The House of the Reapr welcomes the following Novices: TheRealPenguintrooper754, Gabriel Daniels, Jermaine Key, r4vu3, and Dividente Serital to its ranks.
As your Fleet Admiral, I, Crimson_Reapr, welcome you, honor your commitment, and thank you for your service. May our power reach beyond the edges of charted space, and may ruin fall upon all who stand against humanity's strength.
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POV: Mark Shephard
There was no time for a vacation, nor did I want one. I had a billion and a half credits sitting in my newly inflated Helix Business account and a self-imposed five-month timeline to completely overhaul the next ruined warship, secure a massive piece of real estate in unconquered space, and move my entire operation off Mechanicus Station.
If I were going to pull off an exodus and build my own kingdom in the black, every single second counted. To hit that five-month deadline, I had already authorized Marcos to drastically expand our automated workforce using the Material we had. The charging alcoves lining the massive walls of the drydock had been heavily modified and expanded, and we now boasted a full one hundred utility drones at our disposal. It was a mechanical swarm that hummed with terrifying, unified efficiency.
Sitting dead center in the primary cradle, completely dwarfing the central gantry with its sheer, broken mass, was the Swift Justice.
I stood on the upper observation deck, a fresh, steaming mug of synthetic black coffee in my hand, staring down at the mangled corvette. While I had been dealing with Victor Vance and his elite Praetorians in the front office, Marcos had seamlessly utilized the new swarm to continue carefully towing the vessel from its temporary holding spot in the secondary bay over to the primary S-Alloy structural clamps. Now, positioned directly under the harsh, uncompromising glare of the amber industrial floodlights, the true, horrifying extent of the damage was laid bare.
The Swift Justice was an Aegis Aerospace design, built primarily for sub-light speed and rapid, devastating strike capabilities. Her original exterior profile was meant to evoke the sleek, lethal geometry of a Bowie knife. It had a sharp, aggressively angled forward bow that widened out into a thick, heavily armored midsection before tapering back smoothly toward the massive thruster banks.
But right now, the knife was shattered.
The ship was practically a flying sieve. She had received the brunt of the fire during whatever classified skirmish it had fought in, or so I guessed due to the lack of paint and identifying sigils across her hull. There were many through-and-through railgun penetrations that riddled the port and starboard flanks. The entry wounds on the port side were deceptively neat, with perfectly circular, frictionless holes where multi-ton tungsten slugs traveling at a fraction of the speed of light had simply ignored the ablative titanium armor as if it were tissue paper. The exit wounds on the starboard side, however, were blown-out craters of jagged, peeling metal where the spalling had exploded outward into the void, ripping massive, multi-ton chunks of the hull away with it.
"I just don't understand it," I muttered, taking a long sip of my coffee, the bitter liquid doing absolutely nothing to soothe the dull headache forming behind my eyes. I shook my head in absolute bewilderment, tracing the lines of destruction with my gaze.
Kenji walked up beside me, dragging his feet slightly against the grated deck. He was carrying his ever-present datapad, dark circles already forming under his eyes from the previous week's relentless, caffeine-fueled grind on the Vengeance. "Understand what? The kinetic yield of whatever shot them? Because I have the telemetry logs from the Navy right here, and if we run the numbers-"
"No, Kenji," I interrupted, pointing a grease-stained finger at the ruined corvette suspended in the cradle. "I don't understand the physics of how the hell the Navy managed to transport this thing here. Look at it. There are holes the size of an apartment punched straight through the primary crew decks. The secondary fusion manifold is entirely missing. By all known laws of structural dynamics and spatial gravitation, the moment they hooked a tow cable to this thing and spooled a jump drive, the sheer gravitational shear should have snapped it in half like a dry twig. It's a miracle it didn't disintegrate and take the recovery tugboat with it into the abyss."
Kenji adjusted his glasses, leaning over the railing and looking down at the ship with a critical engineer's eye. "Aegis Aerospace builds a very rigid, hyper-dense central spine to support that forward-heavy knife aesthetic. But you're right. Whoever piloted the recovery tug had to be coasting at sub-light speeds for weeks, utilizing massive structural dampeners just to keep the atmospheric drag from tearing the remaining hull plates off."
I let out a heavy sigh, setting my coffee mug down on the metal railing. The sheer volume of work ahead of us was staggering. "Marcos. Give me the internal diagnostic. Tell me we have a foundation to build on, or else I'm going to have to call Elena and tell her to bring a broom and a very large dustpan."
