Chương 264: Volume 2 - Chapter 79 - Critical Roll

People who have never left their home system tend to imagine Voidtravel as something like sailing—a long, quiet journey between two points, with nothing but empty space and time for company. They are wrong on every count. Especially the empty part. The Void is not a vacuum, nor a shortcut.

It is a parallel dimension, existing alongside our own Reality Plane in a state of permanent, total Unreality —a place where the laws that govern our universe do not apply, because the most foundational of them, Time itself, is entirely absent. It is this absence that makes FTL travel possible at all.

By slipping into a dimension where time does not exist, a vessel can cover distances that would otherwise require centuries—not by breaking the laws of physics, but by briefly stepping outside the plane where those laws have any meaning whatsoever. A Void Drive tears open a temporary breach in the fabric of reality, large enough to swallow a ship whole.

The vessel passes through, the tear collapses after a while, and inside the Void, the ship's Void Engines take over: Providing forward acceleration through Voidspace and generating the energy required to maintain the Repulsor-Field. The Repulsor-Field is not optional, if you wish to arrive anywhere alive. Because the Void, antithetical to its name, is not empty. The beings that populate it—colloquially: Void Daemons—are native to a dimension that is, by its fundamental nature, an anathema to everything we are.

We carry Reality with us. We radiate it constantly, and every living being from the Material Plane exerts what researchers call a Reality Radiation Signature, RRS in short—a broadcast that is, to the local inhabitants, roughly equivalent to setting yourself on fire in a crowded room. The stronger your connection to the Allbright System, the stronger this signature.

Psykers especially, as they blaze with it like a dying star, visible to Void Daemons across distances that most naval officers prefer not to think about too hard. The Repulsor-Field maintains a bubble of enforced Material-Plane physics around the vessel, giving the Daemons sufficient incentive to seek their meals elsewhere. When it fails, the results are… catastrophic. This brings us to the matter of Voidlanes.

The Void has an ebb and flow—currents, pressure gradients, and regions of concentrated Unreality that shift over time. Void Storms are the most immediately dangerous, capable of tearing a vessel apart or scattering a fleet with no reliable way to regroup.

Yet the things we refer to as "Temporal Anomalies" are somehow even worse: Pockets of Unreality so thick that Void Engines and Repulsor-Fields cannot compensate, trapping crew and vessel in a suspended drift that may last years, decades, or centuries before the ebb of the Void carries them free. Ships lost to Temporal Anomalies do not always stay lost—sometimes they re-emerge intact, crew alive and entirely unaware that several hundred years have passed outside.

The historical record contains no shortage of these accounts. None of them make for comfortable reading. Voidlanes are the mapped and maintained answer to these dangers—navigational corridors confirmed to contain as few hazards as possible. Not zero. There is no such thing as a zero-risk guarantee.

What there is, is a corridor where the probability of catastrophe has been reduced to levels that allow for reliable commercial and military transit, actively monitored by people whose entire careers exist to do exactly that. The large Voidlanes, however, could never be the product of survey work alone. This is where the Astropaths come in—Psykers of one of four specific Astropathy-based Paths, each fulfilling a distinct role: Beacon, Thread, Echo, and Veil. Thread Astropaths are the pioneers.

Where conventional survey work maps the Void from the outside, a Thread charts from within—threading their psychic perception through Voidspace ahead of any physical vessel, finding pathways between storms and anomalies through what practitioners describe as something between navigation and instinct. Beacon Astropaths are the anchors. A Beacon broadcasts their Psychic Presence deep into the Void, creating fixed navigational reference points that vessels can orient against.

Without them, large-scale fleet movement is effectively impossible—formation flight degrades rapidly, and a fleet that loses cohesion inside Voidspace rarely recovers it. Beacons are, consequently, the most aggressively recruited Astropaths in every Navy. Echo Astropaths serve in both expansion and enforcement capacities. In conjunction with Beacons, they reinforce and widen Thread-charted paths, turning a narrow corridor into something reliable enough for industrial use.

They also track vessel movements inside the Void—if an enemy fleet slips into Voidspace, an Echo can attempt to identify their entry point and heading with sufficient precision to enable pursuit. Veil Astropaths are the counterpoint to all of the above, and the rarest of the four. Where Beacons broadcast and Echoes track, Veils suppress —masking Psychic Presence, concealing routes, disrupting navigational references that opposing forces rely on.

