All is Fair Ch. 04

The ship's computers were another possibility; there was no small school of thought that postulated that the language used within them was not undecipherable, it was just that the power used by the generators to activate those terminals had scrambled the data, rendering it useless, and that using the proper type of power generated by the ship's reactor could potentially solve that problem in one felled swoop. Of course, that theory, like so many others, had never been able to be tested... until now.

She almost skipped a step, practically dancing along the hallway toward the bridge. Her mind was working so fast with new ideas and possibilities occurring to her, one after another, that she completely lost track of time, only skidding to an excited stop when she got to the first flight of stairs up toward the bridge. The last few miles had gone by in a daze of excited anticipation.

She hooked her hand onto the guard rail and practically swung herself onto the first step before freezing.

Habit makes you do a lot of strange things. The fact that you had always done something forced you to keep doing it without even looking for an alternative. In this case, her time on the Primis had seen her make this same journey countless times, and in every one of those journeys, she had been forced to take the stairs. Twelve full decks worth of ascent, one step at a time. But, on the Primis, there had been no other option. Now, however, her eyes were fixed on a set of doors right next to the staircase that had never been used in all the years the Primis had been claimed.

"I can't be that lucky," she murmured to herself, stepping back off the bottom step and over to the elevator doors. Her hand nervously reached out and tapped the ancient rune on a silver panel beside the door, and she let out a squeak of excitement when a soft chime sounded around her. "Oh fuck, yeah!"

Her mind glossed over the fact that despite the amount of amazing, near-miraculous technology around her, she was still waiting for a damned elevator, and she bounced excitedly on the balls of her feet as she waited for it.

Finally, another soft chime echoed around the hallway, and with a near-silent whirring sound, the doors to the elevator slid apart.

Her excitement vanished in an instant.

There, on the floor of the elevator, withered, desiccated, and staring back at her with empty eyeless eyes, was a grey, startlingly well-preserved dead body.

Laura knew very little about human anatomy, and no human had ever seen the body of an ancient - and she had to assume that is what she was looking at - so a closer inspection, after she had gotten over the initial shock, revealed little more than the body was, in fact, dead.

Determining how it died, how long it had been there, or what killed it, was way beyond her current skills. In fact, it was already becoming pretty clear that there would be very little looting of this vault, it would require a concerted effort on an even greater skill than the Primis to unlock its secrets. She had expected to find a half-destroyed building, pull out anything useful, and then leave; that is all she had been trained for. The vast majority of the things she had already deduced would require whole teams with vastly more expertise than she had to dissect, and it would take them decades.

This body was just one more thing to add to a growing catalog of things she would doubtlessly need help with.

She hadn't realized she was crouching over the body, her mind working frantically as her body, apparently moving on autopilot, had knelt to look at the corpse of the former crewmember. But now, with awareness snapping back to her, she stood herself back up straight again and let out a deep, sighed breath.

She turned and looked at the panel on the elevator's wall, reaching her hand out to press the relevant icon on the wall, but it froze in midair. The icons were in the same language used in the computer systems, and she had no idea which button to press to get her to the bridge.

For the briefest of moments, she felt something crawling down her spine. A feeling, a sensation, one that only the most superstitious of captains ever paid attention to... almost like something was watching her. But she shook it off quickly and looked down at her still outstretched hand.

Grumbling in frustration, she stepped back out of the elevator and started up the stairs, casting longing looks back to the elevator doors for as long as they were in view. It was twelve decks between her current deck and the bridge. It was a climb that had her itching in excitement only a few minutes ago, but the elevator had provided an alternative that - like the entirety of this vessel's sister ship - had remained almost comically out of reach. Now, each step on her ascent through the ship felt like torture.

One deck after another. One step after another. One deep, increasingly labored breath after another, each one marking her climb toward her objective. Seven decks to go. Five decks. Three, two, one more left... and then, finally, the bridge.

The large silver doors slid into recesses in the bulkheads, splitting as if the passage of unquantifiable amounts of time had not diminished the need for maintenance or moving parts. For a moment, she squinted at the icon that opened the door on the panel beside it, still a dozen feet away from her, but shrugged. Apparently, automatically opening doors were not a new invention, and absolutely staggering security concerns aside, this bridge had one.