"Scanning now, Mark," Marcos's voice echoed smoothly through the vast bay.
A massive holographic overlay flickered to life above the Swift Justice, mapping the ship's internal structures in glowing blue and red wireframes.
"The vital areas are, for all intents and purposes, entirely compromised," Marcos reported, his tone clinical and detached. "The primary life support nodes, the port-side munitions magazines, the internal comms relays, and the secondary reactor housing have been vaporized or exposed to hard vacuum. The crew quarters are nonexistent."
The hologram lit up with angry, pulsing red zones detailing the horrific damage, highlighting the massive gaps where the ship's internal organs used to be.
"However," Marcos continued, the hologram shifting dynamically. The red faded slightly to highlight a thick, continuous blue line running down the absolute center of the ship. "The primary superstructure, the heavy titanium-carbide keel and the central spinal column, remains ninety-four percent intact. The slugs passed completely through the softer modular compartments without striking the main structural artery."
I felt a massive wave of relief wash over me, releasing the tension that had been tightly coiling in my gut. I let out a low whistle. "Thank god for small miracles, and big ones too. Because, shit, how in the fuck of all fucks did 14 of its 15 crew members survive? Also, if the spine was warped like the Vengeance, we'd be spending the next month just trying to recast a Bowie knife from scratch. But if the skeleton is good..."
"We just have to replace the organs and the skin," Kenji finished, a tired but eager smile touching his face. He tapped his datapad, already running the preliminary schematics. "It's a total internal rebuild, but we don't have to fabricate the geometry from nothing."
"Exactly," I grinned, cracking my knuckles. "Alright, boys. Let's gut the fish. Marcos, unleash the full swarm. I want every compromised piece of metal ripped out of that hull. Kenji, get in the mech. We're going to need the heavy lifters for the reactor casing."
"Initiating Protocol: 'Scrap Metal'," Marcos chimed.
Instantly, the heavy, driving guitar riff of Metallica's Seek and Destroy blasted from the drydock's primary acoustic arrays, vibrating the deck plates with aggressive, rhythmic thunder.
From the charging alcoves lining the walls, the full force of a hundred automated utility drones sprang to life. They were bulky, blocky machines, resembling metallic spiders armed with high-intensity plasma cutters, rotary saws, and magnetic grappling clamps. Directed by the flawless, multi-threaded processing power of the Marcos, the massive swarm descended upon the Swift Justice like a synchronized wave of locusts.
Two weeks went by, and I essentially lived in the drydock. I only slept in short, four-hour bursts on a cot in my office. I didn't even feel like crawling into the shepherd to sleep. Lyra, of course, protested that she would join me in sleeping in my office while Kenji would just return to his apartment.
My enhanced physiology allowed me to push my body far beyond the breaking point of a normal human. I became a force of nature amidst the mechanical swarm. With a hundred drones handling the tedious, repetitive cutting and ferrying of materials, the pace of the teardown was blindingly fast.
Sparks rained down in perpetual, golden showers. The smell of vaporized coolant, burnt copper, and scorched ozone became the permanent atmosphere of the shipyard. It coated the back of my throat and blackened my overalls in layers of permanent grime.
We stripped the Swift Justice down to its barest essentials. The drones sliced away the jagged, blown-out craters of the exit wounds, their rotary saws screaming against the titanium. Operating in coordinated clusters of four and five, they carried massive, multi-ton chunks of ruined metal to the rear of the bay. There, the automated hoppers of the S-Alloy nanoprinters waited like open, hungry mouths, swallowing the scrap metal to be broken down and synthesized for the rebuild.
We ripped out the destroyed crew decks, the shredded hydraulic lines, and the pulverized remnants of the secondary reactor. Kenji operated the loader mech with surgical precision, utilizing the heavy hydraulic clamps to pull out the massive, fused chunks of the main reactor housing that had been compromised by the kinetic impacts.
By the end of the second week, the Swift Justice looked less like a starship and more like the ribcage of a massive, prehistoric beast picked clean by vultures. Only the gleaming, incredibly thick central spine, the foundational ribs, and the primary thruster cowlings remained.
It was during the third week, just as Kenji and I were beginning to run the new S-Alloy internal struts to support the new compartments, that the Navy threw another logistical curveball at us.
I was waist-deep in the empty, cavernous cavity of the port-side munitions bay, using a heavy kinetic wrench to manually bolt a new mounting bracket into the keel, when Marcos abruptly cut the music.
