergence program, the polyomnor quickly decoded the pheromone-signals unwittingly broadcast throughout the room by every single one of the still chattering canoness’ skin pores. There was no doubt in his mind - judging by the amount of palpable stress she was radiating, en Bilal was lying through her teeth.

In Wahpekute’s mind however, informing Jade Constantine of the two-faced Sister’s deception was no longer a priority. In his mind raged a firestorm of emotions ranging from anguished betrayal to purest, blackest hate; a firestorm that only vengeance could quell, one ignited anew by Constantine’s mere mentioning of that despised name. Until this very day, he had no idea where the bastard Istvaan Shogaatsu had wriggled into hiding. It had been so many painful years since the collapse of the Endless Corporation when the Caldari vanished without trace; so many years he had spent fantasizing of the myriad methods with which to kill a man, all the while drifting aimlessly between criminal organizations and border-world outfits apt to take him in. The Endless turned him into this thing at Shogaatsu’s behest, suppressed his personality and made him an abomination whose hands still felt wet with blood. The polyomnor gland he had just relied upon was certainly of use, but the space it occupied in his patchwork brain was that which once belonged to his sense of taste - for the ability to function as a walking lie detector, he was forced to pay the price of every meal eaten from the day of its implantation turning to ash in his mouth.

A plot had already woven together in his tormented thoughts. Telling Constantine of the deception would serve no purpose - attesting that Bilal spoke the truth, on the other hand, opened up a world of possibilities. The Jericho Fraction could even commit its forces to avenge this perceived affront to their allies. Wahpekute knew all too well that Jade had come to rely on him to complement, and sometimes even override her natural intuition.

Some time later, when the canoness had finally exhausted her seemingly un-ending reserve of vitriol and cast pleading eyes upon the assembled crowd, Jade Constantine stood to her feet. Clearing her throat and casting one last glance - as if for assurance - in Wahpekute’s direction, she spoke with a resigned sigh.

“Jericho pledges its aid.”

The spire did not appear as impressive as the holographs of a cloud-piercing stratoscraper on New Caldari that the old man had proudly shared with him some time ago, mused Hamish as he craned his neck upward. His eyes embarked on a dizzying ascent, tracing the sleek, irregular contours of the mile-high corporate tower, illuminated from top to bottom by aircraft warning strobes and office lights. Thrusting far into the rarely clear night sky, the structure nonetheless dominated the skyline of Pator City - erected in scant months on the banks of the river Hvítá that carved the capital of the Minmatar Republic in two. Unmistakably Caldari in architecture, its smooth-walled, monolithic construction clashed jarringly with the girder-work and sheet panelling of surrounding towers.

He was surprised to note that already there was a fair amount of human traffic filtering through the tower’s doors - the old man, never one to waste resources, had already arranged for local businesses to rent out unfilled office space. Desperately eager for prime commercially zoned offices in so prominent a building and in so sprawling a metropolis, these businesses would go far to defray upkeep costs - the Tribal Trust, holder of the deed, retaining the top quarter of the building where the luxury offices lay.

He winced in annoyance as Joaquin Farrad, flashing his blinding, artificially bleached grin, threw an arm around his neck. “Bloody impressive, isn’t it?” he murmured. “A little phallic for my liking, but… oh who am I kidding, it’s plenty to my liking!”

The Gallente’s words dripped with loathsome innuendo and Hamish suspected the little man knew just how grating he could be - at times he seemed to delight in aggravating the warrior. Excusing himself from Farrad’s embrace with a defensive shrug of his shoulders, he stomped toward the entrance, his stereotypical caricature of a companion marching in giddy lockstep directly behind him.

The elevator ascent was an uncomfortable affair at best. Hamish tried to dismiss the surreptitious glances cast in his direction by other workers sharing the elevator cab - he had taken to wearing suits quite well, but this too clashed with the status quo on Pator. Farrad leaning against him, completely disrespectful of any tacit rules governing personal space did little to disinterest the gawkers. He tried to tune them out by losing himself in the hum of the smoothly ascending lift’s maglev drive.

The top quarter of the spire was still largely un-occupied - here and there, quilts, personal trinkets and tribal decorations indicated an occupied office or cubicle. For the most part, only the echoes of footsteps greeted the two men as they navigated a maze of un-tapped work potential, to reach the head offices. Only recently incorporated, the Tribal Trust of Pator existed in a state of pre-operational infancy - employment drives had been limited to a skeleton crew of administration personnel to form the Trust’s foundation. A floor below, the interstellar resource department lay completely deserted save for bored janitorial staff meandering the halls, going through the motions of wiping up dust that had not yet had time to collect.

Ormazd sat reclined in an opulent manager’s chair, transfixed with the skyline laid out before him. His office windows offered a stunning vista over the city and beyond - on a clear day, he could even glimpse the clear-cut border between urban and rural, where the grassy steppes and lake-beds stretched outward for hundreds of miles in all directions. Startled by the sound of his office doors coming ajar, he spun the chair around.

His warm smile at the sight of Hamish wilted as Farrad bounced into view from behind the tall warrior. “What’s that doing here?” he spat, far less concerned with hiding his distaste than his often more tactful comrade.

“Shogaatsu sent him along to close the construction negotiations and handle the building's insurance.”

“After that”, piped in Farrad eyeing Ormazd bitterly, his cheer sapped by the shorter Matari’s cold reception. “I’ll make myself useful with day-to-day operations. Something tells me you two champions of the social graces wouldn’t know your asses from a recruitment campaign.”

As the Gallente stormed out of the office, Ormazd and Hamish wearily followed him with their eyes. It was difficult enough to tolerate the old man insinuating himself into every aspect of their lives, having spent so much of their own among kin - Farrad’s presence felt like nothing short of an intrusion into their personal affairs, an ever-present ever-watchful eye whose allegiance lay with the meddlesome Shogaatsu, and who acted on his behalf.

“So,” Ormazd probed, “where have you been all this time? We left the station one after the other, yet I’ve been waiting in this building trying to find something productive to do with my time for days. The least you could have done is told me you were taking a detour.”

Hamish sat on the corner of Ormazd’s desk, his face suddenly lit up with mischief. “Let me tell you about a bar girl I met by the name of Shaheen!”

Staring out into space from a porthole on the secondary concourse of Wirashoda station, Feaux Tomai couldn’t help but notice something strangely erratic about a distant frigate’s inbound flight trajectory. Two steps closer to the window, he realized the Crusader interceptor bore the golden lion markings of the Guiding Hand - and that its jerky, sporadic approach was largely due to one of its fusion engines sputtering and billowing white-hot drive fuel. He did not wait around to watch it limp miserably into dock, a trail of smouldering starship guts dotting its path; instead, he took off running full tilt to the hangars, cold sweat and apprehension forming on his face.

