TCTS 3: Book 3 Finale Part 2 (Patreon)

A single day had passed since the construction of the launch area when a meeting to discuss the Strathari revival project took place. It was, in every practical way, the last meeting that had to take place before Mark could commit the colony's full weight to what he'd been building toward since they had made their descent onto this planet.

Vita was the one to call for the meeting, and by the time Mark arrived, Talos was already there, standing in front of the display wall where Vita kept the running visualization of the Strathari genome, with 91% rendered as colored strands and the remaining 9% as gray voids.

"Mark," Talos said without turning.

"Morning, Talos," Mark said.

"I have reason to believe that you already know why we are here," Talos said with a tilt of his head as he stared at the genome.

"I think I have a good idea of what Vita's going to say," Mark nodded. "But at the end of the day, I'm just here to listen and make sure everyone in the room says what they actually think."

Talos nodded while keeping his eye on the display. The gray voids in the projected genome shifted as the visualization cycled, and Mark understood that Talos had probably been standing here for a while before he arrived. Long enough to make peace with what he was about to agree to.

After about a minute, Dr. Corven made his way through the doors, and Marcos and Vita joined them through the speakers.

Talos and Dr. Corven took their seats around a table while Mark stayed standing, finding it more comfortable.

"So, what are we here for?" Mark asked.

"Father," Vita said, her voice carrying a sense of serenity. "I have not made any progress ever since I mapped the Strathari genome to the limits of what our current instruments can resolve. As you already know, the remaining nine percent of that genome cannot be mapped due to our lack of technology, and I have already exhausted every approach available to me. Therefore, those sections remain opaque."

"We already knew this," Mark said.

"Indeed, we did," Vita agreed. "However, what we have not until now had was a formal recommendation on what to do about it, which is what I am bringing to this table today."

There was a brief pause before Vita continued speaking.

"I cannot, in good conscience, recommend initiating the cloning program until we have developed technology capable of scanning and interpreting the remaining nine percent," Vita stated.

The room went quiet, and Talos closed his eye briefly, as though he'd been expecting this.

"Would you like to elaborate on your reasoning?" Mark asked, "After all, we had already decided that the missing nine percent wouldn't be of much worry."

"I understand the predicament," Vita replied. "I can produce a Strathari from the samples we have, and everything would work as designed, with the nine percent expressing itself naturally through the developmental process. What I cannot do is guarantee that the expression is correct. We do not have the ability to observe whether the resonance cortices are forming as they should, cannot observe whether the lifespan regulators are stable, and I cannot observe whether any of the structures governed by the unmappable sequences are developing without hidden defects that would only become apparent in a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand years down the line."

"I see," Talos said.

"So you believe that our probability of restarting the Strathari race with problems we can't foresee is too high to go through with the process," Mark inferred.

"Yes," Vita confirmed. "And that not knowing is unacceptable for me, because to proceed would be to create individuals who might be carrying undetected defects generations to come, and may not present themselves until we are all long gone. It would be reckless, and in the strictest medical sense, malpractice. Father, you set my parameters and gave me the freedom to make choices. As the one responsible for everyone's health within your future empire, I will not do such a disservice to you or to the future generations."

The room absorbed that.

"Talos," Mark said. "What do you think?"

Talos turned around, and the prosthetic side of his face caught the room's overhead light at an angle that made it seem as though both halves of him wore the same expression. Grief with the edges worn smooth by acceptance.

"As much as I would love to see my people walk amongst the ruins of this planet once again," Talos said. "I have to agree with Vita... My people would not want us to be careless now, and if I were in the shoes of the future Strathari, I would not want the first Strathari to walk under a new sun in four hundred thousand years, just to walk under it carrying a defect no one could see, and to live a shortened life, or a broken one, because the ones that gave me life would not wait... I would rather be the last of my kind for another century, or another millennium, than be the ancestor of a generation that suffers because I was impatient."

Mark compressed his lips and nodded downward in silent agreement.

"I have thought about this for a long time, Mark," Talos continued. "I have thought about it every night since I woke up in your clinic, and trust me, no one wants my people back more than I. I want it more than I have the words to say. But I want them back whole, and if that means we have to wait until a scanner is developed and Vita can read the whole genome, then we will wait. I want to know that my people aren't defective, rather than have hope wrapped in a body."

