A Shadow Legios starfighter with generic civilian markings (a peculiar combination, to be sure, but the galaxy had seen stranger) prowled an uncharted asteroid field, its two-woman crew fully engaged in the delicate business of searching for something without drawing attention to themselves in turn.

In the cockpit of the two-part starfighter's Beta component, Miranda Sterling sat at the sensor console, frowning at her readings. Then, reluctantly, she keyed her intercom and addressed the pilot up in the Alpha.

"I'm not getting anything, Maia. No energy readings, no propulsion traces, and certainly not any coded comm traffic on the signal band your guy specified. If there is a resistance base here, the recognition protocols we were given aren't in force." She sighed. "I hate to say it, but I think we've been had."

"Well, hell. So much for that," Maia Sterling muttered. She began the Shadow Legios's power-up cycle, keeping her actions cool and professional in order to stifle any further frustration on her part.

Truth to tell, she'd never put much stock in the old spacer's story; she'd only let herself believe the tale of a secret cell of Wedge Defense Force survivors operating from a secret base in these asteroids because she wanted so much for it to be true. Now, of course, it seemed perfectly obvious that the whole thing was nothing but a scam. She could have tried to summon up some anger for the old man, but it wasn't in her. He was just trying to survive. No, in this instance Maia could only be angry with herself.

In the Beta's cockpit, Miranda sensed her sister's agitation and sighed again. While they had made some progress in their plans since leaving Cybertron, she knew that Maia's irritation with the rate of that progress was slowly rising. Fortunately, it wasn't being directed at her, just at the universe in general, but she still wished there was something she could do to help the situation.

The Legios finished its warmup, and Maia nudged the throttle, propelling it out from behind the asteriod they had parked behind. For the moment, she kept the fighter's movements slow; the spaceborne rocks in the area were annoyingly clustered.

They progressed this way for about a half-hour. It was a testament to Maia's skill that they managed to avoid any impacts. Not that the Legios couldn't withstand them, even without its shields up, but damage took credits to repair.

But as the fighter reached a somewhat clearer area, their luck ran out. The Legios trembled slightly as a piece of debris smacked against the top side of the Beta, startling Miranda out of her mild doze.

"What the... What was that?" she wondered, and began to ply her sensor controls. She kept them in passive mode, but she was skilled enough to get decent readings with them anyway.

"What was what?" Maia shook her head. "Eh, probably clipped one of the little rocks. Sorry. Go back to sleep."

"No, I don't think it was that. There would have been more debris cast off after impact." Miranda frowned, panning one of the Beta's cameras along and above the Legios. "Wait... I think I've found it..."

She blinked as the cameras focused on something that was so incongruous that at first glance she didn't register it correctly. Miranda shook her head, took a second look, and saw that it was the same as it was several seconds before.

"... looks like half a blown-up boomer out there."

" - Wha?"

"And not a Vulture fighter, either. Turn us around and get the spots on it, I need a closer look."

Maia considered this, and did as she was asked. The Legios pivoted around, and lights snapped on, piercing the blackness. Both of them could now see the debris more clearly - it was half of a GENOM Corporation BU-55C security boomer, its waist and legs missing, arms slack and skewed at its sides, power core dead.

"Well. That's not something you see every day," commented Maia.


Their curiosity piqued (and reacting to an unvoiced desire to avoid boredom), the two Sterlings began to canvass the asteroid field, using the Beta's powerful sensors, looking for anything else that could be considered out of the ordinary. They found more cast-off boomer parts, looking like they had been in an explosion in the distant past... and more disturbingly, human bodies, desiccated, frozen, and very much dead.

"Ych. Whatever happened out here, it wasn't pretty, Mir."

"What do you think caused it?"

Maia shrugged. "Who the hell knows? Hull breach, pirate strike, shipwreck, could be anything..."

"True..." Miranda hrmed, and tapped some more controls, plotting the locations of the boomer parts and dead bodies on a generic map of the area. The plot formed a rough oval, the majority of anomalous items arranged about its long axis. "Well, for what it's worth, I've got an approximate vector to follow, if you want."