The alarm was raised quickly, Feaux radioing for assistance mid-stride. Guiding Hand operatives spilled out of the nightclub en masse, Istvaan and Tetsuo Shogaatsu hurrying out among them, elbowing club patrons aside and leaving bar staff with worried looks about their faces. The sight that greeted the crowd of well-dressed men as they skidded to a halt in the small-spacecraft glide hangar where the battered interceptor came to rest was enough to elicit a startled silence from all of them.

The once majestic attack fighter was riddled with holes, some through-and-through, such that the glide bay’s floodlights shone brightly through them. Surrounding the sparking hulk were fragments of the ship, trapped in the glide bay’s artificial gravity field - one of its turret mounts was snapped clean from the housing, and the largest fragment severed from the ship appeared to have come from the hook-like starboard semi hull.

An emergency hatch on the bottom of the craft blew outward, loud pops echoing through the hangar as it was thrown to the hangar floor by small explosive ram-bolts. From it, a sole figure emerged legs first, slowly drifting away from the craft and touching down gently, his boots clanging against the hangar floor. Operative Raem Civrie was soaked in pod ectoplasm still dripping from him in oily strands, and as the other operatives ran to him, their faces creased with universal concern, they saw that the right side of his body was also dotted with a dozen small, profusely bleeding scratches and puncture wounds.

Istvaan could see right away that Raem was injured - his gait was unsteady, and although he threw his arms out in a placating gesture to keep the other men rushing to his side at bay, his expression spoke volumes.

“Oh, don’t… don’t worry about me…” he spat up more pod fluid with a hint of blood.

“What the hell happened to you?” Tetsuo asked, anxiously offering the wounded operative a shoulder to lean on but finding the gesture rebuffed.

Raem staggered onward. “Ah… they hit me in the pod. Fried the capsule umbilical and nicked the shell… had to bring it in manually. Caught a little shrapnel there, nothing to worry about. I should think I’d like to lie down for a while.”

With those words and a forced smile, the operative crumpled to the ground, landing on his side and groaning quietly. Someone screamed for a medic, someone else rolled the injured Raem onto his back - as curious miners began to filter into the bay and surround the fallen Guiding Hand in his slowly expanding puddle of blood and ectoplasm, Istvaan ordered two of them to take him to the station infirmary. Not about to refuse, the two miners hoisted Raem onto their shoulders.

Tetsuo caught up with them and lifted Raem’s sagging head by the chin. “Who did this!” he probed, his expression now wracked with rage.

Raem’s voice was barely audible now; clearly he was on the verge of losing consciousness. Pained as it was, he nonetheless struggled to choke out an answer.

“Fighters… sent by Sisterhood. Jericho Fraction.”

His eyelids ever so slightly aflutter, the tall Minmatar warrior found the ergonomic embrace of his armchair too cloying to resist, and permitted himself what happened to be his first fitful sleep in two days. Half dreaming, the mind of Hamish Ramatakhlan swam freely with ideas and trepidations, plots and scheming - some of which, unbeknownst to him, were not entirely his own.

Nestled in his surgically defiled skull, an insidious device hissed and whispered, stroking neurons with its electronic caress and flooding neurotransmitter pathways with its own synthetic concoctions.

His eyes snapped open and Hamish awoke with a start, grabbing at the edges of his ornate marble desk. A sudden conflux of coherent thought dawned on him, the unexpected understanding of what it was that gnawed away at him the moment he set foot on Pator. His eyes ran up his suit sleeve and he stood to his feet, eyeing his awkward trappings.

“Just a suit…”

The plot within his mind had nearly finished coalescing. The greatest obstacle - and source of worry - standing before him, was his loss of status within the Minmatar Republic. He had callously thrown away a career within the Republic Navy, a career move which no doubt garnered criticism, but worse still he had aligned himself with a man still viewed by those few Matari who remembered his name, as a war criminal.

Moonlight washed over his spacious office with an arctic blue light, and he realized that he had dozed off for quite a while. He slowly walked to the wide corner window, and was greeted with a clear and starry sky. There, he imagined, among those stars, fought the brave men and women of Ushra’Khan, one of many mighty paramilitary alliances who eschewed the rigidly regimented and Concord-bound structure of the Navy in favour of fighting their own sort of war.

The Tribal Trust of Pator had submitted its allegiance to the Ushra’Khan some weeks ago. Such was common practice among founding businesses on Pator - even if only in name, many sought sponsorship from either the Navy or smaller groups of fighters, offering a tithe; a fraction of their profits as a token of support to the un-ending cold war of liberation against the implacably encroaching Amarr, and in return receiving a certificate of appreciation from their alliance to hang in their head office. Minmatar corporations who abided this implicit tradition could thus retain a moral high ground when questioned regarding their contribution to the cause; conversely, those that shunned the largely symbolic affair found it quite difficult to conduct any business at home or with kinsmen off world.

However Hamish also keenly knew the disdain with which these tribal wheelers-and-dealers were seen, in the eyes of the fighters among the stars. He knew it from the Navy, where each ceremonial tour by representatives of corporate sponsors was met with a façade of dress-uniformed appreciation, and a chorus of well-hidden whispers of mockery and derision. While the fighters bled in space, these corporate fat cats, these suits bled their honour dry and fed their conglomerates with it, feasting on the Navy’s good name like lampreys.

It had become clear as the night sky to Hamish, that with his current status among his own people, the Tribal Trust of Pator would never ascend to meet his lofty vision of the future. Chief executive officers were tolerated, but it was the fighters, the generals and the assassins who were respected. The mightiest economic engines that drove the Republic forward took root in the great rebellion, and the most celebrated executives were themselves once warriors - with his Navy career scuttled, the prospects were momentarily grim.

Tugging absently on his suit sleeve, the tall Minmatar was far too buried in thought to acknowledge the urgent chime resounding from his desktop monitor. It was only now that he realized that success came with a price, that in a very short order of time he would find himself taking lives once more, taking lives to give life to his dream. This time however, unlike the brief pangs of guilt he felt after ordering the murder of Commodore Vuylsteke, he found himself strangely able to cope with the concept - this time, the lives taken would be Amarr.

Finally, the monitor’s shrill dial tone registered in his mind, and Hamish jogged back to his desk. The somewhat consternate face of Istvaan Shogaatsu greeted him and he squinted, finding the lit monitor’s sudden brightness jarring to his night time accustomed eyes.

The Caldari was nearly shouting. “Where’s Farrad? We’ve got a situation developing back home. I urgently need to talk to his Jericho Fraction connection.”

“I don’t know”, Hamish replied, looking for a way to segue into his plot. “I’ll have him summoned.”

“Do it quickly!” Shogaatsu was reaching for the monitor on his side of the transmission, obviously preoccupied and eager to get on with whatever it was that so worried him, when the Matari interrupted.