Dr. Corven, who had been silent through the exchange, cleared her throat.

"For what it's worth," she said, "I concur. Producing Strathari on the current information basis would be medically irresponsible due to the simple fact that we would be creating a population we know to be at a risk we cannot quantify. That is not something that I, in my position of power, can approve of either."

Mark looked to his left where Marcos' avatar materialized, appearing like a loyal and suave butler. "What do you think, buddy?"

"I concur as well," Marcos said. "The mathematics of scaling an unquantifiable risk are the mathematics of eventually harming someone. And when it comes to reviving the race of my creator, I would prefer we not do that."

Mark nodded slowly. If Talos was saying yes to it, and, of everyone in the room, was the one whose grief the decision belonged to, then he had no reason to stand against it.

"Then it appears we have come to a unanimous decision," Mark said. "There will be no cloning until we have developed the technology required, which will become a priority alongside everything else we're doing."

"How long do you estimate it'll take?" Talos asked quietly.

"That is a hard question to answer," Mark sighed, knowing the answer weighed on what information he decided to master from the System. "It could be anything from a year to decades, possibly longer. From what Vita has told me, it isn't a matter of refining what we have but rather inventing new physics of measurement."

"I understand. It is not something that should be rushed," Talos said. "I have waited four hundred thousand years to see another Strathari. I believe I can wait a little longer."

The room was quiet for almost a minute before Mark broke the silence.

"Vita," Mark said. "Log the decision that we have come to today. The cloning program is on indefinite hold pending the development of scanning technology capable of resolving that missing link. This was unanimous and not a decision I made alone, and I want that in the record."

"Logged, Father," Vita said.

Talos took a breath and looked at the display one more time and sighed. "Thank you... All of you."

Then he walked out of the room, and Mark watched him go. This decision, though slightly difficult, more so for Talos, freed the colony's full weight to focus on their ultimate goal of returning to space.

---

Three days later, a second council meeting had been called, though this time it had been by Mark in the operations chamber Mason had built into the northern side of the city. It was attended by Mason, Ferrum, Kenjiro, Aurelia, Sarah, the former Europa ice-miner who had been running the open-air quarry, Juan, Reginald, Knox and Marcos.

Once everyone was ready, Mark pulled up a projection and began to speak.

"I believe that it is time we return to space," he said while pointing to the display, which showed a laid-out plan. "I have laid out six phases for this project, each one dependent on the last. Phase one will focus on establishing a communications infrastructure by launching and positioning satellites in low orbit. Doing so will allow all of the AI's to gain continuous coverage of the entire planet and enough excess bandwidth to establish reliable contact with anything we put beyond the atmosphere, thus setting our foundations for everything else to come."

"This phase will take a projected six weeks for the first constellation, which will be composed of twelve satellites that will be locked in a geosynchronous orbit," Marcos spoke, his materialized avatar waving its hands as the display shifted imagery. "I'll be handling most of the launch coordination while Ferrum handles the fabrication and Kenjiro helps Mark with whatever it is thermal engineers do. Pretty straightforward, considering the fact that we've done harder things."

"I can have the first booster hull segments in production tomorrow morning," Ferrum said. "The printer schedule is currently free."

"Go for it," Mark said.

"What will be the next two?" Reginald prompted.

"That'll be the station," Mark answered as the display once again shifted to a design that had been sitting in his head for months. He had built it during his hours between projects, refining it and working with Marcos over the past six months in the deep hours of the night when the city slept, and most importantly, Lyra slept. Mark had taken advantage of the fact that his mind now needed even less sleep than it had previously required to keep working.

The station would be a construction platform first, being more akin to a working orbital yard, designed to host large-scale assembly of vessels and infrastructure, with modular expansion capacity so it could grow as their needs grew. For now, the design was a central spine of reinforced S-Alloy with four extending arms with docking bays for construction drones and transport shuttles, a primary command module at the core, and, most importantly, a dedicated server chamber sized to house Marcos's expanded processing infrastructure.

"So, strictly speaking, that's not a station," Aurelia said, studying the design. "That's more of a shipyard, if anything."

"Why can't it be both?" Mark asked. "It's a shipyard that can also serve as our first permanent orbital presence. It'll have living quarters for a small permanent crew, a server room for Marcos, since he is going to need to be up there to coordinate the construction of everything we build past this point, and enough flexibility that we can expand it as we go."