Their applications are almost entirely military in nature, and consequently, they are uncommon choices among civilian Psykers. So, always remember: Voidtravel is not simple. It is not safe. It is a monumental ongoing negotiation between Humanity and a dimension that was not only never meant for us, but is actively hostile to us in every conceivable way, merely kept functional by an extraordinary concentration of expertise, sacrifice, and frankly improbably good fortune…

— [Shortened Excerpt From: Prologue of "Between Stars and Silence," Dr. Aethon Varri, Chair of Voidspace Studies, UHF Orion Prime University, PFC 801]"S—So, I guess…" Evelyne started, visibly nervous but clearly trying to pull herself together.

"I guess I'll start at the beginning, then…" Thea gave her all the time and space she needed, using the interim to keep a close eye on everything the girl did—consciously or otherwise.' Why go through all this trouble just to ask me questions…? If you knew I was MMM from the start, why not just say so and ask? It's not like I had some reputation for being a tyrant on GalNet. At least not toward people who were genuinely curious and wanted to learn. So why go through all the trouble…?'

Evelyne took a breath, fidgeted briefly with the hem of her sleeve, and then looked up.

"Can I ask… how you did it?" she started, her voice a little steadier now that she had something concrete to lead with.

"Like—how you got to the top of the Recruit roster so fast. Your general approach to the Allbright System as a whole, I mean... What does that look like? What's guiding your decisions in that regard?" Thea blinked. It took her a second to follow where that was even coming from—she'd already half-forgotten that Evelyne was supposed to be a fan of her, Thea McKay, UHF Recruit, and not MMM.

Whether the girl was still keeping up that particular pretense or had genuinely started to wonder about it in its own right, Thea couldn't quite tell. Either way, the question wasn't one she'd been expecting. She leaned back against the wall, let the back of her head rest against the cool sandstone, and actually thought about it for a moment.' Did I even have such a philosophy…?' If she was being entirely honest? Not really. Not a conscious one, anyway.

"I didn't, going in," she said eventually, keeping her eyes on the middle distance.

"Have an approach, I mean. Same as everyone else—I had no idea any of this existed before Integration. Nobody told me what the Assessment was going to look like, nor what Focus was, or that things like Focus Overdraws were a very real danger, none of it." She paused.

"I spent most of the Assessment just trying to stay afloat, honestly. There was a whole host of things cropping up that nobody had thought to explain ahead of time." She said it lightly, the way you talked about something that had already been processed and filed away—old news.

"Like, on the very first day of the Assessment, about an hour or two after touching down—" she continued with a chuckle, "—I almost died. Not in-Assessment died—like actually died. Straight up Zeroing. I Overdrew my Focus, hard, because I wasn't aware that it was even a thing to begin with." The words had barely left her mouth before she caught it—a sudden, sharp spike in the steady rhythm she'd been passively tracking beside her. Thea turned her head immediately.

Evelyne was staring at her with an expression that had no trace of anxiety left in it whatsoever. What had replaced it was something Thea genuinely hadn't been prepared for—equal parts shock and a very specific, very focused kind of fury, the sort that wasn't looking for a target so much as it had already found one and was only deciding what to do about it." What?!" The word came out louder than anything Evelyne had ever said—by an order of magnitude.

"You Overdrew your Focus on the first day and almost got Zeroed?!" Thea raised both hands immediately, palms out.

"Hey, hey—easy there," she said, keeping her voice low and calm.

"I didn't. I almost did, sure, but I didn't. I was lucky enough to have Kara around at the time. She caught it, the second it happened—actually even before then—and pulled me back." Evelyne looked like that was not the reassurance she'd been hoping for.

"Without her, I probably would have, to be fair," Thea admitted, because lying about it seemed pointless at this stage.

"Though Kara did mention afterward that the DDS technically has some built-in failsafes to prevent a true Zeroing from happening inside it. So it maybe wouldn't have gone that far…" She tilted her head slightly.

"Probably still would've been extremely bad, though. And a guaranteed exit from the Assessment either way—I'd have been sitting at around Level four with nothing to show for the whole thing." Something complicated moved across Evelyne's face at that. Several things, actually, layering over each other fast enough that even Thea couldn't begin to pick them apart cleanly before they'd already shifted into something else.