"Mark," Marcos announced, his voice echoing loudly in the sudden quiet of the bay. "A heavy IUC recovery tug has just entered our localized airspace. They are requesting permission to deposit a delivery."
I wiped a thick streak of grease and sweat from my forehead with the back of my arm, leaning out of the cavity. "A delivery? Check the ledgers, Marcos. We aren't scheduled for a raw material drop from the mining guilds for another month."
"It is not raw materials, Mark," Marcos said with a sigh. "It is the Retribution."
"The Retribution?" Kenji asked over the comms, the massive yellow loader mech pausing its heavy lifting midway across the deck. "They're still going to give us that ship? I thought that was just a joke. It should be a total loss."
"Open the exterior doors, Marcos," I ordered, tossing the kinetic wrench onto the deck, climbing out of the ship, and dropping onto the gantry. "Let's see what they brought us."
The massive, interlocking blast doors at the far end of the drydock groaned open, the atmospheric pumps holding the air inside as the bay was exposed to the cold expanse of space. A heavily armored Navy tug, its engines burning bright, slowly backed into the bay.
Trailing behind the tug on thick, glowing magnetic tethers was... what could best be described as debris.
I walked to the edge of the observation railing, my jaw dropping in sheer, unadulterated disbelief.
The Retribution wasn't a ship anymore. It was barely even a recognizable shape. The corvette had been effectively cleaved in two. The entire forward bow was simply missing, sheared off, and vaporized by what looked like a massive, close-range explosive. The midsection was a crushed, crumpled tin can of twisted metal, and the engine block was hanging on by a few twisted structural ribbons and exposed wiring. It looked like a piece of tin foil that a loading mech had stepped on, crushed under its heel, and then casually kicked across a parking lot.
The tug released the magnetic tethers, letting the horrific wreckage drift aimlessly into the secondary holding cradle. The tug didn't even hail us on the comms; it simply burned its thrusters and sped back out into the void, entirely eager to be rid of the graveyard scrap. The exterior doors slammed shut, sealing the bay.
I stared at the mangled mess of metal drifting in the secondary cradle. I rubbed my temples, a massive, pounding headache forming instantly behind my eyes.
"I swear to god," I whispered, my voice echoing in the silent bay, thick with disbelief. "I am going to find the logistics officer at Fleet Command and beat him to death with his own datapad. How... HOW did they transport that? It's in pieces! It's literally two halves held together by spite and a single titanium strut!"
Kenji walked up beside me, pulling off his glasses and wiping them on his shirt, staring at the wreckage with wide, horrified eyes. "The gravitational shear of a jump should have turned that into a localized shrapnel cloud the moment they breached the light barrier. They must have encased the entire thing in a metal weave just to drag it here without it dissolving."
"Mark," Marcos chimed in, his synthesized voice taking on a dry, deeply analytical tone. "If you remember, the Retribution is obviously not scheduled for repair. Fleet Command has officially designated it as a total loss, and it's set to be scrapped."
"Then why the hell did they dump it in my drydock?" I asked, throwing my hands up.
"Well," Marcos hesitated, "You do remember that this was supposed to be a 'bonus' for you. A gesture of the Navy's ongoing goodwill."
I froze, the memories of the contract coming back to me.
"A bonus?" I repeated, my voice trembling with a sudden, volcanic surge of annoyance. I gripped the gantry railing so hard the metal groaned and warped under my fingers, the S-Alloy bending to my enhanced strength. "Are you out of your digital mind, Marcos? I know what I had read, and it didn't seem half as bad as it is. The IUC thinks they can dump their blown-out, radioactive garbage on my doorstep and call it a bonus?!"
"That appears to be their administrative categorization, yes," Marcos replied, his tone remaining infuriatingly neutral.
"They don't want to pay the recycling guilds the exorbitant fees required to separate the fused alloys!" I roared, my voice booming across the empty drydock, echoing violently off the bulkheads. "So they tow their void-roadkill to my station, pawn off their garbage disposal on me, and dress it up as a reward! It's bureaucratic sleight-of-hand!"
"It's a complete insult, Mark," Kenji agreed, his usual timid demeanor vanishing, replaced by genuine disgust at the military administration that governed their lives. "We should contact the tug. Tell them to turn around, haul their trash back to Fleet Command. We aren't interested in their bonus."
I opened my mouth to agree. I was half a second away from telling Marcos to get Elena Rhen on the horn so I could reject their 'gift', consequences be damned. But then I stopped.