Marcos's avatar laid his hand on Mark's shoulder as it smiled deviously. "I approve of my own expansion."

"Never change, Marcos," Mark said. "Never change."

"That central spine is going to require material at a volume the current mining operations can't sustain," Mason noted. "If you want this built in the timeline you have in mind, we need to expand extraction substantially."

Sarah, who had been listening quietly, spoke up. "When you say substantially, how much more are we talking about?"

"Ten kilometers of ridgeline, cut in staged sections over approximately eight months," Mason said. "This will require full-spectrum extraction, the creation of more automated equipment, the use of augmented Peacekeepers as crews, on-site refinement, dedicated freight rail down to the city and the pad, and more."

"As Mason said, a lot," Mark said. "Sarah, you'll be running the surface operations, and Aurelia, you'll continue running the deep tunnels into the Strathari facility complex alongside the new work. Juan, you and your men will continue your role as security around the expanded operation."

Sarah exhaled and pulled her tablet closer. She scrolled through something for a few seconds, then looked up.

"I think I can do it," she said. "But I'm going to need more crews. The augmented workforce will definitely help, but ten kilometers of ridgeline is a lot of dirt to move, and I don't want to run my current people into the ground. If you can pull civilian workers off other projects and route them to me for training, I believe I can have the extraction moving at full pace inside three weeks."

"Don't worry about workforce," Mark said. "I'm sure that the work of autonomous machinery will be of much help, and even then, I'm sure Reginald will coordinate with you for workforce reallocation, if needed." 

Juan tapped the table once with his knuckles as he brought up an issue. "I'm not too sure that the perimeter is going to be an easy task. Ten klicks of ridgeline exposed to the open sky mean ten klicks of new sightlines my men will have to defend. I'll need overlapping turret nests on the surrounding ridges and mobile response teams stationed at the refinement facility. And if we're pushing that far into the range, we need to formally decide what we're doing about the northern approaches, because the wildlife density up there is higher than we're used to."

"Coordinate with Knox on the defensive grid," Mark said. "Whatever turret coverage you need, I'm sure it can be worked out. As for the wildlife, we handle it the same way we've handled everything else. If they are not aggressive, then we share the territory. If they want problems, then they will learn just why humanity is at the top of the food chain."

Juan nodded with a smile. "Well, that settles that. I'm pretty sure I can have a defense grid drafted and my men ready within a week."

Aurelia leaned forward and clasped her hands on top of the table. "I'd like to raise something about the mining plan itself."

"The floor is yours," Mark said.

"The current proposed extraction route cuts through a section of the northern ridge that sits directly above the Strathari facility. Currently, we're operating in the tunnels below without disturbing the mountain above. If the surface extraction proceeds along the planned line, we're going to be cutting the ridge down substantially, and eventually we're going to expose the facility's original surface entrance."

The room went quiet as they considered how to navigate this possible issue.

"The plan avoids the section directly above the facility itself," Mark said after weighing the options. "But the entrance is going to become visible before we're done. When we get near it, leave that section of the ridge intact so that the entrance is only exposed to the sun, post a marker, and keep the crews clear of it. We've learned all we could from it, so it's time we treat it as a memorial site rather than an extraction target. We'll figure out the exact perimeter together."

"Understood, Commander," Aurelia nodded.

Mason's voice returned through the wall speaker. "That works with my current staging plan. We can route the extraction around the facility without losing significant material volume. Sarah, if I send you the revised extraction lines by tomorrow, can your team execute against them?"

"Yeah, I can execute against whatever lines you send me," Sarah nodded. "Just make sure the refinement facility placement gives me enough buffer for transport."

"It will," Mason assured.

"Great. Now that we have all of that figured out, let's talk about phase three," Mark said, and the display changed again, showing a shuttle of some sort.

He had spent a while on the design, changing it multiple times during the launch pad's construction. What he had arrived at was a heavy-lift transport capable of moving a massive load without needing a full-fledged spacecraft. It was purpose-built for planet-to-orbit runs, capable of both atmospheric and vacuum operation, with the payload capacity to carry construction drones, raw materials, and the smaller nanoprinters that would handle the fabrication work in orbit.

Being the first space-capable craft that had been created on the planet, he had called it the IRS-1A Hermes. The name had come to him easily, since Hermes was the messenger of the gods, the carrier of things across boundaries, it fit.