“Wait! Wait.”

The plan was flawless. He would not only demonstrate to the Ushra’Khan that even a suit could have teeth, but in doing so he would also test the old man’s willingness to aid him on his own terms - Shogaatsu’s shameless display of fondness for the Amarr still stung in his memories, and Hamish would find out once for all how far the Caldari was willing to go for him. The Matari was no fool; it was patently obvious that Istvaan Shogaatsu had vested interest in his ascension. Now it would be the Caldari who would have to make a sacrifice.

Hamish’s shadowed face lit up with the glimmer of teeth. “I’d like your help, Istvaan. I’d like your help in a heist.”

“… behalf of canoness Rolette en Bilal to avenge her good name and to reclaim the unjustly co-opted Sisterhood chapel currently in your possession. The fighters of the Jericho Fraction challenge the corrupt and murderous management of the Guiding Hand Social Club to emerge from their hiding place on behalf of canoness Rolette en Bil - “

“Turn that shit off!” roared Istvaan, prompting a tense operative to flip the speaker switch, silencing the looping communiqué extracted from Raem’s shattered interceptor voice recorder. He sat leaning forward, his elbows resting on the round table in the Guiding Hand’s back room, his hands spliced together and his expression creased with white-hot anger.

His voice came quickly, through tightly clenched teeth, each sentence punctuated with a finger stabbing at the marble tabletop. “I want that bitch dead. I want her dead within the hour, I want her clone repository records within one half of that hour, and I want bombs on every single one of her revival vats and mnemonic servers. If we had the luxury of time I’d have her skinned and raped to death but we don’t so I want this fucking bitch erased right fucking now.”

His furious eyes came to rest on Feaux, who merely nodded and left the office without hesitation. Coordinated clone assassinations had become something of a trademark with the Shogaatsu family, recognized almost like a criminal fingerprint by Concord authorities that nonetheless found themselves powerless - or bribed into sufficient complacency - to do much of anything about it. While common capsuleers relied on the crude and almost ghoulish pod-mounted neural scanner, that murderous contraption which recorded the neural engrams of a dying pod captain by means of a brain-searing electric shock, the sufficiently wealthy and prominent denizens of the Eve cluster could sometimes afford to keep a server-banked hard copy of their very soul. The process entailed sacrificing their original self under controlled conditions while attached to a clone bank’s privately owned neural scanner, a calculated suicide that blasted the essence of their corporeal self into not one but two or more bodies. Only one of these simulacra was to awaken immediately, leaving the others in cold storage as blank shells awaiting the engram upload through a traditional cloning mind-jack. In layman’s terms, this meant that wealth equated to immortality even outside a starship’s capsule - unless of course, one’s waiting clones were also dead.

Tetsuo Shogaatsu’s face was softer with emotion than that of his brother. “Does anyone know how Raem is doing?”

“The station surgeon says he went into shock for a while”, Artel Rivaad replied, his eyes fixed straight ahead on nothing in particular. “He says he’ll be ok, it’s mostly surface wounds and fluid compression shock.” His voice was monotone, but clearly filled with anger.

“So what are we going to do about this”, droned the towering Civire.

Istvaan closed his eyes. “Did the system probe come back?”

Tetsuo nodded. “Yeah. The force that ambushed Raem is still by the gate. Image recognition picks up one cruiser, probably Rupture class judging by silhouette, and a bunch of small skirmishers. We can’t tell what they are from here, but they’re broadcasting the same Jericho signal we dug out of Raem’s ship. There’s one more thing…”

Istvaan looked up. “What?”

“Long range scan shows a Tempest class battleship in dead space between Wirashoda two and three. Gate traffic logs indicate it showed up a half hour before the Jericho group, and it’s not broadcasting any IFF. It could be theirs, it could be someone else’s; we just can’t tell from here.”

“What do we have in the system?”

“That’s the bad news. The bulk of our major space-borne assets are diverted to the Medusa campaign and the covert op. The Hvarkann, the Stalwart, Excessive Negation, all the heavyweights are at least a day away. That leaves…”

Istvaan winced. “The Chorus of Angels.”

The younger Shogaatsu merely nodded, understanding the quiet concern his brother was admirably trying to conceal. “Her, and the operatives’ personal rapid offensive units. We can match the battlegroup at the gate almost pound for pound, but if that overgrown weathervane parked in dead space is Jericho’s ace in the hole, we’re fucked six ways from Sunday without your ship.”

“So what you’re telling me,” Istvaan quipped, forcing a nervous smile and winking at Tetsuo, “is that we got caught with our pants down.”

Tetsuo rolled his eyes. “Are you ever going to let me live that down?”

The prospect did not appeal to Istvaan in the slightest. It had been some time since he commanded a warbird in battle, and twice as many since he stepped into that vile wet coffin. He had had his fill of pitched combat in his youth, dying a dozen times and coming back for more - all until that fateful day in Heaven, where all at once he lost his appetite for destruction. Perhaps it was the premeditated nature of his last demise, or perhaps it was the crystal clear memory of the Badger’s bridge crumpling and crushing inescapably toward him against the prow of a Das Paragon titan, that finally soured him on the rush of adrenaline inherent to battle. Since awakening from that death he had rarely hazarded to board a capsule, preferring exclusively to be chauffeured around on smaller vessels, or commanding larger engines of war from the bridge as was the captain’s fashion in naval battles of old. He did not dare call it a phobia, or fear, or worse share his discomfort - that would mean admitting fallibility.

“All right. I’ll take her out. Tetsuo, put out the call to the crew quarters, I want her crewed and ready for action within one hour, I don’t care if you have to start a fucking stampede down there. Forget about loading provisions, forget about pre-launch procedures, I’ll rip it clear off the moorings if that’s what it takes so tell the station master to release every umbilical save for the docking gantries if he knows what’s good for him. We’ll turn the IFF transponder off and keep her in reserve until the last possible moment in case she’s needed… as for the rest of you, get in your ships, warm up your guns, and be ready to engage.”

The back room cleared of everyone but Istvaan Shogaatsu in the blink of an eye, eager GHSC operatives running to their ships with vengeance and bloodlust weighing on their minds. He stood there for a moment, finally allowing himself to reel from the onslaught of pressure bearing down upon him. While the looming battle weighed heavy upon his mind, there was also the brief and confounding conversation he had had with his Minmatar protégé… and the request the warrior made of him, which at first seemed so grand as to border on the surreal: the theft of an artefact so infamous and priceless, that Istvaan’s mere implication in its pilfering could well burn the last bridges remaining between him and the Amarr. The thought of becoming a pariah in the Empire rattled him to the core.

With a deep, calming breath and renewed resolve, the old Caldari steeled himself for whatever was to come. As he leisurely strolled out, his shadow grew tall in the arc light beaming through the open back-room door.