The last in a long line of questions was short-lived, though, as her eyes fell upon the sight beyond those doors. A huge holographic representation of the planet and the system around it hovered in the air above and just in front of the captain's podium. Beneath it, and in front of the command chair, was a long, raised platform that led to the main viewscreen. On either side of that were dozens of terminals, each of them bright with light, power, and information flooding through their screens. Scores of displays lined the walls, and a few of them were decipherable just from the diagram-like representations of their systems. Hull integrity, displayed as an outline of the ship's hull from different angles, all in the green... which seemed odd considering a large part of the vessel was buried beneath the ground. Shield status illustrated by another green thrumming orb around the ship. Engine output currently set to idle. Life support covering all but a few sections of the ship in another soft green glow. Power systems, marked by a diagram of the reactor and a bar beside it, about twent-five percent full - the power output, she guessed. Sensor information displayed on another screen, the host of ships in orbit above the planet identified in staggering amounts of detail, including the closest: The Seren.

It was all here. It was everything she could possibly have dreamed of finding and more. Every system that had proven so infuriatingly cryptic to a century's worth of Mariner researchers and engineers was now powered up, active, and functional, as if the ship had been parked here waiting for them to find for all of this time. She felt her chest hollow itself, a lump forming in her throat at the unimaginable scale of her find. The last few days, the discomfort, even that fucking suit, all of it forgotten in an instant. Her life's work was coming to fruition before her very eyes.

And then her eyes started picking up other things, things that had never come in those moments she daydreamed about a find like this. Each of the dozen consoles was paired with a chair of the person meant to operate it... and each chair was filled with a body. There were bodies on the floor, bodies slumped over railings and leaned up against walls. Dozens of them, a hundred of them at least, each of them bathed in the soft glow of the bridge's lights and of the consoles they had once manned. Each of them grey. Withered by time, and lifeless.

And each of them wearing a small, metallic looking silver helmet on their heads.

********

What Laura's eyes missed, however, was a small, blinking light on the comms display on the other side of the bridge, not that she would have known what it meant even if she had spotted it. But several hundred light years away, an identical light started blinking on the comms unit of a different ship.

The bearded, aged-looking man piloting the ship frowned at it. His cerulean eyes staring at it in almost incredulity as the sheer impossibleness of its meaning quickly dawned on him. WIth a sigh, he cast his eyes up to one of the security monitors. His student was still sleeping in his cabin, having not woken in the entire time since the sedatives had been administered, and not during the secretive flight from the capital either. He watched the security monitor as the much younger man turned over in his sleep. Elijah was due to wake in a few hours.

But that blinking light meant that plans had to be changed. The man who had spent the better part of a century being known as Master Wu had hoped he had months, maybe years, to slowly introduce the boy to his true nature, to set him on the path that Wu had seen the moment he laid eyes on him. That light, an alarm from a ship that no other living soul was supposed to know existed, meant that his carefully laid plans were now in tatters.

He shifted his gaze back to the console, tapping in a series of complex commands and looked up as the Nav computer adjusted the ship's course. It would be another day before they arrived at Xnios, which meant that Wu had less than that time to prepare Elijah to be introduced not just to his nature, but to his birthright.

********

Histories and Lores

The council of ministers, or the high council in less formal terms, is the second highest power in the Imperium and perhaps the highest authority that the normal citizen will ever lay eyes on. There are nine seats on the council, eight ministers - each responsible for a different apparatus of the state - and the First Minister, who acts as a tiebreak during votes, and as representative of the council to the masses. Between them, they are the highest holders of power in human-controlled space. For all extents and purposes, they are the Imperium.

So apparent is this display of their power that some have theorized that the Emperor is little more than a figurehead or even that he doesn't exist at all. They, predictably, are wrong. The Emperor is very much real, although very few people are astute enough to recognize the tender ways in which he manipulates the strings of power. For those doubting his existence, one question is always enough to gain admission of their doubt... Who chooses the members of the High Council?

There is no political suffrage in the Imperium. The masses have some small measure of power over what happens on an extremely local level, but anything higher than a township is governed from the top. Ministers are not elected. There are no campaigns. There are no elections of any kind anywhere in the Imperium.

There are also no promotions. Although, in some cases, a career path that led to the high chambers can be tracked by those willing to look for it, this is rarely the case. The Ministers are literal nobodies one day, then the most powerful people in the Imperium the next, with no clear indication of how they got there or what qualifies them for their position. Outside of the conspiracy theorists, it is generally understood that each Minister is personally chosen by the Emperor. But how and from where is one of the greatest mysteries of modern human life.