I looked at the twisted, ruined hull of the Retribution. Then, I looked across the bay at the massive, empty hoppers of my 8x8 nanoprinters sitting in the shadows, waiting for material.
A slow, predatory grin began to spread across my grease-stained face, replacing the annoyance with a cold, calculated, mechanical genius.
"No," I murmured, the anger bleeding entirely out of my voice, leaving behind a clinical amusement. "No, we aren't sending it back."
"Huh?" Kenji asked, thoroughly confused by my sudden shift in demeanor.
"They think they're just getting rid of a problem by dumping it on us, Kenji," I said, my eyes glittering in the amber light as I stared at the scrap. "The Navy thinks they're being incredibly clever, passing off a huge disposal problem as a 'bonus' because standard Imperial foundries can't melt down and separate heavily irradiated, fused alloys efficiently. They think it's worthless trash that I'll eventually have to pay to get rid of. But they don't know what our printers can do."
I turned my back on the wreckage and walked back toward the Swift Justice. "Free titanium. Free tungsten-carbide. Free optic fiber. Thousands of tons of free raw mass. Marcos?"
"I think I know where you're going with this," Marcos said, and I could picture him rubbing his nonexistent hands together like a villain.
"Break the Retribution down," I commanded, pointing a thumb over my shoulder at the ruined corvette. "Every single bolt, every shattered hull plate, every piece of shredded wiring. I want it stripped and fed to the printers. One man's garbage is another man's treasure. We're going to break their garbage down, re-weave it, and turn the Retribution into the new guts of the Swift Justice."
"With pleasure," Marcos confirmed.
The drone swarm abruptly shifted its focus. Over sixty metallic spiders detached from the skeleton of the Swift Justice and flew across the bay, descending upon the broken corpse of the Retribution like a school of piranhas. The sounds of high-intensity laser cutters and ripping metal filled the air once more.
The fourth and fifth weeks of the project were dedicated entirely to the internal reconstruction.
The nanoprinters roared day and night, their induction chambers glowing with a blinding, atomic fire that cast long, dancing shadows across the drydock. The raw metal harvested from the Retribution was synthesized, its molecular lattice entirely restructured into the proprietary, hyper-dense S-Alloy.
Kenji and I worked in perfect, unspoken tandem. With the central spine of the Swift Justice intact, we had a flawless canvas. Since this was a complete rebuild, I decided to take some liberties. I completely redesigned the internal layout from the ground up. The old Aegis Aerospace schematics were terribly inefficient, placing delicate life-support nodes and atmospheric scrubbers too close to the exterior hull where a single strike could disable them. I moved them deep into the armored citadel, wrapping them in secondary S-Alloy bulkheads.
I ran miles of freshly printed, hyper-conductive S-Alloy wiring through the ship, creating a new system that could handle triple the thermal load of the original design.
I didn't need to use the modular thermal vents I had just sold the patents for to SIGS. The irony of the two-billion-credit deal with Victor Vance was that he thought he was buying the absolute pinnacle of my engineering. But the vents were just a band-aid for broken ships. I used what Anahrin had taught me, along with a few things I had studied up on. I was completely rebuilding the Swift Justice from the inside out using the S-Alloy. As we worked, I ensured to integrate thermal dispersion directly into the atomic structure of the ship's bulkheads. The entire ship was the vent. The heat would simply bleed out through the hull naturally into the void.
Due to our location, being in the center of such a populated system and all, we had to order the reactor the corvette required. We went with the same reactor it previously had, a Skovelish Mk. 12, costing a pretty penny of just under ten million credits. Once it arrived, we quickly installed it, dropping the massive, glowing core into the reinforced casing with the help of Kenji's loader mech and a few pulleys.
I wasn't all too familiar with the design of the reactor, so I ended up spending forty-eight straight hours inside the reactor chamber. Though whatever Strathari DNA I had in me enhanced my body enough to resist ambient radiation, I still chose to use my armor, which wasn't exactly radiation-proof, but it was radiation-resistant. I manually fused the plasma conduits, ensuring not a single micro-fracture existed in the system, and ensured my welds were absolutely perfect.
By the sixth week, the internals of the corvette were halfway done. I was missing quite a lot, but at least everything that was currently hooked up was fully functional. The lights on the newly constructed bridge flickered to life. The life support systems hummed, pumping clean, scrubbed oxygen through the ship's freshly minted ducts.