Maia considered this, and replied with an affected nonchalance, "Eh, sure. It's not like I've got anyplace better to be this afternoon."

With that, she goosed the Legios' throttles a little more, and the fighter continued on its way through the asteroid field.


Another hour passed.

The amount of biped debris had tapered off about fifteen minutes prior, and now they were just flying straight on, dodging asteroids and seeing where their path would lead. The asteroids in this area were larger than the ones they had encountered earlier. Even the smallest was the size of a starfighter, a fact that Maia kept in mind as they flew. But she didn't see any signs of a pirate attack or a shipwreck - just more rocks.

Just as Maia was about to suggest to her sister that perhaps this wasn't going to pan out as she had hoped, her intercom beeped. "Yeah?" she answered.

"Got something, I think. I'm reading a noticeable gravity variance on one of the asteroids. It's definitely got a stronger local field than the others in the area."

"So what? So do a lot of other asteroids, especially if they're big enough. Mascons can cause all kinds of weird variations."

"Yeah... but at one Standard gravity?"

"..."

"I figured that would get your attention."

"Okay, this is just getting god-damn peculiar. Plot me a course, Mir. We'd better check it out."

Smiling slightly, Miranda did as she was asked.


Several minutes later, they arrived at their destination.

At first glance, it didn't appear to be much. About the size of a medium space station, the asteroid floated serenely among the other rocks. Its surface was dark, pockmarked with craters from lesser impacts. There were no outward signs of artificial structures or active habitation.

The Beta's powerful active sensors scanned the asteroid in the distance, searching for any clue (aside from the abnormal gravity) that man had once been here. Slowly, an image began to form what what few clues radar and sensors could extract. It detailed a rough square shape, laid out atop one plateau on the asteroid, surrounded by blocky compartments on either side of the central square.

Miranda hrmed and considered the information presented. Recognition sparked in her mind. She performed some verification scans, and they confirmed her suspicions. "Maia?"

"Yeah?"

"... I think this is a MIDNIGHT base. Or at least, was one."

"... that'd explain a lot. Any reaction from them?"

"Doesn't look like it. They could be hoping we'll ignore them, though they'd have to have noticed our sensor sweeps."

"Well, we'll sit here for ten, and if there's no reaction, we'll move in. We still have enough missiles to handle anything they throw at us if they retaliate."

Miranda nodded. "All right."

As they waited, Miranda continued to study the readouts, and refreshed in her mind what she knew about GENOM's deniable operations branch. As members of the Black Riders, she and Maia had experience in many sorts of covert operations; the swift strike and crippling of the Kilrathi Ghorah Khar Shipyards was just one noteable example. But out of them all, their missions against MIDNIGHT had been some of the most challenging. Operating with a cell-like structure, each project center was isolated from all the rest. Rumor had it that only Maximilien Largo knew the true scope of their operations, and even then, the WDF's intel division had never been quite sure that some opportunists within the gigacorporation weren't running projects behind their Master's back on the sly.

Whether operating on their own or with approval from Largo, MIDNIGHT bases themselves were of a type, refined over the decades to be discreet and unnoticeable to most wandering eyes, sensors, and investigators. Built of prefabricated, generic station components, bought through third parties, the bases were damnably hard to track by studying the paper trails of commerce. Once assembled by boomer technicians whose memory cores could be wiped after the work was done, the bases became operational, but contact with the outside universe was tightly controlled to prevent detection via subspace comm traffic. No lights, no windows revealed the station's presence in the black of space. Heat exchangers for the various systems and station reactors were cunningly hidden, their thermal signatures diffused over large areas to become negligible when viewed at a distance.

There was, however, one flaw in the design of such a base: one that the GENOM engineers had tried to resolve time and again for their offplanet operations, with little success.