It had a length of 46.7 meters, a wingspan of 31.2 meters, a maximum payload of 2.4 million kilograms, a miniaturized fusion reactor, and 28 maneuvering thrusters for precise control. It would also have the capability of autonomous piloting, so the shuttles could run cargo runs without crews when the situation called for it, freeing human operators for the work that actually required them. Lastly, it had a front-loading cargo bay large enough to receive shipping containers, construction drones, and the assembled subsystems the station would need.

Kenjiro was studying the specs attentively as something caught his eye.

"The fusion reactor," Kenjiro said. "Has an output curve that indicates that you're running the reactor closer to the ceiling than most designs would."

"I am, because we can," Mark said.

"Yeah, okay," Kenjiro nodded. "I want to take a look at the thermal management on that reactor before anything is put into production."

"Ah, fret not, my friend," Mark said as he crossed his arms. "It's the piece of the design I'm least confident on, so you can have free rein there."

Kenjiro nodded. "Give me a week or two, and I think I'll come back with a revision."

"How many Hermes shuttles are you planning, Sir?" Reginald asked.

"Six, for the initial fleet," Mark answered. "Just enough that we can run continuous rotations to orbit without any single shuttle being overtaxed, and enough that we have redundancy if any of them go down for maintenance."

"And the construction drones themselves?" Reginal asked.

"Marcos will be in charge of them," Mark said. "That's phase four, and it happens in parallel with the shuttle production. Small, modular units, purpose-built for orbital assembly work, capable of handling the fabrication tasks the nanoprinters produce. Think of them as Marcos's hands in space, and he's going to have a lot of hands."

"I am looking forward to touching things," Marcos said, which caused Mark to sigh and shake his head while the others chuckled.

"Phase five will be the station itself," Mark pushed himself to continue. "Construction will begin as soon as the first Hermes fleet is operational and the initial material shipments start arriving in orbit at the coordinated location. I don't think I need to explain that further."

"And phase six?" Aurelia asked.

Mark hesitated. This was the part he had been carrying alone, mostly, because he was still drafting it in his own head.

"Phase six is what the station enables, which is everything," he said. "The next generation of vessels, deep-space exploration platforms, defensive infrastructure, and a whole bunch of other things I've been theorizing about, but that we can't build without an orbital construction capability. Think of phase six as more of the beginning of the fleet rather than part of the project."

The room absorbed that.

"I hope that we can have phases one through five done within half a year," Mark said. "It's achievable, but it's not comfortable."

"Nothing you have asked of us has ever been comfortable, Mark," Marcos said with a hint of warmth. "I don't see why we should start now."

Chuckles rang through the room accompanied by words of agreement.

Mark looked around the room and saw everyone slowly begin to coordinate, and a smile crept onto his lips.

"Let's get to work," he said.

---

Mark stood at the observation platform for each launch, and over the course of five weeks, twelve satellites went up. Each one deployed cleanly, moved to its designated geostationary position, and came online in sequence. By the end of the fifth week, the constellation was complete, and the AIs had continuous coverage of the entire planet. Marcos reported that his effective bandwidth had increased by a factor of forty, and the other AI's reported similar developments.

"This is going to change how I sleep," Knox said, which was extremely high praise coming from him.

"We don't sleep, Knox," Marcos stated.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Knox said.

At the same time that the satellite launches were taking place, the production of the IRS-1A Hermes was taking place, and the pace was, by any reasonable industrial standard, absurd.

The printers under Ferrum's control ran continuously, with the largest of the four twenty-five-meter radial units being dedicated exclusively to Hermes hull segments, producing complete sections around the clock, with Ferrum himself overseeing the quality control on every layer of every extrusion. The smaller printers handled the internal components, being used to produce the smaller precision parts, while the fifteen eight-by-eight-meter printers produced everything in between.

Kenjiro's thermal team, now augmented and running at cognitive capacities that made their pre-serum output look leisurely, redesigned the Hermes fusion reactor twice during production, incorporating refinements Mark had proposed during their design sessions, shaving 8% off the total thermal load. The reactor that went into the first Hermes was measurably more efficient than the one Mark had originally specified, because Kenjiro's team had found improvements Mark hadn't had the time to develop.