The exterior armor plating of the Swift Justice was a monumental task that was going to consume the better part of the next few months. The ship's original Bowie knife aesthetic was undeniably beautiful, but Aegis had sacrificed too much armor density for aerodynamic styling. I kept the aggressive, sweeping lines, the predatory bow, and the tapered midsection, but I thickened the S-Alloy plates by an extra forty percent, which, due to their lighter weight, wouldn't affect the ship's aerodynamics much.
I stood on the gantry, a heavy remote-control module strapped to my chest, manually guiding the massive 8x8 printer as it churned out the first massive batches of external hull plates. The S-Alloy cooled into a stunning, matte black finish with faint, dark crimson undertones woven into the metal, a deliberate homage to the armor that hid within my pendant and, well, to the Shepherd itself.
"Bring the lateral plating up," I ordered, my voice hoarse from yelling over the continuous noise of the bay.
Kenji hoisted the plate with the mech, a dozen drones flying alongside to help stabilize the massive weight. I stepped onto the repulsor-lift, flying down to meet it. I welded the armor into place, the blue plasma flame blinding in the dim bay. Piece by piece, plate by plate, the Swift Justice was slowly being reborn. She was losing the fragile, corporate elegance of her former life and gaining the brutal, terrifying mass of a genuine apex predator.
I noticed the sheer physical toll of the work began to show on Kenji. The man was running on fumes, sacrificing his tea to survive on synthetic caffeine and pizza. His movements in the mech were becoming sluggish, his reaction times dropping. But I had pushed him on, barking orders, throwing him stim packs, and keeping the heavy metal music blasting at maximum volume to keep his adrenaline spiked. We were bleeding for this ship, pouring our souls into the metal, and we still had three grueling months left on the clock.
The relentless grind of the second month was only broken by the daily, sixteen-hundred-hour visits from the shipyard's most demanding Foreman.
Lyra would arrive like clockwork, bringing a brief, shining hour of peace to the chaotic inferno. She would sit on the supply crates with Sergeant Miller standing nearby, swinging her legs and demanding detailed updates on our progress.
"It looks like a big, black shark," Lyra noted one afternoon during the seventh week, squinting up at the sharp, sloped bow of the Swift Justice. She was eating a bowl of synthetic strawberries, her face smeared with bright red juice, her oversized paper hat slightly crumpled. "But it doesn't have any teeth, Papa."
I laughed, leaning against the gantry railing, a stark contrast to the grim, soot-covered mechanic I was five minutes prior. "It has teeth, Bug. They're just hidden inside. When the bad guys show up, the front opens up, and the railguns do the biting."
"Good," Lyra nodded sagely, popping another strawberry into her mouth. "Sharks need teeth. Timmy said his dad saw a real shark once on an ocean planet before he died. He said it was as big as a house. I told him he was a liar because houses don't swim."
"Impeccable logic, Foreman," Kenji agreed, slouching exhaustedly against the thick hydraulic leg of his loader mech, nursing his fifth cup of coffee for the day. "Never trust a boy named Timmy. They are notoriously unreliable sources of marine biology."
I watched Lyra, her innocent chatter a soothing balm against the violent reality of our work. But beneath my smile, the heavy, suffocating knot of guilt that had formed weeks ago remained tightly coiled in my stomach. The massive fortune sitting in my Helix account felt like an anchor dragging me down. I was building an empire, securing an unconquered world for our future, but it meant tearing her away from the only sliver of stability she had found since the tragedy at the orphanage. I hadn't told her yet. I hadn't told Sister Elara. I couldn't find the words.
As the second month finally drew to a close, the Swift Justice was undeniably starting to take shape, but we were nowhere near the finish line. We still had three months of brutal, non-stop labor ahead of us.
The drone swarm retreated to their charging stations for their scheduled maintenance cycle. The massive nanoprinters powered down into a low-idle standby, their internal induction fields cooling to a dull, dormant blue. The deafening roar of the atmospheric scrubbers faded into a low, ambient hum.
I stood on the main deck of the drydock, staring up at the half-armored behemoth I was resurrecting.
I wiped a rag over my face, letting out a long, ragged exhale. The sheer exhaustion was finally catching up to my enhanced biology. My muscles ached, my bones felt incredibly heavy, but the immense, undeniable pride of creation burned bright in my chest.
"Kenji," I said, my voice quiet in the vast, echoing space. "Go sleep. Take the week off. You've earned it."
Kenji didn't argue. He didn't even try to formulate a witty response. He simply offered a weak, exhausted salute, stumbled toward the personnel door, and practically sleepwalked out of the drydock.