The eight council seats are each determined by the facet of Imperium rule they govern. Each seat is essentially the head of the ministry that oversees the various branches of government. The Ministry of Defence oversees all aspects of the Imperium military, from the Navy, Marines, and the Colonial Militias, through funding and recruiting, logistics, production, and research. It is the entirety of the serving military and the military-industrial complex combined under a single umbrella. The Ministry of Colonial Affairs practically runs civilian life on any Imperium world, including Earth. Humanity still maintains a free market economy, so most of the day-to-day necessities of survival - from food and the mining of primary resources to the production of domestic and luxury goods - are, broadly speaking, dealt with privately. But the rules that govern that economy and the people living within it are dealt with by what is colloquially known as the Home Office. Everything from the port speeds of civilian star bases to the punishments handed out by the court system, to the construction of infrastructure, to the organization of supplies and establishment of new colonies. All of it comes from the MoCA.

The Minister of Internal Security oversees both the Civilian and Secret Police forces and is responsible for maintaining state secrets, of which there are a lot more than a few. They are also tasked with monitoring all of the other forms of government to make sure they fall in line with the Emperor's ideals. Almost every instance of treason in the civilian sphere has been investigated by the Ministry's primary apparatus: The Internal Security Division, or ISD.

If the Ministry for Internal Security monitors people's actions, the Ministry of Public Information attempts to influence the people's thoughts. By heavily monitoring and controlling the spread of information, as well as spinning a positive narrative on any piece of news that proves impossible to keep out of the public eye, they are in charge of disseminating propaganda throughout the Imperium, controlling information to the press, and juggling the often tricky, but necessary role of censorship.

The Minister of Finance is responsible for the setting of tax rates throughout the colonies. These include the duties paid in far-flung ports and tariffs levied on the export or import of all goods into the privately run free market. The Imperium has, over its history, set up a huge number of inter-species trade agreements, and those working on these trade routes have to pay their dues. The Financial Ministry is also responsible for regulating and overseeing the market itself, as well as collecting and enforcing the taxes levied on its citizens. The purse strings of the Imperium are controlled by the Minister of that office.

The Health and Education Ministry is technically part of the MoCA, but ceased answering directly to that Minister generations ago. One of the most simple facts of rule is that a healthy population is a happy population, and happy populations tend not to rebel. The flip side to this is that an educated population is significantly more likely to be dissatisfied with the status quo. So, the Education branch of this ministry was responsible for what could and couldn't be taught at any level of the education system. Any subjects deemed socially disruptive - philosophy, large parts of history, and many other social sciences - are banned and replaced by more 'productive and responsible' subject matter. Literature is treated to an equal amount of censorship; massive swaths of mankind's literary greatness are deemed a disruptive influence by the state and banned.

The last two Ministries are essentially different sides of the same coin. The Ministry of Alien Affairs, or the Foreign Office. It is split, at least in name and number of ministers, into two branches, each given equal representation on the council due to the vital function they are deemed to hold. The first is the foreign diplomatic service. Humanity has, on several occasions, found itself at war with one of its alien neighbors. But, for the most part, relations between humans and other alien empires have been fairly cordial, with peace treaties and trade agreements being formed and renewed at a startling pace, so much so that a whole government ministry had to be formed to handle these inter-species communications. The foreign office is also responsible for establishing, maintaining and staffing embassies on all friendly foreign worlds and the necessary communications of state with foreign embassies on human soil.

The second branch of the Foreign Ministry is the one that deals with intelligence gathering and espionage. It is, effectively, the foreign counterpart to the ISD; responsible for the gathering of as much intelligence and the spread of as much misinformation as possible - not to mention counter-intelligence operations. Regardless of the current diplomatic tensions between humanity and another race - ranging from openly friendly to downright hostile - every single one of the Imperium's stellar neighbors is expected to be watched, spied on, and fed only what the ministry wants them to know, while simultaneously trying to prevent other powers from doing the same to them.

No matter what happens anywhere in the Imperium or at what level of society it takes place, one of these Ministers can be said to be directly responsible. It is a system that works remarkably well, not just in terms of efficiency but of effectiveness. The overriding motivation of the council is that of control. Control through influence, control through the allocation of provisions of goods and services, but mostly, it is control through fear. Each of the Ministers is highly educated and have learned that a government that answers to its people will only survive for as long as the popular winds blow in their direction. A population who fears their government, on the other hand, will last forever. The quickest and easiest way of gaining and maintaining power is to violently and mercilessly eradicate anyone or anything that poses a threat to it.

Power is held with an iron fist, one that is as ruthless as it is uncompromising. Behind it all, standing in the shadows at the top of the pyramid, is the Emperor: a man so illusive and enigmatic that nobody, not even the High Council of Ministers, is entirely sure how he rose to power in the first place, let alone dare to challenge it. The Emperor only has two types of enemies: the ones who aren't dead yet... and the ones who are.