Finding Rolette en Bilal’s clone repository was an elementary affair of records hacking, Feaux realized, allowing himself some satisfaction - he had managed to accomplish it on his palm link even before reaching his ship. By now, another Guiding Hand operative elsewhere was surely readying to deal with the canoness’ current incarnation - having heard her shrill sermons, Feaux more than slightly envied the man’s task of throttling her. Located in a Vivant Clone Repository medical bay aboard the Concord watch-outpost in orbit of planet Uchoshi one, the repository lay only one jump away from Wirashoda, and judging by its proximity to the one time Sisterhood chapel co-opted by the Guiding Hand nightclub, it was no doubt where the canoness made her home.

Running the gauntlet of Jericho Fraction fighters clustered around the Wirashoda-Uchoshi gate was a pulse-quickening experience for Feaux, and he longed to get back to what he did best. The autocannon tracer fire greeting him as his lightning-fast Gallente interceptor screamed into the portal was a breathtaking monsoon of light; ever the war poet, he could not help but muse how tightly bound together death and beauty were.

As Feaux navigated the maze of ill-lit station halls, he took the precaution of removing his flight jacket and inverting it - the Guiding Hand emblem embroidered upon the jacket pauldron would no doubt attract the attention of Concord staff present here. Devoid of real threats to police on this silent fringe of nowhere, the station still existed here for only one reason - its proximity to Wirashoda and the Guiding Hand’s centre of operations. From this backwater, Concord launched their numerous clumsy attempts to infiltrate or observe the Shogaatsu family. So far, none of these attempts had succeeded.

The Vivant carcass shop was a dilapidated hovel much like the rest of the station. Peddling grimy, recycled clones of highly questionable quality to corrupt local lawmen and world-weary miners who likely did not care whether they woke up again, it was staffed by a sole, sleepy looking clerk. The fellow looked almost relieved to be incapacitated by Feaux’ stun gun as he slumped to the ground. After dragging the twitching man behind the shop’s front counter, he glanced about surreptitiously to ensure he was not noticed, and slipped into the rear.

Only a few executive hard copies had been rented out here, and finding the canoness’ doppelganger took no time at all. His breath visible in the frigid, ill-lit cold-storage room’s air, Feaux rubbed the layer of frost and snow from the cryogenic tube where her next incarnation slumbered, shamelessly taking in the sight of her naked, hairless form.

“Well, at least I can see what Tetsuo saw in you”, he muttered as he affixed a tiny adhesive-backed metal coin to the glass. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up - it was the same unsettling sensation he often felt when in the same room as the old man’s associate, Inquisitor Doradus - shrugging, he attributed it to the cold, unaware of the pair of eyes watching him from a dark corner of the storage room.

He pried about the clone shop, and located the central server box under a heap of dirty packing paper stained with god only knows what - clearly, hygiene was not on the agenda here, thought Feaux making a mental note never to clone there. He slipped another explosive coin into the disk drive, brushed himself clean of the snow that built up on his coat during his brief foray into the cold room, and left the shop. His back to the door as he lit a cigarette, he could hardly be blamed for not noticing the towering shadow which stalked out behind him and took off running at an inhuman pace toward the ship hangars without making so much as a single sound.

Had Feaux ran instead of walked back to his ship, he might have caught glimpse of the Minmatar frigate undocking immediately before him, entering warp and quickly vanishing into Wirashoda gate.

“How do you like that, you little monkey fuck!”

Greenish white pillars of light stabbed out from a nimble Guiding Hand interceptor, numerous impacts registering against the fragile Jericho Rifter and detaching its engine pod in a shower of sparks, sending the spindly craft tumbling end over end, effectively out of commission but still spitting autocannon fire wildly in all directions. Artel Rivaad let out an exultant whoop, and immediately found his face connecting painfully with the inner wall of his pod - his drives snarled by another hostile interceptor’s potent stasis webifier, he experienced a deceleration so intense, it would have killed him instantly were it not for the shock-absorbing properties of his capsule.

He attempted returning fire, but found his lock broken; the Jericho Stiletto menacing him flooded his Crusader’s archaic Amarr-built computer systems with intense electronic interference. The staccato impact of shells exploding against his own interceptor’s thick armour shook his teeth in their sockets.

Istvaan’s voice came loud and clear over the strategic channel. “Tetsuo, Artel needs help, after you pick that one off him I want all of you to concentrate on the cruiser.”

“Gotcha.”

The younger Shogaatsu revelled in the firefight. He had already claimed two ship-kills and even had the presence of mind to eradicate a Jericho capsule as it burst from the wreckage of a vanquished Breacher. The invading force was superior in number, but up to this point they appeared to be inferior in quality of warships - the balance of destruction nonetheless remained roughly even despite losses on both sides.

Seizing the Stiletto in a death grip of convoluted energy strands and warp-suffocating anti-boson radiation, he let loose with three electromagnetic warheads that shattered the fragile vessel’s shield and scorched off parts of its armour. Sensing impending doom, the Stiletto pilot redirected his electronic warfare suite against Tetsuo’s Crow, quickly counteracting the web, and punched his tactical micro-warp drive, tearing off into the distance to regroup with other Jericho vessels.

Tetsuo eyed the pockmarked Crusader off his bow. “Can you fly?”

Artel’s voice came through as nearly despondent. ”I can fly fine, but three of my fucking guns got shot off. I guess I could ram them…”

“And get an ear full of shit from the old man about squandering resources? No thank you, head back to station!” Tetsuo cut off the conversation and cursed. With their relatively low numbers, each and every loss was a tactical disaster. His stomach sank as he caught the blinding light of a cycling stargate from the corner of his camera drone eye.

His fears were quickly allayed at the sight of Feaux Tomai bursting from the gate’s periphery at a breakneck velocity of four klicks per second. The elite operative’s Taranis latched on to the Stiletto which moments ago savaged Artel’s ship in what seemed to be the blink of an eye, and in a hail of antimatter blaster fire, tore it to ribbons before the pilot could react. The capsule, and the two remaining Jericho frigates scattered to the four winds, eager to put as much distance between them and the surprise arrival.

“All right, let’s take out the big boy!” Tetsuo hollered, noticing that Feaux was already burning toward the hostile Rupture. The mighty cruiser wheeled about and belched forth a bloom of light, a heavy thermal warhead that accelerated in their direction, and soon followed it up with a blinding fusillade of autocannon fire.

Stray shells thumped against Feaux’ shield, but at his blistering rate of sharply angled approach, few managed to connect. The missile launched in his direction sailed harmlessly past and erupted behind him. In moments he was close enough to the Minmatar hulk to peer in to the bridge and see the enemy crew, appearing not unlike ants as they ran from one post to another. Fully aware of the delicious target his ship presented, Feaux nonetheless remained in tight orbit of the cruiser, well within striking range of its chattering autocannon. Inexplicably, it ignored him and abruptly ceased fire.

