Chương 275: Volume 2 - Intermission 84.999 - Grand Viewing Gala V (2/3)

The Sovereign-specific awards wrapped up with the efficient, unhurried pace that had characterised Proprietor Quinn's ceremony throughout—clean transitions, no wasted moments, each category given exactly the time it warranted and no more. The tier of awards shifted after that. The screen behind Proprietor Quinn changed, the category emblems updating, and the distinction was made clear: Recruit and Assessment awards. The full Drive.

Not just the Sovereign anymore, but every ship, every squad, every Marine who had taken part in the Assessment across the entire Drive and sector cluster. The room's attention sharpened accordingly. The Eye in the Sky awards moved through their lower tiers without producing anything that made the ballroom react. Gold. Platinum. Palladium. Then came the Two-Stars. Platinum first. Polite acknowledgement, appropriate applause, the measured appreciation of people watching other ships' Marines receive recognition.

Then came the Two-Star Palladium.

"Thea McKay, from Alpha Squad." The pause that Masters provided lasted approximately four tenths of a heartbeat before the arguments started, and they started with the specific, unguarded energy of people who had apparently decided that Thal Masters' earlier speech had been directed at everyone else in the room but them.

"Pity points." The voice came from the left cluster—one of the same voices from before, Veyra noted, the same western-affiliation Minor Legacy who had not, apparently, reconsidered anything.

"The UHF is simply handing them out to make a point. It's political, you see? This whole evening has been political from the moment that title card came up. I tell you it's—""She found a piece of equipment." Another voice, even younger, somewhere behind that person, agreeing.

"That's all this is. She stumbled onto something significant and the UHF is calling it genius because it suits their agenda. Anyone could have gotten lucky like that. Since when does the UHF do this kind of stuff?"" Anyone could have—" Veyra stopped listening to the specific words and listened instead to the quality of them.

The brittle, insistent quality of people who had decided on a conclusion and were working backward from it, rather than the measured skepticism of people genuinely trying to reason through something. Her father's voice came back to her, the way it always did when she was standing in a room full of people doing exactly this.

"Luck is nothing but preparation meeting opportunity, Veyra. Remember that. The next time someone calls a person lucky, ask yourself what they were prepared for that you were not and adjust yourself accordingly for the future." She thought about the clip of the young woman finding the vehicle and insisting that Alpha Squad follow it.

She thought about the fact that Corvus—her son, had allocated himself as a sacrificial resource with the calm reasoning of a man who knew exactly what he was doing—had placed his full trust in this young woman. Had accepted her Caliburn and trusted her instructions blindly. Had chosen her, specifically, to keep running after he was gone—to lead Alpha Squad in his stead.' Corvus does not trust carelessly…

'She thought.' He's never done so. Not since he was a baby.' She could give the young Cyan the benefit of the doubt on that basis alone.' If Corvus trusts her, then there's no reason to believe she is anything but what she appears to be from her actions.' The room finally quieted from the downright riotous candor as Masters restarted the recording, and the ceremony moved forward. Isabella Itoku came next—One Man Army, One-Star Palladium.

The clip played and the room responded with the same split reaction it had been producing every time the Illyan's name came up: Genuine appreciation from the people watching what she could actually do, and the familiar, slightly uncomfortable commentary from the cluster near the windows about what it all meant for the broader question of Mid-World integration. Veyra kept her eyes on the screen and her thoughts to herself, which was where they generally did the most useful work. The pause ended.

The recording continued.

"Thea McKay, from Alpha Squad" for the Surgical Strike Medal, Two-Star Platinum. The outcries came again, but Veyra noticed—with the careful attention of someone who tracked rooms for a living—that there were ever so slightly fewer voices than before. Not gone. Not even close to gone.

But there were faces in the room that had been loudest the first time around that were now producing expressions rather than words—the slightly conflicted expression of people whose certainty had developed a small crack somewhere between the first award and the third, and who hadn't yet decided what to do with it.

'Progress,' she thought.

'Of a sort.' The recording continued. Karania Faulkner. Emperor's Touch. Two-Star Crysium. The pause that followed was, if anything, louder than any of the previous ones—but differently loud. The earlier arguments had carried the shrill, brittle energy of people who had already made up their minds.