In order to remain functional, the base needed gravity of some kind. Zero-gravity facilities were not good for long-time human residence, and using rotation to emulate gravity required a significant, constant supply of power to drive the rotation servos - leading to an obvious energy signature. In the end, it had apparently been decided that using artifical gravity would be an acceptable risk. Modern gravity generator technology used very little power, and could be maintained for months at standby levels without a noticeable loss of output. Since a station's gravity generators, unlike a starship's, didn't have to compensate for rapidly changing G-loads on the structure itself, it could lurk for years, unnoticed and unseen, without concerns about being revealed by the presence of abnormal gravity.

In most cases, this was true. Most starships and fightercraft who would have cause to visit an asteroid field would be unable to sense the variance. Their sensors were relatively 'grainy' in the grand scheme of things, the gravity changes made by a handful of generators unnoticeable to them.

But not to the sensors of a Shadow Legios.

Continuing to ply the sensor console, Miranda gathered what information she could. It appeared to be a relatively small facility, and there was little micro-impact weathering apparent on the exposed manufactured surfaces; quite possibly only one or two black projects had ever been held there. Doppler radar was revealing an interesting hollow on the opposite side of the asteroid, however...

"Ten minutes are up, Mir. I'm going in."

Miranda returned her focus to the present. "All right. Proceed on bearing two-two-one mark two-seven; I think I might have picked up a hangar door."

"Roger."

Maia carefully piloted the Shadow Legios to the indicated location. A quick check by Miranda revealed the presence of refined metals across a rectangular area large enough to accommodate several starfighters. While she started scanning for any access terminals, Maia switched back on the spotlights to help with the search.

The hatch, now illuminated, revealed something rather surprising.

"What the...??" Maia blurted out, and then narrowed her eyes, studying the angular script on the door.

"Found the access terminal... what was that, Maia?" Miranda paused in her work, and then blinked at the words that had been somehow scribbled on the hangar door. "... oh my."

"Yeah, figured that would get your attention, Mir." Maia shook her head. "This is just getting stranger by the second."

"No kidding." Miranda pursed her lips, and ran the Beta's comm systems against the access panel she had found. Within moments, the panel was hacked, cracked, and triggered; and in response, the hangar door opened.

"After you, Maia."

"Thank you ever so much."

The Shadow Legios slid smoothly into the open hangar, using its VTOL thrusters to keep it aloft once it entered the range of the base's gravity field. It pivoted around and touched down on its wheels, now positioned for a hasty exit should circumstances warrant it. The sisters watched as the hangar door slowly closed, cutting off the starlight from outside.

In the cockpit of the Beta, Miranda monitored the hangar's environment as it pressurized. At the same time, she used the Beta's powerful sensors to scan the insides of the base proper.

"Hangar's reaching one atmosphere, composition Earth-normal, trace particulates but no contaminants. Negative sapient lifesigns - this place is empty."

"Understood." Maia performed some checks, made sure her CVR-3F and flightsuit were sealed, and then popped the Alpha's canopy. With her Gallant-H90 in one hand and a thick-handled MagLite in the other, she stood up in the cockpit and surveyed the interior of the hangar. Just because there weren't any humans here didn't mean there couldn't still be boomers on standby somewhere inside, ready to kill the unwary.

The hangar was relatively bare, though there were clear hatches for airlocks leading further into the facility. Durasteel crates were piled near the edges and in the corners, but other than that, it was empty.

"Area's clear, Miranda. You can come out now." Without waiting for a response, she descended the Alpha's landing ladder to the deck.

Miranda put her own consoles and cockpit on standby, and exited the Beta. She too was armed with a Gallant, but her flashlight was one of the more blocky types that were all lens and reflector. She also wore a simple utility belt, with tricorder, tool pouch, and accessories for her Gallant hung off to the sides.

The two of them stood side by side, regarding the hangar and the crates. No words were exchanged between the two; they just set to work studying the interior to puzzle out its secrets. Most of the crates were unmarked, and neither woman felt like opening them for the time being. However, when shifting one over, Maia noticed the remains of a shipping label still attached to its side. She shone her MagLite's beam on the label.

The label itself was generic, but the shipping address spoke volumes.

It would've seemed straightforward enough to the shipping department guys at Raytheon, but from her time with a WDF special-forces unit, Maia knew a couple of things they didn't.

One, Brüningstrasse in Berlin ended at 55900.