I stood alone with the ship, the silence ringing loudly in my ears. I turned and slowly climbed the stairs to the front office. The stark fluorescent lights felt blinding after weeks spent in the amber gloom of the bay. I walked behind my faux-wood desk and collapsed heavily into my chair, tossing the grease-stained rag onto the surface.
"Marcos," I muttered, rubbing my eyes with my bruised, calloused hands. "Run a baseline diagnostic on the Justice's newly installed sub-systems. Make sure the S-Alloy integration with the primary thruster housings is holding stable before we start mounting the engines and the jump drives next week."
"Diagnostics are already running," Marcos's synthesized voice replied, echoing smoothly from the desktop console. "All active systems are green. The structural integrity of the completed sections is flawless. We are perfectly on schedule for the five-month completion deadline."
"Good," I breathed, leaning my head back against the chair, staring at the ceiling.
"However, Mark," Marcos continued, his tone shifting away from the casual snark of a mechanic's assistant into the crisp, serious register of a strategic advisor. "There is another matter that requires your immediate attention. Regarding our relocation initiative."
I slowly opened my eyes, dropping my hands from my face. The exhaustion momentarily receded, replaced by a sharp, focused intensity. "The real estate search. You found a place?"
"I have spent the last two months continuously crawling the deep-web listings, neutral-zone auctions, and black-market planetary deeds on the G-Net," Marcos reported. "The parameters you set were incredibly restrictive. Finding a habitable moon with an existing, massive-scale orbital station, capable of heavy manufacturing, located in unconquered neutral space with a moderate but manageable pirate presence, and costing under one billion credits... it was a statistical nightmare."
"But you found something," I stated, knowing the AI wouldn't bring it up unless he had a viable target.
"I have managed to narrow the entire G-Net database down to exactly three viable options that perfectly fit your operational criteria," Marcos confirmed.
A holographic projection sprang to life above the desk, displaying three distinct, slowly rotating planetary bodies, each accompanied by streams of heavily encrypted environmental and structural data.
I leaned forward, my eyes scanning the holograms. This was it. This was my exit strategy. This was the foundation of the kingdom I was going to build to rival the corporate giants and the Navy alike.
"Let's hear it," I said, a spark of genuine excitement cutting through the fatigue. "Which one are we buying?"
"That is the complication," Marcos said, the holographic projection flickering slightly, turning the three planetary bodies a warning red. "All three of these locations currently have small, independent civilian populations living on or around them."
"I don't mind neighbors, Marcos," I said, waving a hand dismissively. "As long as they stay out of the places they're not meant to be on and don't ask too many questions, having a local populace might actually be beneficial for basic logistics and morale. It'll give Lyra some regular people to interact with."
"The civilian populations are not the primary issue, Mark," Marcos corrected smoothly. "The problems lie in the specific environmental and geopolitical hazards attached to each property."
I frowned, leaning closer to the desk. "Lay it out for me."
"Option one," Marcos said, highlighting the first hologram. "The infrastructure is solid, but it sits directly on the border of a territory controlled by the Blood-Let Corsairs. A well-known pirate organization boasting over two thousand active members, all of whom possess armed vessels."
"Two thousand armed ships is a fleet and a fucking half, not a gang," I grunted, crossing my arms. "I said I wanted a pirate presence to keep the corporate scouts away, not an ongoing warzone. What else?"
"Option two," Marcos continued, highlighting the second spinning moon. "Geographically, it is positioned very close to the IUC border. This would make our logistical supply lines and naval deliveries incredibly efficient. However, the orbital station is massively damaged and has been officially abandoned for decades. Rebuilding it to accommodate your future plans would require a monumental investment of time and resources."
"We just spent months rebuilding a single corvette," I sighed, rubbing the bridge of my nose. "Rebuilding an entire dead station from scratch might push us for ages, though we could just pay out to have it repaired. What about the third?"
"Option three," Marcos said, bringing the final hologram to the center of the desk. "It possesses every single structural metric you requested. The station is intact, the manufacturing capabilities are immense, and the location is perfectly secluded. However, the habitable moon it orbits has an atmospheric oxygen content of approximately thirty-five percent of the standard human requirement."
I stared at the hologram, my jaw tightening. "Meaning?"
"Meaning that unless your Strathari enhancements include the ability to breathe carbon dioxide," Marcos said flatly, "you, Lyra, and anyone else we bring will be permanently confined to living under pressurized glass domes. A single atmospheric breach down there would be catastrophic."
---
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