This, however, was the sound of a room that had been genuinely surprised and was processing it out loud, the overlapping noise of people turning to each other with actual questions and disbelief rather than rehearsed positions. Datapads appeared rapidly. Not one or two but a significant number of them, across multiple clusters, people pulling out their devices and typing with the focused urgency of someone who needed more information immediately.

Veyra tracked the movement without moving her head and noted that it was not limited to the Minor Legacies. Two representatives she had placed as solidly Major earlier in the evening were among them as well.' A Two-Star Crysium Emperor's Touch… The best field medic in the entire Assessment. Not just the best among Recruits—the best among every Marine who participated, including the Ace and Elite Squads operating at full Tier 1 Prime capacity…

From a young woman on her first Assessment, newly Integrated, with no accumulated Class framework, no years of combat experience to draw on and no apparent Legacy affiliation…' The reaction was, Veyra thought, more than understandable. She felt a version of it herself.

"Who in the Emperor's name is she?" she heard from somewhere to her right.

"Viscero, it said. Inner-World somewhere around—""I know what and where Viscero is, I'm asking who she is! The girl! Just what—" Veyra let the conversations run and turned her own attention, as she had been doing all evening at every significant moment, to Madam Sen. The fan was moving. Slowly, with the unhurried rhythm of a woman in no hurry at all.

The screen was still holding on the frozen image of Karania Faulkner accepting her medal, and Madam Sen was looking at it with the quality of attention that Veyra had learned, over the course of this single evening, to treat as very significant. The same level of attention she had applied during the medic's clip earlier. The same quality she had applied practically nowhere else. And there—so small that Veyra almost missed it—was the smile again.

'Just who is she to you…?' The question formed itself clearly, and Veyra held it there without attempting to answer it, because there was no answer available to her and she knew it. She had spent the better part of the evening trying to map Madam Sen's logic and had succeeded, to varying degrees, with most of it—the introductions, the pledge, the positioning, the test she was now fairly certain she had passed.

Those things had shapes she could trace, even if she'd only found the outlines after the fact and still did not know where it was leading, fully. This, however, was different. This had no outline she could find. A newly Integrated Recruit from Viscero with a Two-Star Crysium and no prior Legacy affiliation, and Madam Sen looking at her frozen image on a ballroom screen with the closest thing to genuine, unguarded delight that Veyra had ever seen on a Sen's face. It made absolutely no sense.

But then, she reminded herself—nothing about the Sen ever did, when seen from the outside. That was rather the point of them, deep down. The recording continued once again. And immediately, a familiar name appeared. Thea McKay. Two-Star Platinum. Stellar Republic Reaper. The pause produced noise again, but markedly less of it than before.

The room was beginning to develop a slightly winded quality, one of people who had been arguing uphill for the better part of an hour and were finding the gradient steeper with every new announcement. Some of the voices that had been loudest earlier were still present but definitely quieter, their certainty having shed enough weight over the course of the evening that outright proclamation was no longer comfortable. Then the recording continued and it happened again. Thea McKay. One-Star Gold. Forward Leadership.

The pause was, for the first time all evening, almost silent. Not the silence of a room that had nothing to say, for there was undoubtedly a lot that people wanted to. It was the silence of a room that had run the arithmetic and arrived somewhere it hadn't expected to arrive, and was still trying to figure out how to actually deal with it. Several looks were exchanged—careful, measured looks, that communicated volumes without providing anything that could be repeated or quoted afterward.

A few people near the large left cluster had quietly, incrementally, adjusted their physical positions—stepping a half-pace away from the colleagues who had been the most vocal, with the casualness of people who had decided that a slight geographic distance might be useful—if not downright imperative—going forward. Feet shuffled in that pause and many looks were exchanged. Nothing else. The recording continued.

And then Proprietor Quinn's voice, clear through the recording's audio, announced the Ace Squad award—Two-Star Crysium, the highest available, awarded to the Sovereign's Alpha Squad—and the ballroom stirred back into life with the warm, genuine reaction of people who had been watching this squad accumulate recognition for the better part of two hours and had, medals or no medals, long since arrived at the conclusion that the recognition was very much earned.