Inside one of the advanced ion blasters studding his fierce attack ship, a loading hopper fed the next of many steel-cased charges in contact with a magnetic constriction chamber. The charge released its tightly contained bundle of raw antimatter into a linear acceleration channel. This same process repeated itself in each of his lethal cannons, and Feaux Tomai spat hellfire into the Rupture’s brightly flaring shields.

“I don’t get it, it’s not even trying to get me!”

Tetsuo smirked, his interceptor letting loose another salvo of warheads, this time directed at the Rupture as he too barrelled toward it. A single lance of light crashed into the hostile cruiser’s flickering aegis of energy in the same location where his Crow’s missiles impacted, momentarily piercing it and leaving a fading red-hot stain on its rusted hull.

“I thought I told you to dock up!”, Tetsuo barked at the battered Crusader, barely managing to sputter fire from its single functioning weapon.

“And miss all this fun? Besides, boss-man ordered us all to get on it!” Artel howled. “But why isn’t it engaging? Is it disabled?”

Indeed, for all intents and purposes the Jericho Fraction Rupture appeared lifeless. The bridge lights were still on, and there was no indication of flashback or internal explosion apparent to the three Guiding Hand attack ships now pounding it without mercy.

It was Istvaan himself, observing the battle unfolding from the Chorus of Angels’ vaulted command chamber, who first realized with a cold chill why the warship had ceased its assault, the words of the Jericho transmission extracted from Raem’s ship still fresh in his memory.

“The fighters of the Jericho Fraction challenge the corrupt and murderous management…”

He leapt from his command chair and leaned over the speaker-comm, smashing the transmit button with the palm of his hand. “Shit! Tetsuo! You’re primary target! Back off now! Now!”

“Motherfuc - “

A fountain of rapidly ejecting spent brass casings sputtered from the Jericho Rupture as all of its cannons came to life at once, barrels whirling and tracers stitching thousands of through-and-through punctures in Tetsuo Shogaatsu’s soft skinned interceptor. The graviton reactor breached, his Crow first exploded and then instantly collapsed in on itself, with no hint of a capsule visible in what few glimmering splinters remained of the wreckage.

”Tetsuo! Shit, Tetsuo!”

“He’s gone, chief. Gonna wake up with a headache after that one.”

There was a grim resolve in the old man’s voice. “All right, back off from it. We’ve lost enough people. Put some distance between yourselves and that ship now, go after the stragglers. I’m coming in.”

A great mechanical howl filled Wirashoda station’s docking berth, atmospheric pumps siphoning precious breathable oxygen back into its reserve tanks and equalizing the bay’s internal pressure with the frigid vacuum beyond the station doors. With a hollow clang, the doors split like a jagged vertical maw and slid slowly apart, unveiling a star-dotted morass beyond. The last of the docking umbilicals fell free with puffs of steam and gas, serenely twisting and drifting away from the Chorus of Angels’ golden hull.

This battleship, this great space-faring fortress was the old man’s most cherished material possession - not merely because of its monetary value or martial might, but stemming directly from its heritage, a glorious historical record of actions and achievements, each etched into its metres-thick armoured prow in high Amarr calligraphic script like a litany of righteous dominion. He had not bought it - instead, it was awarded to him in days gone by, a resplendent token of Imperial appreciation for services rendered in the heyday of the Endless Corporation. Chorus of Angels was the vessel’s second name - as he was wont to do, Istvaan re-christened it, to keep its origins a secret above all; in its first incarnation, the battleship was known as the Hammer of Starkmanir, gaining the bloody moniker after participating in the fleet responsible for the orbital devastation of the Starkmanir tribe’s homeworld by House Ardishapur over a century prior. It was the last surviving vessel of that crimson legacy - The Scythe of Starkmanir, the Red and Silver Hand, all the other great warships that rained fire on Starkman Prime that day, razing cities, fracturing continents and boiling away the seas with searing tachyon laser fire; all had been systematically dogged and hunted down by Republic Navy black ops raiders in an act of almost poetic retribution with the intent of wiping their names from history some time after the great rebellion took place. In many ways, she was a floating museum, even after numerous retrofits, still utilizing some technology a century old.

Now crewed by a motley blend of hired deck hands and officers drawn from all of Eve’s nations, the few original Amarr engineers who had chosen to stay on Shogaatsu’s lucrative payroll rather than return home in light of his dwindling loyalty to the Empire, and the slaves they brought with them, the Chorus of Angels served the dual role of historical artefact and projector of power. As the former, it was priceless; as the latter, it was infamous. Clad in a skin of high density rolled tungsten armour, which in some places was up to ten metres thick, it harkened to the days when Amarr Prime was known as Athra, and monstrous naval ironclads roamed the vast oceans between the continents of Amarr and Udor, deadlocked in a bloody war of conquest; the Reclaiming itself in its nascent form. This great skin of tungsten was not entirely a solid mass; rather, it was criss-crossed and channelled like the circulatory system of a great living beast - through these conduits and capillaries flowed trillions upon trillions of self-assembling armour regeneration nanites, the metal-breathing robotic life-blood of all such armoured goliaths. Just as the platelets which seal a laceration inflicted upon human tissue, this swarm of metallivorous locusts rush to the site of blasts and gouges torn from the warship’s carapace in battle, bleeding forth and filling the cavities with their microscopic interlocking bodies, finally to form new capillary channels for fresh nanites to traverse as their last selfless act before deactivating into inert metal.

Stars stretched into slashes of light as the Chorus of Angels’ FTL drive thrust her forward, making a mockery of the Einstein barrier with no more than a moment’s turbulence. In seconds, the battlefield swelled into view, two Guiding Hand interceptors set upon two fleeing Jericho vessels, the hostile Rupture wheeling about sluggishly to bring more of its cannon into arc and sending a sputter of uranium slugs in a haphazard fan directed at Feaux Tomai’s Taranis.

From their perspective, the brass monstrosity off their starboard bow appeared far too quickly to do anything about it - the Rupture’s crew realizing that in pursuit of the interceptor that they had unwittingly exposed their flank to more firepower than they were apt to survive. Klaxons throughout the vessel sounded, and plasma drives shrieked, frantic engineers dilating fuel injection valves far past safety limits in a futile effort to turn the ship into the coming onslaught. Unfortunately for the seven hundred crewmen of the Jericho cruiser, the targeting array aboard Chorus of Angels was no antique.

A holocaust of electromagnetic energy bridged the Amarr battleship and the Minmatar cruiser, the river of fire surging and crashing against the smaller vessel’s shield for all of two seconds before it caved. Struck amidships, it slewed and tilted violently, thrown sideways as though struck with a sledgehammer. Stripped of its defences, the Rupture was bored clean through, a single concentrated column of light skewering it like a butterfly upon a pin - the brilliant beam passing through its insides and off into the nether. All lights aboard fell dark, and all its roaring engines died.