The construction crews welded and assembled the hull segments as they came off the printers. The augmented workforce meant crews of six could handle work that previously required twenty, and they could do it in half the time and around the clock in twelve-hour shifts. The first Hermes came together in 19 days, from the first hull segment to the complete airframe. The second in twelve and the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth in progressively shorter timelines as the production lines optimized themselves and the workforce learned the assembly patterns.

By the end of month one, six Hermes shuttles sat on the pad, painted in a muted gray composite of the vessels' outer shell with red accent striping along the flanks and TRS (Trisolis Rubrae Solutions) lettering on the nose of each.

That was the other thing that had happened during that month.

Mark had, without much ceremony or opposition, founded a company.

He had done so through a random announcement through the colony's internal communication network. A simple two-paragraph message that Mark had drafted himself while sitting on the observation platform watching the first Hermes take shape.

It read: "Effective today, the colony's technological development program will operate under a formal designation: Trisolis Rubrae Solutions. TRS. The name reflects the three ruby suns under which we live and the solutions we intend to build for the challenges ahead of us."

"TRS will be the operating entity for all future advanced technological development, including vessels, orbital infrastructure, defensive systems, and any other applications of the knowledge base we have accumulated. Existing colony infrastructure remains under the colony's civil administration, and TRS will handle the frontier. The two work together, and the boundary between them will be as porous as the situation requires."

That was the whole message.

Mark hadn't consulted anyone other than Marcos before sending it. The company existed because he said it did, and the colony accepted it because, over the past two years, Mark had led them, put their safety first, and overall, made the right call when time dictated it.

Lyra had turned 11, and she had grown both in height and in her never-ending curiosity about the things going on in the colony. So she asked him about it that evening at dinner.

"Why did you make a company?" she asked.

"Well, bug, that's because what we're doing next needs a name," Mark answered. "The technology we make has to have an official name and leader."

"Are you the boss?" she asked.

"I'm the boss," Mark nodded.

"Am I the boss when I grow up?" she asked.

Mark looked at his daughter across the table and understood that Lyra would inherit everything he had built one day.

"If you want to be," he said. "Yeah. You can be the boss when you grow up."

She nodded and went back to her dinner.

---

In the same weeks that the shuttles were coming together, the mining operations expanded.

The area surrounding the northern mountain had been the colony's primary source of raw materials since the very beginning, but the demand for what they were building now required a scale of extraction that the existing mine couldn't sustain. Mason, coordinating with Ferrum, had already been drafting the expansion, and Mark's authorization moved it from paper to earthmoving within a week.

Its scale fundamentally altered the landscape, as roughly 10 kilometers of the ridgeline were designated for full-spectrum extraction. Automated mining equipment, augmented Peacekeeper crews, and a fleet of earthmovers began stripping the mountain layer by layer, processing the ore on-site, and moving the refined materials down to the city and then the pad via a dedicated maglev freight line.

Mark visited the mining operations in the early stages when the destruction of the mountainside might have looked worse than the work justified.

He stood at the observation post built into the ridge above the operations and watched the work below. Massive extraction machines chewed through rock while refined ore rolled down the valley on the maglev line. Everyone on site was working with immense coordination and efficiency.

All their effort eventually paid off when the satellite constellation was completed and launched into orbit in the same week the first Hermes flew.

The shuttle lifted off from the launch pad, its engines glowing a pale blue as it climbed through the atmosphere. It carried a full payload of construction drones, three nanoprinters, and the first shipment of raw materials for the station's central spine. Marcos coordinated the flight from the ground control center, running the shuttle in autonomous mode since there was no reason to risk a pilot on a first flight that could be handled by the ship's own systems.

The Hermes reached orbit four minutes after launch, and rendezvoused with the pre-positioned staging platform, unloaded its cargo, and returned to the pad a few hours later for its next run.

The other five Hermes shuttles flew their first missions within the next ten days, and by the end of the month, all six were operating on continuous rotation, running cargo up to the staging platform where the construction drones and the nanoprinters were slowly, piece by piece, shaping the station.

Mark watched the construction feed at night, after Lyra had gone to bed, through some of the drone camera views. He would sit with a mug of the colony's dark brew and watch the station slowly take shape in orbit around his world. He watched as the central spine came together, section by section, printed and welded by the drones under Marcos's direct control. Then the primary docking arms, followed by the command module and the server chamber, which Marcos had, on his own initiative, designed to accommodate not just his own future orbital instance but also expansion capacity for the other AIs, if any of them ever needed to have a presence in orbit.