Corvus ascended the stage with the rest of Alpha Squad, and Veyra felt the quiet warmth of seeing him standing there— leading a squad that had just spent the better part of two hours making every Legacy in the room reconsider their assumptions about what Recruits were actually even capable of in today's age. Proprietor Quinn kept speaking, and the screen behind her changed. The Ace Squad award, Veyra had understood from the moment it was announced, was not going to be a straightforward presentation.

The category existed to honour squad-wide achievement—particularly the biggest upset performed by a single squad—and the Two-Star Crysium designation, the highest available in the entire Assessment, was almost never awarded to a Recruit Squad. Stolen story; please report. She had understood the weight of that going in, clearly. She had not understood, however—or had even had an inkling of—what the footage was going to actually show.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Proprietor Quinn's voice came through the recording, carrying the particular quality Veyra had already identified as her register for things that mattered,"let us witness the impossible." The screen opened on a control station in Nova Tertius. Urban environment, dense and compressed terrain that multiplied threat vectors and made clean tactical decision-making extremely difficult at the best of times. Alpha Squad ascending an apartment complex adjacent to the objective marker.

Standard approach, nothing yet that distinguished it from any other infiltration footage that she'd seen in her life. The word came through Proprietor Quinn's narration, and every Legacy in the ballroom responded to it the same way.

"Psykers." It wasn't the word itself—the word was just a word, seven letters, two syllables, something that appeared in briefings and classification documents and historical analyses with the detached, administrative calm of institutional language. It was what the word connected to, in the body, before the mind had time to intervene. And every single person inside this room had their own version of that connection.

Their own specific memory that the word reached directly into, bypassing everything that years of training and composed comportment had built, finding the original thing underneath it all: Fear. Veyra's own had been formed in a dense forest environment on the outer rim of Inquonia's second continent, thirty-seven years ago. She did not revisit it now except to note that it was present, and set it aside, which was exactly what she had done with it for the past several decades as well.

Around her, however, she watched the composure of the room make small, involuntary concessions to the same process happening inside of everyone else. Meanwhile, Proprietor Quinn's narration continued over the footage, laying out the statistical reality of what Alpha Squad had walked into without any preparation, without any anti-Psyker training—as the Drive had been too close to the Assessment to fit it in—without any prior awareness that this was the situation they were entering.

"Three percent survival odds for a trained Tier 1 squad encountering a single Psyker." The number was familiar—anyone with UHF experience knew that number—but hearing it spoken aloud over footage of Recruits making their way toward the exact scenario it described had a quality to it that the number alone never carried.

"Below zero-point-zero-two percent—exponentially less—for Recruits without training. Far, far less when facing two simultaenously."

The footage showed it unfolding exactly as the number suggested it should: The auditory hallucinations beginning to work through the squad's communication structure—Veyra watched the breakdown happen in the body language of the Marines on screen, the small, visible signs of people whose ability to trust incoming information had been surgically removed, the squad's coordination deteriorating precisely and methodically the way a Psyker who knew what they were doing would dismantle it.

The air displacement attacks arriving with horrible precision and tore into one of their members—Reimart, as she remembered. A Legacy representative somewhere to Veyra's front-left—she placed him as having significant field experience from the eastern front, low-tier Minor Legacy —made a very quiet sound when it happened, but then did not make another one. She noted it without looking at him directly.' He likely experienced something similar, at some point…' The recording continued.

What happened next, however, she was not— could not have been—adequately prepared for, and she had spent the better part of her entire life preparing adequately for things. In a fraction of a moment, the Cyan girl had come up with some kind of last-ditch plan. A plan she conveyed to the rest of the squad with a series of very chopped, limited gestures, that, somehow, the Squad Medic was able to pick up in a heartbeat and get the rest of the squad moving according to it, while the Cyan girl split off on her own.

Then came the explosion, the squad… surfing —there was no other name for it that Veyra could find—on the Defensive Heavy's Full-cover shield, through several floors as they breached their way directly towards the Psyker's destination. Isabella Itoku moving through the corridor with her massive two-handed chainsword, after the Psykers got the Defensive Heavy and Squad Medic, taking apart the last guards. The last explosion caused by the final actions of the Defensive Heavy before his own demise, in the corridor.