Two, the Niogi Bundespost contracted out all heavy commercial freight handling services within the city of Berlin to a private shipping company. A shipping company that belonged to another company, which belonged to another company, which belonged to a holding corporation, which belonged to:

GENOM Corporation.

Diverting crates of munitions shipped to nonexistent "reseller" addresses in the city: simplicity itself.

"Well... that old spacer was halfway right," Maia mused. "There WAS a secret base in this asteroid field. It just belonged to the wrong side."

It was a moment's work to open the inner personnel airlock to the base. Once cycled through (one can never be too careful when dealing with unfamiliar stations), the sisters studied the corridor they were in.

Maia frowned at the dull greenish glow of the standby lights, which cast unnatural highlights and shadows up against the walls and along the plates of the twins' CVR. She swept the beam of her MagLite from side to side, which temporarily banished the spectral haze, but once the beam passed, the haze returned. She turned to address her sister.

"Miranda? I just want you to know... if I see even one cobweb in this place, I don't care how curious you are, we - are - LEAVING."

Miranda nodded, her expression grim. "Duly noted, Maia."

They started walking along the corridors. These were plain and generic, lacking most forms of identifying marks by the doors. They avoided those for the time being, following the readings produced by Miranda's tricorder, working out where the command center would be in the base from long experience with similar installations. Every so often, they encountered dark, dull stains along the floor and walls; without taking a closer look with MagLite or tricorder, they couldn't easily identify them, and at the moment, Maia wasn't particularly inclined to try.

"I don't know what's creepier, Mir. The standby lighting in this place, or the thought of MIDNIGHT folks having the sense of humor to implement it that way."

Her sister frowned. "I have to wonder which came first, the emergency lights or the name. I'm as much a Tolkien fangirl as anybody else, but there is such a thing as pushing it."

Maia nodded, sweeping the beam of the MagLite up and down the corridor they were in. "Any headway on finding the command center? The sooner we get the lights on, the better I'll feel."


Guided by Miranda's tricorder, and with a suitable application of elbow grease, they entered the command center and brought the base up from hibernation mode. Maia let out of a sigh of relief as lights flickered to life and control panels activated. She reached up, unsealed her helmet, and removed it.

"Be it ever so stale and recycled, there's no air like station air," she said to herself, and then set to studying the computers of the base, trying to figure out what the purpose of the place had been.

Next to her, Miranda was doing much the same thing. She took a deep breath, and then wrinkled her nose. There were some familiar scents in the air, ones that hadn't been removed by the reactivation of the base's air handlers. Leaving Maia to her work, she exited the command center and studied the now-lit corridor.

Inside, Maia had managed to gain access to the base's supply manifest. Already, she was noticing some peculiarities. "500 cases of GPM-150s and 900 cases of GPM-100s? What the hell would GENOM need with so many stockpiled General Hosement missiles? And where the hell would they put them?" she muttered to herself.

Further musings were cut off by Miranda's voice, which held a measure of urgency. "Maia? You better come out here."

Maia left the command center, turned a corner in the corridor, and headed for Miranda's voice. She didn't take long; her sister had not gone all that far. Miranda had pulled out her tricorder, and was currently scanning the stains on wall and floor.

"Yeah, Mir? What is it - holy... " Maia's voice trailed off, taking in the scene. Clearly, a pitched battle had taken place in this area; orange, rust-brown, and black stains covered the surfaces of the corridor. "... What happened here?"

"Obviously, a big boom or two," Miranda dryly replied. She continued scanning with her tricorder. "You smell that in the air?"

Maia took a wiff, and wrinkled her nose. "Smells like boomer fluid mixed with burned explodite residue."

Miranda nodded, and held up her tricorder for Maia to look at. "Mm-hm. Just what my tricorder shows for what's on the walls and floor. As well as dried human blood."

"Dayumn. Somebody was pissed off in here." She shook her head, and started heading down the corridor while Miranda continued her scans.