But watching the station take shape was not the only thing Mark did during his late nights, and that was advancing their own weapons. There were branches of knowledge in Anahrin's records and in the System's vast repository that lit up every once in a while. Information containing the foundations needed to build new weapons.

Now that the station was building itself and the colony was moving toward its formal transformation into something more, the fleet that would come out of the orbital yard would need to be armed with something better than what humanity currently had. So his attention shifted away from the station and towards advanced ballistics, even dabbling in direct energy weapons. He remembered his past life on Earth and all of the media he had consumed. In all of them, energy weapons seemed to be the cream of the crop for outer-space weaponry. He understood that there must've been a reasonable answer to why they always portrayed future weaponry as energy-based. 

So he worked on it during the deep hours of the night, with Marcos's help. He extracted concepts, taking a branch that the System illuminated, following it into the underlying physics, understanding the principle, and then, with Marcos's help, translating that principle into designs the colony could theoretically produce once the industrial base was ready.

But since energy weapons were still highly underdeveloped, he decided to shift his focus back to the more conventional railguns, and eventually created a breakthrough in their technology.

Mark came to realize that the parameters currently surrounding railguns were far more conservative than they needed to be. Current railguns were limited by their magnetic coils, which operated at power densities that had been calibrated for baseline human safety margins and civilian material tolerances, something he had already surpassed with the railguns of the Shepherd. However, even that had the ability to be further improved, and the System pointed him toward configurations that used a specific harmonic resonance between the coil arrays, creating a magnetic acceleration curve that was substantially steeper than the current designs that even the Shepherd achieved, while pulling less total power from the vessel's reactor.

The result would be faster projectiles with higher energy transfer on impact and less power draw per shot. 

Mark refined the concept over weeks of nightly work, with Marcos running the electromagnetic simulations and Mark reviewing the results in real time. By the end of it, he had a theoretical design for an upgraded railgun that would deliver twice the kinetic energy of the Shepherd's current model while drawing only 60% of the power. And another far more critical discovery while designing it was the fact that the design was scalable. The same principle applied to the small-caliber War-Frame weapons and to the massive orbital rail cannons he had already begun to sketch designs for.

While this was all taking place, the colony was also undertaking another massive project that would one day be a testament to their beginnings. It was officially called the "Dome Project," and it was going to be purpose-built to still stand thousands of years after everyone alive today was dead.

Over the course of the past months, the four crashed ships had been repositioned. Heavy lifters had extracted each vessel in sections from their crash sites, transported them into the city, and settled them in place around a central plaza that Mason had designed specifically to host them. The Strathos' Shepherd sat at the center of the arrangement, elevated slightly on a reinforced platform that put its scarred hull at the visual heart of the space. Around it, in a wide semicircular arrangement, sat the remaining three Vanguard mercenary frigates, the Ironclad, the Rampart, and the Bastion, along with the three civilian freighters, the Aegis Prime, Stellar Dawn, and Iron Will, each one settled at a distance that let visitors walk between them and up to the Shepherd itself.

The dome was going up over all seven of them as a vast overhead structure of reinforced composite and transparent alloy, resting on twenty-four massive support columns spaced around the perimeter of the plaza, rising to a peak two hundred meters above the ground at its highest point.

The transparent sections of the roof would allow sunlight through, so the crashed ships would sit in natural light during the day and under starlight at night. The support columns carried inscriptions that told the story of the crash, the survival, the founding, and the years that had followed.

Due to perfect coordination, the dome was finished the same week as the station, just a few days earlier.

Mark went to see it on the day the last support scaffolding came down and walked through the central plaza in the light of the three suns, past the reconstructed hulls of the ships that had carried his people here, up to the base of the Strathos' Shepherd where he could look up at the wreckage of the vessel he and Anahrin had built.

He stayed for a long time, touching the Shepherd's hull and reading some of the inscriptions on the nearest support column. He walked between the crashed ships and let his enhanced perception take in the details of the space, the way the sunlight fell on the surfaces, the way the acoustics of the enclosed area made even his own quiet footsteps sound different from anywhere else in the city.

He had to admit that this might have been the most important part of the city, and may remain so for many years to come.