The Kinetic Redirection Ability sweeping through the last of the enemy guards before finally stilling herself. The camera finding the Psyker Duo, exposed at last, one of them turning toward the hallway to end the raging Offensive Heavy of Alpha Squad... The footage slowed. A pinhole opening in the window glass behind them.

A projectile—the Icicle, Veyra noted immediately, the same weapon she had seen introduced earlier as belonging to the Cyan—traveling through the gap that the slow-motion frame made absolutely legible, boring through the first Psyker's skull with the unhurried certainty of something that had been aimed from outside, from distance, through glass, at a target that hadn't even known the angle existed. The second Psyker was still processing the first death when the window shattered and Thea McKay came through it.

Only one arm, having lost the other to one of the air implosions from the enemy Psyker earlier. Her entire body bloodied and battered, the slow-motion footage giving the room an inventory of exactly how much damage the young woman had absorbed to reach this particular moment and was apparently operating past regardless. The Icicle came up. The second shot was taken at point-blank range with the same absolute, uninterested calm as the first had been from distance. The footage faded out.

Quinn's voice, when it returned, carried something in it that Veyra had not heard from her at any other point in the recording—genuine, unguarded pride.

"It is downright unheard of for a fresh Recruit Squad to defeat a single Psyker that catches them off guard. For them to defeat a trained Duo of Psykers under such conditions? It is quite literally unprecedented." The ballroom was dead silent. Several faces around Veyra had abandoned composure in the small, involuntary ways that genuine shock produced—a jaw not quite closed, eyes slightly wider than usual, the almost imperceptible forward lean of a body that had been pulled toward the screen.

A Minor Legacy proxy near the right wall had pressed one hand flat against her sternum without, Veyra suspected, being entirely aware she had done it. But Veyra herself was primarily thinking about Corvus, at this moment. Not about anything specific within the footage, which she had absorbed in full and would continue absorbing for quite some time. About her son, specifically, and the particular challenge now visible to her in a way it hadn't been before tonight, as she now realized.'

This is the squad you're leading, Corvus,' she thought, her eyes still on the screen.' Not merely a group of talented people moving in the same direction... A squad that can hold itself together while someone is systematically dismantling its ability to communicate and trust. A squad that can come up with a plan against an enemy they have never met before, in a situation they have never encountered before—without their Squad Leader present—in a fraction of a second, then communicate it and execute it flawlessly.

And, somehow, they did all of that without you, because you'd already been spent in the industrial sector days prior...' The weight of that realization sat with her for a moment, laying hefty in her chest.' The gap between being merely a good squad leader and being what this specific squad actually needs from one—that's not a small gap, Corvus... That's going to ask everything from you.' And yet…

She had watched him allocate himself tonight with the settled logic of someone who understood the difference between the principal and the piece. She had seen the squad that, through his reasoning, he had trusted enough to let operate without him—and it had paid off, without a shadow of a doubt, in that sequence right there.

And she knew—with the bone-deep confidence of a mother who had been paying closer attention to him than anything else since the day he was born—that finding ways to multiply what the people around him could do had always been the thing he was best at. Long before the UHF. Long before any of this.' You'll find a way… Somehow. You always do.' She allowed herself a smile at that—small and brief, gone before anyone could have reasonably claimed to have seen it. She was right about this.

She had never been more certain of anything in her life. On the screen, meanwhile, Proprietor Quinn was already moving—the Crysium medals brought forward, the ceremony proceeding with the efficient, unhurried precision that characterised everything she did. But then, another unexpected thing happened, as Proprietor Quinn simply kept speaking beyond the usual rewards. And seemingly didn't stop… Veyra heard the words.

She processed them individually, each one arriving cleanly, and then she processed them as a sentence, and then she stood very still for a moment while her mind ran the sentence back from the beginning to confirm it had understood correctly.

'A celestial object… Personally bestowed by Proprietor Quinn herself, come each Alpha Squad member's retirement… Any unowned celestial object, within the Sector… Any …' She was almost certain something had come out of her mouth.

She thought she caught it—barely, in the half-second between the impulse and the sound, snapping her composure back into place with the sheer force of decades of practise—and managed to reduce it to a sharp, controlled exhale that could, charitably, have been interpreted as simply breathing. Several people around the room were not as quick.