Maia walked about halfway down the hallway, studying the floor as she did so, and noticed another thick streak on the floor. There was something about this one's color and shape that twinged recognition in her mind. She raised her voice, and waved for Miranda to come over. "Hey, Mir, does this look familiar?"

Miranda glanced down the corridor, and walked over. She knelt down and studied the dark streak on the floor. "Huh. That looks about the width of a Cyclone tire. And look, here's the scorch mark you always get from the jump to battroid mode."

"Well, that's certainly consistent with all the micro-missile explosion sites at the other end of the hall." She glanced back the way they had come. "Whoever did this wasn't pulling any punches when they left."

Miranda nodded. "C'mon, there's got to be more evidence in here."


The two women walked a counter-clockwise circuit through the square main corridor. They tried every door they came across to get a sense of the layout of the place, although they didn't spend too much time in any of the rooms. If necessary, they could always come back later and investigate them more closely.

From what they could seen on their first pass, the MIDNIGHT base had been relatively well-equipped. There was an infirmary, mess hall, data storeroom, dormitories, and a small hydroponics unit. There were boomer charging stations and several small machine and electronics shops. Clearly this had been a nicely self-contained community, until the mysterious killer (or killers) had cut a bloody swath through the base.

Turning another corner, the two saw something decidely odd. What appeared to be a pressure bulkhead door had been ripped from its storage track and rammed against an outer wall. The sisters approached the wedged door, Miranda scanning it, while Maia leaned in close to study it. If she was quiet enough, she could hear a very faint hissing sound eminating from one of the bent edges...

" 'Breach hull, all die. Even had it underlined!' " Maia quipped.

"That's hard vacuum on the other side," Miranda confirmed. "Looks like that door is the only thing keeping all the atmosphere from venting entirely."

"Make a note, Mir. Before we leave, we fix this properly."

The two turned, and entered the door that was opposite the hull breach. It led to a different-style corridor, which eventually exited into a much different room - one with an empty, open locker (which looked suspiciously like those found in a WDF pilot or infantry locker room) and an unoccupied Cyclone hardstand.

"Well, I guess this is where the Cyclone came from," Maia observed.

"And it explains the blast damage past the hull breach," Miranda added. "Forearm missile plus boomer equals much debris."

"Helluva math problem, especially given the end result." Maia shook her head, and led the way back out to the corridor.

More hallway, more doors, more rooms. They found some storerooms filled with crates, many of them with obvious WDF insignia on the sides. There was a small recreation room, with a SegAtari Super Cougar game console hooked up to the room's master display, but they couldn't tell if it had ever been used. There was a computer room, and doors that opened onto much more industrial-looking corridors, presumably leading to the power and life-support portions of the base.

The twins entered another room, and for a moment they thought it was another infirmary, or possibly a surgical suite. There was a single long table in the middle of the room, racks of medical and technological tools along the sides, computer banks, and hooks for hanging intravenous fluid bags. All perfectly normal, save for two glaring anomalies.

The first was the fact that the long table possessed a duralloy restraint system (currently retracted). Various sensor wires and contact pads hung free over the sides.

The second was the smashed monitor on the rolling computer cart next to the table. Dried blood was spattered over its keyboard and the printer next to it. Some of the blood had even stained the printout that was still sticking out of the printer, and there were dark red streaks on the floor where a body had been dragged away.

While Miranda looked over the computers and tool selection, Maia went over to the damaged terminal and pulled out the printout to get a better look at it. What she read puzzled her, but it sent a subtle chill down her spine, and gave her a faint sense of foreboding. She read it again, and then looked over at her sister.

"Miranda. Take a look at this."

Miranda blinked at Maia's words and, more importantly, the tone of her voice. She turned around and accepted the printout without a word.

G-OS UNIX System XLII Release 6 version 1.12 (root@angband)
33/S MYTHOS-21 OFFLINE
base operating system OK
installing memory A.................... OK
installing personality matrix A........ OK
installing memory B.................... ERROR
Transmission error. Upload aborted.
personality matrix B: failed dependency. Upload aborted.
system activating
WARNING: MEMORY/BEHAVIOR CORE INCOMPLETE
This unit may be erratic or behave in unexpected ways.
33/S MYTHOS-21 ONLINE

"Good God," Miranda murmured, her blue eyes going wide.