Istvaan unwittingly rose from his chair, his fist clenched tight and shaking visibly. His eyes were alive with undeniable excitement, and he examined the mortally wounded enemy vessel for signs of life.

“Shall I fire again, Mr. Shogaatsu?” The pod captain’s synthesized mind-voice echoed throughout the command bridge. The capsule assembly was located directly adjacent to, and partly integrated with the bridge. The ship’s captain could only step into the interface capsule through an arched portal situated directly behind Shogaatsu’s ornate command throne, itself a pre-capsule era relic the old man insisted on leaving intact, rather than removing it along with the rest of the bridge to the Spartan standards of modern-day.

“No…” the old man finally exhaled. “They’re dead in the water. How are our guys looking?”

The strategic officer seated to Istvaan’s right had scarcely opened his mouth to reply when the booming voice of the Chorus of Angels’ captain cut him off. What the capsuleer stated sent icy chills through the old man’s veins.

“I have a large FTL signature inbound on scanner, Mr. Shogaatsu. It’s hostile!”

Events were unfolding so quickly that the old Caldari and his crew found themselves scrambling to react - in their zeal to obliterate the enemy cruiser, they had failed to notice the location of the last remaining hostile frigate, on the surface appearing to attempt an escape, but in reality positioning itself to serve as a warp-beacon for its flagship. Her spindly sails occluding the Wirashoda star and casting a menacing shadow upon the Guiding Hand battleship’s gleaming hull, the Jericho Fraction Tempest slid from its warp-tunnel into normal space less than five miles off the Chorus of Angels’ bow.

”Prepare for attack!”

Her titanic plasma drives igniting like a second star, the enemy battleship surged forward, barrelling prow-to-prow directly at the Chorus of Angels before correcting her course slightly to port. Shogaatsu immediately recognized just what the enemy captain was playing at.

“Re-modulate the main guns to multi-frequency! Armour regenerators to full power! She’s coming in for a broadside!”

The two monoliths scythed slowly past one another, so close that each of their crews could well make eye contact with the enemy, space itself around them almost rumbling with their utter mass. The Tempest’s short-ranged artillery cannon were the first to speak, belching yellow hellfire and brimstone into the Chorus of Angels’ flank. Dozens upon dozens of shells exploded against her, each detonating in a spectacular electromagnetic shower against the battleship’s shields or blasting metre-deep craters in her once-pristine carapace.

Istvaan Shogaatsu sat tensely in his command throne, tightly gripping the instrument-studded armrests. His eyes followed the song of battle raging just outside his immense warship’s hull. Shells exploding against the shield bore the cadence of a dull, muffled thump; those crashing against reinforced tungsten armour however, sounded as sharp and vibrant as clanging cathedral bells, their percussion reverberating throughout the Chorus of Angels’ superstructure. As her rudimentary shields fell, this clang-clang-clang rose to a fevered pitch, soon joined by the hiss and chatter of an angry swarm - armour regeneration nanites pumping rapidly to wound sites, filling them as quickly as new ones were inflicted. Truly, to a battleship captain, this was an aria of destruction more uplifting and inspiring than any naval anthem - this swarm, this toll of bells.

The rising thrum of capacitors signalled the Chorus of Angels’ reply to the Jericho assault - she raked the Tempest’s shields with blades of ravening energy, and her fighter hangars gaped open disgorging a flock of sentient fighting machines that set upon the Tempest like hornets. Still, the hostile battleship peppered the Apocalypse with an un-ending stream of fire, rapid-fire artillery taking ever-larger bites out of her aft quarter as the goliaths passed and began to put some distance between one another.

Shogaatsu followed the Minmatar juggernaut with his eyes. “She’s turning to starboard”, he stated ponderously, attempting to decipher the enemy captain’s strategy. “Kill the engines and turn to port, captain, I need you to bring us about to face with our bow before she can make another pass!”

While the Chorus of Angels boasted a half-dozen massive pulse laser batteries on each of her flanks, her true might lay in her forward torpedo tubes. These in turn were shielded by the thickest of armour, as her prow - pertinent to Amarr military doctrine - was clad in enough metal to survive and come out the victor, should its captain elect to use his vessel like a battering ram against an enemy battleship.

“Sir! She’s firing missiles!” The pod captain shouted. Indeed, three blinding points of light had emerged from the Jericho Tempest, and were now streaking inexorably toward the Chorus of Angels’ stern.

“Fire defenders! Take out as many of those warheads as you can!”

Two lightning-quick rockets darted out from the Apocalypse, nimbly pirouetting around the savage exchange of fire pouring from both warships. They met their marks, two inbound warheads detonating violently only hundreds of metres away - the third however, sank into the Amarr battleship’s aft, through a masterstroke of luck and guidance disappearing directly into her largest fusion thruster.

What followed was a moment of silence stretching into torturous infinity. Then, Istvaan and most of the bridge crew found themselves lifted effortlessly out of their chairs - the subsequent blast was so utterly deafening and jarring, that he felt as though his brain had undergone a reboot. As senses returned one by one, stars still twinkling in his eyes and his ears ringing, the old man clambered unsteadily back to his throne, the ship still rattling and rocking violently. A shower of sparks to his right made him flinch reflexively but he disregarded it, his eyes fixed on the forward screen.

”Report!”

As battered crewmen picked themselves up and rushed back to their stations, the bridge was filled with anxious internal radio chatter. “Damage reports are still coming in, sir!”, the bridge engineer bellowed. “Engineers report the tertiary reactor got hit! It’s completely gone and the aft quarter is exposed to vacuum. Bulkheads are falling into place now, sir… atmosphere loss contained! The explosion flashed back through the power distribution network!”

“Drives?”

”Primary is gone, secondary drives and attitude thrusters still online!”

Istvaan’s jaw clenched as his eyes came to rest on his very dead strategic officer, whose console apparently had exploded in his face. “Get a fucking camera on our aft, I want to see the damage.”

The forward screen display panned briefly from the Tempest, now quite some distance away and perpendicular to the Chorus of Angels as it slowly wheeled about. When the camera drone came to rest on the Guiding Hand battleship’s massacred aft quarter, a collective gasp sounded throughout the command center - even the pod captain, situationally aware of the damage better than anyone, could not help but express his disbelief. An ebbing white fire poured from three distinct breaches in the ship’s structure. When the drone zoomed closer, Istvaan’s face blanched with ill-concealed horror - within the inferno, among the burning debris, he could faintly see dozens upon dozens of charred bodies being reduced to ash and blown out into space.

“The aft quarter is crewed mostly by slave engineers, sir”, the pod captain intoned, his words offering little comfort to the Caldari, who visibly sank in his chair.