Three Minor Legacy proxies spoke aloud, outright, before they could stop themselves—short, involuntary sounds that were not quite words and were not quite not-words, the sounds of people whose composure had been exceeded by the speed of what they'd just heard. One of the older representatives near the staircase actually said" Pardon?"

loudly enough to carry, which under any other circumstances would have been a significant decorum violation, and which, in this specific moment, appeared to be entirely forgivable because approximately half the room was thinking it in exactly those terms. The pause, when Masters provided it, lasted considerably longer than any of the previous ones. And the room filled it immediately, completely, and without any of the usual Legacy restraint.

"That cannot be legal under the MC code—""She's a Proprietor, the code doesn't—""They had to have had help. Or at least information beforehand. It can't be—!"" Any unowned object? Does that include—""How did they even beat the Psykers…?! That makes absolutely—""Without the Psychic 101? Null-Serums? How is this—"" Stars. Stars are celestial objects!

Unclaimed stars—""There are black holes in the outer Sector that haven't been—""—six members, six objects, the compound value of that over a single century—" Veyra's mind had, independently of the conversations around her, already begun running the same calculations that the rest of the room was running, and had arrived at numbers that her composure was having some serious difficulty accommodating. The Sylarion Legacy owned one planet.

Three moons, acquired over the last decade, that were somewhere upwards of thirty years from returning anything meaningful on the investment. The portfolio was respectable for a Minor Legacy. It was a footnote compared to what was currently sitting in a box labeled " Corvus, upon retirement" inside Proprietor Quinn's private authority. Any unowned celestial object. Any.

Within an entire Sector that was the Proprietor's to command, which meant the choice available to him was not constrained by the modest inventory of a Minor Legacy's territorial holdings but by the full, enormous, largely unmapped catalogue of everything in that Sector that nobody had even yet thought to claim. She flagged down a servant with a movement that was considerably less composed than her usual standard.

The servant appeared—as good servants did—practically from nowhere, and she took two glasses from the tray in quick succession and drank them without tasting either one. Madam Dravain appeared at her right shoulder. The older woman said nothing for a moment—simply stepped closer and placed one hand, briefly and precisely, on Veyra's back, like she had seen a person needing steadying and had decided to provide it without making a production of it.

"Quite the generous one, our Proprietor," Madam Dravain said, with the calm of a woman for whom the recalibration of significant sums was a routine part of existence.

"Congratulations, Madam Sylarion." She paused briefly, and then added, with the directness that apparently characterised all of Madam Dravain's communication, "I would very much like a sit-down, at your convenience, to discuss the ties between our Legacies. No need to respond now. Take your time and consider it." She paused once more.

"I trust you know how to reach me." Then she simply stepped back to her position to the left of Thal Sen, as though she had done nothing more remarkable than comment on the weather. Madam Sen, meanwhile, was observing the room with her usual, absolute composure. Her eyes found Veyra's briefly, and the nod she produced was the same miniscule acknowledgement as before—small enough to be deniable, precise enough to be unmistakable.

'I don't know if I can survive this evening, my love,' Veyra thought, in the direction of Orvyn, several kilometres away, entirely unaware that his wife was currently in the process of being offered Legacy alliances from Major Legacies and celestial real estate while standing on legs that were performing their function mostly out of habit at this point. She was glad, profoundly and specifically glad, that they had agreed she was the better fit for this ballroom.

If Orvyn had been standing here instead—not because he was weak, he wasn't, he had always been steady in ways that had saved both of them more than once—but because his heart was considerably less armoured against their son specifically than hers was, and this evening had targeted that particular vulnerability with the precision of something designed to find it. He would not have survived the crater.

She was not entirely certain she had survived it herself, in any meaningful sense, and she had considerably more practise with this type of evening. She straightened. Let her breathing find its usual depth. Smoothed her dress again, unnecessarily. Thal Masters, after allowing the longest pause of the entire evening to run its course—and given what Quinn had just announced, nobody in the room was in any position to argue that the extra time was unwarranted—restarted the recording.

(Continues in Part 3 at XX: 00, whatever time this went live for you.)