The station was completed three days later, and a formal announcement went out at eleven in the morning, from Marcos's orbital servers, which now permanently housed him. The station's construction was complete, life support was stable, the docking arms were operational, and everything was ready to go. The first station in the IRS' short history was, as of that morning, open for business.

Mark received the announcement while sitting on the observation platform of the launch pad, watching the Hermes shuttles that had made it all possible sitting in their berths. Then he stood up, walked back to the maglev, took the ten-kilometer ride back to the city, and called for a colonial meeting at the entrance of the dome for the following day.

Mark had told Reginald to spread the word, and that every man, woman, and child in the colony was invited, but not required to attend. He didn't want anyone there who didn't want to be there. But he wanted anyone who wanted to be there to have the chance, because what he was going to say mattered enough that those who cared should hear it from him directly.

Reginald had spread the word, and to Mark's pleased surprise, every single person had come.

Mark stood on a platform at the dome's entrance, facing the crowd gathered in the plaza and the surrounding streets. There were, by Reginald's count, nine hundred and ninety-three people present, a growth from the nine hundred forty-one people who had initially composed the colony.

The date, according to the colonial calendar Reginald had formalized eight months earlier, was Tuesday, April 22nd, 2988.

Mark took a breath and looked over the crowd one more time before he began to speak.

"Almost three years ago," Mark began, "we came tumbling out of the void after an ambush. Some of us made it down, and the less fortunate of us didn't. The Horizon burned into the northern mountain with what remained of its crew, and there are people alive today because those five men and women took it upon themselves to risk their lives piloting such heavy ships into the atmosphere while carrying provisions we had needed, and unfortunately, never came to miss."

The crowd was silent.

"Most of you standing here remember that day," he continued. "Everyone who was alive during that forsaken day knows exactly where you were when the sky turned into fire, and the ground came up to meet you. And every one of you knows what we did after we hit the ground. We started building. We built houses. We built a wall. We built infrastructure. We built a home. We built a city."

He paused, looking out at the faces.

"You built this. All of you. The families who kept each other alive when the nights got long. The Vanguard who stood watch on the perimeter for weeks without proper sleep so the rest of us could sleep at all. The orphans and their caretakers who never stopped believing there was going to be a tomorrow worth waking up for. The engineers and the miners and the workers who paved the roads and garden beds in this city. You did this. Even with the help of the AIs, you, your hands, your refusal to lay down and take it were what allowed us to be where we are not."

A few voices called out the names of the dead, others called out the names of the living, and a few cheered.

"We are not, anymore, the survivors of a crash. We stopped being that a long time ago, and most of us didn't realize it. We are a people. We have a home. We have a culture. We have children who were born under these three suns and don't know any sky but this one. We have a future. And today, on the ground beneath our feet and in the orbit above our sky, we have finished laying the foundation of what comes next."

He gestured, and the massive doors of the dome behind him opened.

The crowd's gaze shifted, looking past Mark into the dome at the ships arranged in their eternal semicircle around the Strathos' Shepherd. The sunlight streamed through the transparent roof and fell on the scarred hulls of the vessels that had carried them here. Some of them had helped build the dome, while some of them had only seen it from the outside. But one thing was for sure, and that was that all of them were seeing this view for the first time.

"This dome," he said, when the murmurs had settled, "is where we come from. Every generation that comes after us will walk into this space, see these ships, and know what we survived and what we built out of it."

He paused momentarily before continuing. "And now I want to tell you what we're choosing to become. For nearly three years, we've called ourselves a colony, a word that served us right while we needed it. But it isn't the word we need anymore. A colony is a place that answers to somewhere else, yet we do not answer to anywhere else. There is no one out there who has any claim on what we are. There is no authority above ours or a crown we owe fealty to. This world is ours, so that we build here is ours... What we decide is ours."

The silence deepened.

"Today, on the twenty-second of April in the year twenty-nine eighty-eight, we stop calling ourselves a colony. Today, we call ourselves what we are. A budding empire. Today I declare it as the birth of the Imperium Rubrarum Solium. We are The Empire of the Red Suns. And I stand before you today, with your consent or without it, as its emperor."

The crowd erupted, and the sound of nearly a thousand people rolled through the plaza and up through the streets, and it kept rolling. All the while Mark stood on the platform and let it happen.

Somewhere in the front of the crowd, Titus's voice called out a chant: "For Emperor Shephard! For the IRS!"