”What’s the status on that ship?”

”Their shields are down to forty percent. Our drones are drawing their missile fire.”

The two warring mammoths had nearly completed their turns, with Shogaatsu’s warship almost in line to fire torpedoes. By now, the thunderclap of artillery against her nigh-impenetrable prow had quieted noticeably.

“I’ve had about enough of this.” He rubbed his temples, hands shaking slightly. “Cease fire and synchronize guns, we’re breaking through their shields. Load hull-breakers into the tubes and stand by to fire.”

The soft chime of an incoming transmission filled Joaquin Farrad’s office, and was soon met by the sound of his hurried footsteps. Exasperated, the Gallente dashed around his desk, and fell heavily into his armchair, tilting his desktop holo-panel and vainly adjusting his ruffled hair before daring to open the channel - the Minmatar Hamish had, some minutes ago, paged him with news of an urgent call from old man Shogaatsu, and one would be remiss to appear as though he had just emerged from a sweaty mail-room romp with a punkish Thukker who caught his eye while touring the downstairs offices.

There was something immediately apparent about Istvaan’s face, perhaps the scintilla of light reflecting in his eyes, perhaps the occasional blinding flash, or ear-splitting blast or rattling of the monitor, that gave the Gallente cause for concern. The old man spoke before he could open his mouth.

”Farrad. We have a situation on our hands. I need you to contact whomever you may still know in the Jericho Fraction, we have reason to believe they’ve been deceived into…” - a massive concussion nearly threw the old man out of monitor focus - “… we think the Sisterhood has them engaging us based on a lie. Stand by to receive a file.” Again the old man rocked in his chair, batted about by some manner of impact.

A binary attachment arrived on Joaquin’s terminal. He skimmed through it, eyes wide in disbelief, still hearing the voices of military personnel over Shogaatsu’s shoulder; one crewman reporting torpedo launch, another babbling something regarding synchronized laser batteries. His eyes darted to meet the Caldari’s. “I’ll have this whole mess fixed up in a jiffy”, he blurted, almost reluctant to change channels.

A league of systems away, Jade Constantine answered the ring of her communicator.

Functionally, a starship’s electromagnetic shields were similar in many ways to crystal - they possessed an interwoven energy lattice, and more importantly, a specific resonant frequency. Thus when six synchronized pillars of burning laser fire emanating from the Chorus of Angels crashed again and again, salvo after salvo, against the Jericho battleship’s immaterial fortress walls, the surging shield began to wither and crumble, fracturing and cracking like a champagne glass at a soprano operetta.

Although the Chorus of Angels had sustained critical damage early in the firefight, the tables were rapidly turning now - her damaged power distribution grid was once again fully operational thanks in no small part to near-miraculous feats of patchwork engineering by the slave crews below decks. Their launchers still hurling guided cruise missiles, the warheads breaking ineffectually against the Guiding Hand Apocalypse’s prow like gentle spring-time rain, the crew of the Tempest had no way to intercept the pair of sluggish, explosive-packed ‘Bane’ torpedoes now blazing toward them.

Her rusty, armoured skin already ravaged by prior detonations, and bleeding atmosphere from a dozen small hull breaches, the Minmatar battleship found its defences finally overpowered. When the blast finally came, the sudden release of raw energy momentarily blinded all sensors and eyes cast upon the battle - this brilliant fog of war was immediately followed by a shockwave so intense that even the crew aboard the Chorus of Angels felt it rage past them from ten miles away. When this cleared, the sight before them sent cheers and whoops of jubilation throughout the six thousand crewmen of the brass-clad goliath.

The first torpedo had struck just astern of her drone hangar, the effect being similar to that of a sawed-off scattergun discharged into a man’s belly at point blank - shattered combat drones rained out of the fiery wound like so many broken toys, and the damage from that warhead alone had caused the Tempest to slew and founder. The second Bane torpedo however, had made its mark in far more spectacular fashion.

Her ventral sail now drifted as a separate entity from the burning battleship, still spinning violently from the blast that severed it from the main hull. Turning away, the spindly monstrosity lit its drives once more.

The pod captain’s bloodlust was audible, his voice rough with an undercurrent of violence and anticipation. “Mr. Shogaatsu! They’re fleeing! Shall we pursue?” He was practically slavering.

Istvaan snapped. “Pursue them with what, you cretin? We’re in no condition to pursue anything! We should be glad we managed to rout them with what little we had!” The captain’s callous disregard for dying crewmen had aggravated the old man, but until this moment, acting upon his emotions was not a luxury.

The blazing Tempest and her sole remaining escort frigate vanished into the Wirashoda-Uchoshi gate, an entourage of Guiding Hand warheads on her tail dispersing in random directions as they lost target acquisition. Finally, the battle was over - Istvaan stood, still weak in the knees, and walked to the forward screen to take in the carnage. Before him lay a small graveyard of shattered warships, capsule husks and more corpses than he could possibly count, each frozen in a horrific snapshot of agony. To know that none of those pitiful souls had the possibility of reincarnation in a clone body made the old man sick to the stomach.

His eyes came to rest on the Tempest’s shattered sail column, left behind in Jericho Fraction’s hurried retreat. He turned, He turned, his fingers dancing on a communications console. “Call the station and get rescue shuttles over here, there might still be survivors on that wreckage fragment.” Unbeknownst to Istvaan, the battlefield vista on the large view-screen behind him had switched to the portrait of a Gallente woman. The voice of a red-eyed Jade Constantine filled the command bridge, prompting Shogaatsu to spin around in surprise.

“Looks like you gave us quite a beating, Mr. S.”

His anxiety abated, a wave of relief filling him as Istvaan Shogaatsu read the woman’s expression - it was an unmistakable mixture of concern and regret, and could only mean one thing. He exhaled, his own expression relaxing for the first time in hours.

“I take it the talented Mr. Farrad has contacted you, miss Constantine.”

“We wouldn’t have retreated otherwise”, she replied matter-of-factly, wincing and rubbing her neck. “Which leaves us with quite the conundrum. I understand now that we have been deceived… but if I give you my word to deal with en Bilal on my own terms, can we still expect retribution from your fighters for this attack?”

Istvaan took a moment to mull over his retort. “We’ve both lost today. There’s no reason for this to continue.” He turned sideways, his embittered voice dropping an octave, as if to underscore his intent. “Although you may find there won’t be much of the good canoness left to deal with when I’m finished with her.”

Constantine managed a weak grin. “In that case, may I have your permission to re-enter Wirashoda unmolested and search for survivors?” As their eyes met, there was a grudging moment of understanding between them. Istvaan nodded.

“If you’ll excuse me, I have to go tend to my dead.”