Maia nodded. "Clearly, whatever those MIDNIGHT folks were planning, they seriously screwed the pooch." She tapped the printout with her index finger.

"And this... 'Mythos-21' replicant... must have been the one that did it," Miranda replied, running over the evidence they had found in her mind.

"I guess killing everybody in the joint would qualify as 'being erratic or behaving in unexpected ways.' " Maia shrugged. "At least it was conscientious enough to clean up after itself. I bet if we explored further, we'd find another airlock that's filled with boomer fluid and dried blood stains."

"I certainly wouldn't be surprised." Miranda looked back the way they'd come. "Come on, we'd best be moving. While I doubt GENOM ever came back to investigate this place, I'd rather not take any chances."

The two Sterlings completed their circuit, returning to the airlock they had entered by. Further study of the environs revealed a larger internal hangar adjacent to the airlock, with a door leading to the outer hangar large enough to admit a Legios fighter.

"Looks like the trail ends here," Maia gestured at the room, and the further evidence of rapid death. "The replicant must have gotten into here, killed whoever was on guard, and left."

Miranda nodded, and glanced over at her twin. "The going question becomes, 'how'?"

Maia allowed herself a smirk. "Take a look at the decking and the back wall, sis. And you tell me if the scorch marks aren't familiar."

Miranda blinked, looked over the singed deckplates and the burn marks on the back wall, and drew in a breath of surprised recognition. "Those are the VTOL takeoff blast marks for a Legios!"

"Mmm-hmm. And that'd explain why they had stockpiled GPMs."

Miranda's eyebrows went up. "Stockpiled General Hosements? How many?"

"It'd probably take us... hell, 10, 15 years to use them all up, if the numbers I read on the station manifest are correct."

"... that's a lot."

"Yep." Maia looked thoughtfully at the door leading to the outer hangar, where their Shadow Legios was parked. "Seems a shame to let them go to waste..."

Miranda chuckled, patting Maia's shoulder armor with a gloved hand. "Sister? I like the way you think."

It didn't take too long for the sisters to find and move the missile crates they needed; Miranda's tricorder detected them just fine, and a nearby gravlift helped with moving them. After helping Maia prep the Alpha and Beta for missile reload (a task they were very familiar with), Miranda took a break to check for any remaining facilities (like, say, bathrooms) they had missed in their earlier sweep.

Orienting the base's layout relative to the asteroid in her mind, she realized there was still a portion left unexplored. If her hypothesis was correct, there should be a corridor that cut through the asteroid, to the hollow she had detected on the opposite side. Curious, Miranda checked for any passages they had missed that might lead in that direction.

And there it was - a featureless corridor off the main hallway that ran straight through the asteroid to the other side. There she found an observation gallery jutting out of the asteroid's surface, and what she saw beyond the shielded windows...

Miranda activated her communicator. "Maia, get down here! You are not gonna believe this!"


"You were right. I - don't - believe it," Maia breathed, her purple eyes wide as she took in the sight. She had paused in the missile loading to answer Miranda's summons, and now that she had, she was glad that she did. "The Liberator," she said, unable to keep an astonished laugh from creeping into her voice. "The god damn Liberator!" She shook her head in wonder. "These folks weren't thinking small, that's for sure!"

Miranda nodded, looking out at the vessel that was moored in the hollow of the asteroid. It was an Ikazuchi-class battlecarrier, one of a class of warships that had originally been produced by GENOM Corporation until they sold the designs to Rendili StarDrive, a Salusian-held starship manufacturer. The Salusians had corrected most of the flaws in the GENOM design (which itself had been stolen from the WDF centuries before), then put the revised version into production for use by the Royal Salusian Navy and allied planetary fleets.

Overall, it was a pretty good design, as starships went. An Ikazuchi could carry a large compliment of fightercraft, ground mecha, or both, along with the crew to pilot them and the technicians to maintain them. While not the fastest or toughest ship out there, it could still hold its own against similar opponents, and hang together through protracted battles. Just the thing for a patrol group or special-ops division on the go.