The cry was picked up and carried through the crowd like a wave, spreading from the Peacekeepers and the Elites to the civilians, gaining volume as it went. The words carried up into the pale sky and echoed off the buildings and rolled back through the plaza. Mark let it run for as long as it needed to.

Once he was ready, he raised his hand, and the crowd quieted.

"There is one more thing I need to say," Mark said with a shift in his voice. "Because I owe you honesty, and because what comes next needs to be understood."

He looked out at the faces.

"We did not choose to come to this specific system. We were forced. The bastards that ambushed us as we retreated to create a stable and quiet life are still out there. House Volanti still maintains its hold and the IUC still profits. The corporate houses that decided our lives were worth less than their quarterly returns are still, at this very hour, making the same decisions they made when they made the ones that killed our friends. They are still choosing, every day, to be what they are."

The plaza was silent again, though this time the silence felt more oppressive.

"I have not forgotten them," Mark said, his voice growing colder by the second. "And I never will."

He remained quiet for a few seconds before continuing.

"I want to be clear about what we are," Mark said, and his voice dropped into the register that made people stop breathing and listen. "We are builders. That is what we have proven over our time on this planet. But let no one in this plaza, and let no one beyond the stars who may one day hear these words, mistake building for softness. We will conquer. Make no mistake about that. We will take the stars, one by one, system by system, and we will plant our flag on every world that serves the future of our people. That is a promise. But what we conquer, we will make into something worth having. Every world we claim will be a world worth living on. Every system we take will be one where children grow up safe, fed, and free. We will not conquer to destroy, but to build. And what we build, we will defend with everything we have and everything we become."

He let the words settle across the plaza.

"There is a cost to what was done to us, and that cost will be paid," he said.

The crowd shifted, and something in the air changed.

"The Imperium will never forget," Mark said. "And with me at its helm, it sure as hell will never forgive."

A low and dangerous sound moved through the crowd. It was the sound of agreement.

Juan's Vanguard stood a little straighter, and Mark's eye caught it as it happened. These were men and women who had spent their entire adult lives loyal to nothing and no one, who had sold their rifles to the highest bidder and slept in ships that belonged to someone else and fought wars that weren't theirs, had been hired guns escorting a convoy of refugees into the unknown. They had expected to serve out a contract and move on. But the universe has this twisted sense of humor, and what should have been a short mission has since stopped them from moving on.

Somewhere over their time on this planet, the job had stopped being a job. And now, standing in the plaza in the light of the three suns, listening to the man who had led them through all of it declare an empire, they understood what they had become.

"The ones who did this to us," Mark said, "are going to see us again. Mark my words that House Volanti, and the IUC by association and lack of action, will feel our wrath. The corporate rot that decided our lives were worth less than a quarterly return forgot about us and moved on. They filed the paperwork and closed the ledger and went back to their offices and their profits and their comfortable certainty that we were dead."

His voice hardened.

"They were wrong," he said, anger leeching off his tone, causing the crowd to be utterly still. "One day, they are going to look up at their sky, and they are going to see a fleet flying the mark of the three red suns. And they are going to remember us. They are going to understand, in that moment, that the people they discarded built an empire out of the wreckage, and that empire came back for them to collect in full."

The crowd let out cheers and whistles of enthusiasm and agreement. It was the sound of a people who had survived everything the universe had thrown at them and had just been told by the man they trusted most that the bill was going to come due.

Mark looked out at his people, at the seven Elites at the front. Severus, Titus, Aurelia, Lucius, Cassius, Valerius, Octavia. Every one of them met his gaze and wore the same expression. They were ready to follow him to the very end of the universe if he so wished it.

Mark took a breath.

"For the Empire!" he shouted.

"For the Empire!" the crowd repeated.

"For the IRS!" he said

"For the IRS!" the crowd repeated before erupting into celebration.

Mark stood on the platform, and he let his people cheer for the empire they had just brought into being.

The stars were no longer out of reach. And Mark Shephard, as the first emperor of the Imperium Rubrarum Solium, keeper of the Strathary legacy, father of Lyra, host of the ancient part of the universe's origin that had chosen him, understood that the founding was, at last, complete.

"Prepare your family's grave, Gregorio Volanti," Mark muttered under his breath. "Because I'm gonna burn it all to the fucking ground."

End of Book 3