He could already detect his scent; that arrogant mix of cologne and cigars hanging subtly in the air, thought Wahpekute Assiniboine as he walked through the Guiding Hand Social Club’s unguarded doorway - through his deception of Jade Constantine, and with Istvaan’s lackeys pre-occupied by Jericho Fraction cannon-fodder at Wirashoda system’s gate, he was free to leave his calling card.

He noted an attractive girl at the bar, one of the few nightclub staff remaining; she eyed the tall Brutor with a warm smile, which he struggled to return - when her expression changed from welcoming to frightened at his razor-grin, he bitterly reminded himself that no woman could possibly desire his mutilated body, and continued toward the back door.

Another scent wafted past his finely attuned olfactory senses - a muskier animal fragrance that caused his ghoulish grimace to widen. He had come here with his present for the old Caldari in his pocket, but scenting Shogaatsu’s damnable Slaver-hound gave him another idea; a far more poignant message to send to his hated foe.

Some ten minutes later, he returned to the bar, package firmly under-hand. He slid it toward the bargirl, eyes fixed on hers, reading her discomfort.

“I’m an old friend of Istvaan’s”, he half-whispered, voice like a nest of serpents. “I would appreciate if you forwarded this to him.”

He turned to leave, then stopped.

“… No peeking.”

The nearly total devastation wrought upon the Chorus of Angels’ aft decks was nothing short of nauseating to the old man. Even though some sections were still ablaze or exposed to space, he shunned the peril and insisted on touring the ravaged tertiary reactor chamber. Such a shame, he thought running his hand against a slightly buckled wall plate, almost as though comforting an injured pet - such damage inflicted upon this priceless relic was nearly irreclaimable, a sickening affront to a history buff of Shogaatsu’s ilk.

Artel Rivaad cautiously appeared at his side. “Forward drive is back up, we won’t need to call tug-ships to haul her in.”

Istvaan nodded, allowing himself a smile. “I guess I’ve been delaying that retro-fit for far too long, Artel. Let that be a lesson to you, never let sentiment get in the way of effectiveness.”

“Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree”, retorted Artel, gazing upward. “This thing was important to you, to all of us in a way… it’ll be a shame to lose the history recorded here.”

“That it will. Something tells me she’ll be fine though.” They passed from the spinal access corridor into the great engineering chamber where one of the Chorus of Angels’ three antimatter reactors once lay. The compartment had been exposed to vacuum by the interstellar warfare equivalent of a bulls-eye hit from Jericho Fraction’s battleship - as emergency bulkheads fell to contain the loss of precious atmosphere, they also inevitably served to trap the engineers inside. Here and there, great fragments of the reactor shell lay scattered like the skin of an onion.

“I think it’s high time to refit her with second generation technology, bring her up to modern day standard… it’s amazing, though. That blast sent a flashback through the PD grid, and these engineers had it re-routed in a heartbeat.”

A pair of private charter officers brushed past them, carrying a groaning, heavily sedated Amarr man with awful burns away on a stretcher. Already, the deathwatch had set to their grim task, loading the fallen into ceremonial torpedo-coffins. Farther away, a wheezing hydraulic power-loader bulldozed debris and mangled dead ever closer to the crippled reactor’s plasma crucible. Artel could not help but notice Istvaan’s brow furrowing in rage.

The old man was upon the power-loader in a heartbeat, and hurled the operator to the ice-cold hangar floor, a cloud of vacuum-formed condensation frost kicking up around him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing”, he roared at the startled young Amarr, who shielded himself in vain as Shogaatsu landed kick after brutal kick upon his midsection.

“Sir! Stop, please! I was just incinerating them before they started to reek! They’re just slaves!”

The Caldari stormed closer, grabbing the loader operator by the collar and shaking him violently, his own ever-present sunglasses coming loose and hanging by one ear-piece. “Listen to me very carefully, you filthy witless fuck. Those mere slaves are the only reason why you and I are still alive. You’re going to pick every last one of those bodies out of that wreckage using your own two hands. Then you’re going to give them a proper - naval - burial among the other dead. Finally, you can inform the captain of this ship that his services will no longer be required, and tender your own resignation alongside his.” The young officer was far too petrified to argue - in part due to his reputation, but chiefly because of the fact that one of the old man’s cosmetic contact lenses had come loose during the battle. Oblivious to this fact, Istvaan leered at him hatefully with one brown, and one piercing, baleful white eye.

Noting that a number of engineers and slaves had abandoned their tasks to observe the spectacle, he relinquished his grip on the poor sap, letting him down to the hangar floor. ”Now get out of my sight before I do something you regret”, he intoned quietly, adjusting his glasses.

An hour later, the final mournful clang of docking gantries securing themselves against the Chorus of Angels’ ravaged exterior announced the conclusion of a most sordid chapter in Istvaan’s life. The hero’s welcome of cheering Guiding Hand staff and local miners, all of whom had either participated in, or observed the battle on long-range scans, did nothing to wash away the foul taste in his mouth. So many dead, so many of his own irretrievably dead, and all to secure one whore’s honour.

Artel Rivaad was at his side, soon joined by the towering Inquisitor Doradus. They walked wordlessly back to the club, each with a stiff drink foremost on their minds - suddenly, Doradus’ arm shot out across Istvaan’s chest, stopping him in his tracks. The monstrosity inhaled deeply.

“Something is not right.”

Exchanging concerned glances, the trio stormed into the Guiding Hand nightclub. The moment they stepped through the door, they were greeted by a girlish shriek. “Mr. S? Oh I’m so glad you’re back in one piece!” Shaheen the bargirl was ecstatic at the sight of her employer, jumping up and down like a jackrabbit.

“A friend of yours was here! He dropped off a package!”

Shogaatsu sauntered over to the bar, eyeing the box with suspicion. He had seen the same box in his private office, he was certain of it - as he reached for it, Doradus’ hand stayed his own - already, the Inquisitor had sensed what was inside, and in an uncharacteristic display of compassion, attempted to prevent the Caldari from peering in.

He did so for but a moment then closed the lid, turned on his heel and made to leave the nightclub. His face was utterly devoid of emotion. Concerned, Artel sidled over to the Inquisitor. “What’s in the box?”

Doradus followed the old man with his eyes. “See for yourself…”

Artel had scarcely lifted the lid an inch, when he leapt away with a disgusted yelp. There, in the box, lay the cleanly severed head of Shogaatsu’s pet Slaver - a deactivated Guiding Hand coin-bomb resting on its grossly extended tongue. The flimsy cardboard box had by now begun to seep through with the animal’s coagulating brown ichor.

“What the fuck is this supposed to mean?” he shouted.

“It means canoness Rolette en Bilal is still very much alive”, Heraeus Doradus replied, words dripping from his mouth like venom, eyes still cast toward the nightclub entrance, “and that someone is after Mr. Shogaatsu… personally.”