The fact that this one was painted in "Mars Division" livery, looking as if it had come straight off the cover of one of Maia's "Scott Bernard" novels, was just the icing on the cake.

For several minutes the two just stood there, each thinking about what this could mean for their future. Finally, Maia turned to face her fraternal twin. "Miranda?"

"Yes, Maia?"

"We definitely need to remember these coordinates. Oh yes..." she said with a grin as she stepped towards the transparisteel gallery windows. "... I can see much possibility in this." She crossed her arms, regarding what they had found, then glanced back over her shoulder. "Mir?"

Miranda directed a speculative glance at her twin sister and said nothing, waiting for her to go on.

"I think it's about time that GENOM, and the galaxy in general, learned that 'Mars Division' is more than just a fable or a legend." Without waiting for a reply, Maia turned around to study the starship further.

Behind Maia's back, Miranda quietly smiled at her sister. She had seen the light sparking in her twin's eyes as Maia considered the possibilities presented by this battlecarrier and base out in the middle of nowhere. It was a welcome change from the grim dullness that had become more frequent over the past months. Perhaps, just maybe, this was just the opportunity they needed to truly make a difference, and on their terms, not just on the whims of an uncaring universe.

"Hm. I like this plan, Maia. I'm proud to be a part of it," Miranda said. "But, one suggestion..."

Maia turned around, and looked at her sibling. "Yeah, Mir?"

"We are going to have to change the name." Miranda gestured at the side of the Ikazuchi.

Maia blinked, and looked a little indignant. "What? Why? That's what the Mars Division's ship is supposed to be called. Liberator's a perfectly fine name for a starship."

"Well, yes... for any other starship," Miranda explained. "But if you're really going to bring 'Mars Division' to life, we're going to need to give the ship a name that will make people think twice and hesitate at the image, not immediately dismiss it as a hallucination brought on by watching too many epsiodes of 'The Bernard Files'." She quirked a grin.

Maia didn't look entirely convinced, but she let it go for now. Miranda might have a point, but she wasn't so sure making people think they were hallucinating would be such a bad thing. Especially GENOM's people.

Still, that discussion could wait for another time. Neither sister was inclined to shackle the other's buzz with such a quibble right now. It'd be some time before they could even think about putting this ship to work. Years, maybe quite a few of them.

But when they did... oh, yes.

Yes indeed.

"Travellers On the Shadowed Road" - An Exile Mini-Story by Philip Jeremy Moyer
Special to the Eyrie Productions Forum
© 2007 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited

Did not expect to end up back at that MIDNIGHT base again - hope to see this thread picked up later!

Unless GENOM was also planning to create a fake Nazgul Squadron, I don't see why any of MIDNIGHT would have the humor involved to name their base Minas Morgul.

-OM

EW

MIDNIGHT? Hmm, that sounds familiar, I wonder where I've heard that before. *Reads some more* Oh, it's one of GENOM's dirty work branches, right. I'll go back and look for the exact place it came up later. *Reads some more* Wow, this place is a mess. I can't wait to see who's responsible for that. *Reads some more* Maia's right, that -is- a lot of missles. What could they possibly need 1400 crates of- Hey, wait.

Hidden GENOM Base + Mass Murder Mystery + Lots and Lots of Missles = ...Oh, it couldn't possibly be...

And so, of course, it was, and I now have my first look at how Scott's going to be tieing in with the rest of the story. Still, it's striking how, more than the dead bodies or the Cyclone tracks or the Legios VTOL marks or even the freaking MYTHOS printout, -nothing- connects this story with Scott for me more than two off-hand comments about the number of missiles at the base.

Anyway, all that aside, I'm now intensely curious as to what the first meeting between these two Sterling sisters and Scott is going to be like. And also what they're going to rename the Liberator to if Miranda wins their arguement, but more the first meeting angle.

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Remember, two wrongs do not make a right, but three lefts do.

I'm really here, but I'm not here, really.
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RCW#665 the other neighbor of the beast