She let the girl have a moment and didn't push, turning her gaze back towards the other people in the arena continuing Lucas' training while Evelyne quietly gathered herself. Thea's own thoughts drifted, just slightly, to those first few days. It felt like damn years ago by now. It genuinely did—even though it had only been a little over a month by any honest count.

Though, in fairness, several subjective months of grinding through [Basic Physics] Skill training probably had something to do with that particular feeling of temporal dislocation. Time got a bit slippery when you spent a large chunk of it in accelerated states, she'd to admit.

"—misjudged her… I'll need to thank her…" Thea caught Evelyne's quietly muttered words from the left—barely above a whisper—but decided not to push. After a few more moments, the girl seemed to have gathered herself, dipping into a slight bow.

"I am very sorry for the outburst. It… it came as a big surprise to hear that the literal star Recruit of the entire Drive had almost died. I apologize for the yelling…" She was back to being fidgety now, her heartrate still slightly elevated but coming down at a natural pace—not the forced, immediate kind Thea had noted as quite common for the girl before, just a slow and steady settle.

"Ha, no worries," she replied easily, waving it off.

"Can't blame you for being surprised, honestly. It still feels a bit surreal to me too, not gonna lie. But it all ended up being a big misunderstanding and oversight on the UHF's part, really. Things have been worked out since—it's a lot better now." That didn't seem to fully convince Evelyne, but she clearly decided it wasn't worth pushing, and instead prompted, "Please, continue with what you were saying before I so rudely interrupted you."

Thea had to work to suppress an eyeroll at the phrasing, feeling briefly like she'd been dropped back into one of the post-tournament Q&A sessions as MMM.' These fans really need to learn how to just talk like normal people… It's not that hard to just be normal, right?

'The thought landed, but then she tilted her head slightly.' Actually… that's probably a bit hypocritical, considering how much I'm still struggling with the whole socialization thing myself… Maybe it really is just as hard from their side…?' She shelved it for now—something to come back to later. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Instead, she started retelling her experiences in the Assessment from the beginning.

Not in exhaustive detail—she skipped the finer points where they didn't serve the broader picture—but she walked Evelyne through the shape of it. The first day's ambush, the chaos of a Stellar Republic strike that nobody had seen coming because of a rocket artillery nobody had known was there. The moment her Focus had started burning through itself without her realizing, right up until the point where it almost didn't matter anymore.

Kara dragging her back from the edge of something she still didn't fully like to think about. Then the suicide mission. Arrow Squad—Elite Tier 1s from another ship entirely, the kind of people who made you acutely aware of exactly how new you were just by standing near them, and also taught her quite a lot—and a target that had no business being assigned to Recruits by any reasonable metric. Despite all that, destroying the rocket artillery had somehow worked.

It had also put her out of commission for the better part of several days afterward, which had been its own particular kind of frustrating.

"So, genuinely," she said, spreading her hands slightly in a powerless gesture, "my philosophy for most of the Assessment was just… survive. Do the best I could with what I had and not die. That was it. I wasn't thinking about the System in any grand strategic sense. I wasn't thinking about it much at all, honestly—I was too busy trying to keep my head above water." Evelyne was listening closely, her earlier agitation fully replaced by something that looked a lot more like genuine focus.

"And your Build?" she asked.

"How did you approach that side of things?" Thea paused. She turned the question over for a moment, measuring it against the parts she couldn't hand out freely, and settled on the version that was true without being too much.

"Still figuring a lot of it out," she said.

"But I'm working toward unlocking some specific Classes going into Tier 1. Ones that are… probably not available to anyone else." That landed exactly as one would've expected it to. Evelyne shifted—just slightly—closing a few centimeters of distance between them with the kind of unconscious lean that happened when someone's attention had fully sharpened to a razor sharp edge.

"More information on that, if you don't mind. Please," she said, and the please was almost definitely an afterthought addition. Thea considered it for a moment. Evelyne was idiosyncratic, sure. But, fundamentally she was also a UHF Marine, same as any of them, and giving her something to work with wasn't exactly a big problem. If anything, it was a net positive for the Corps in general.

'Probably…'

"Are you familiar with what a Wielder is?" Thea asked carefully. The effect was immediate: Evelyne's eyes went wide for a fraction of a second—a clean, unguarded reaction she didn't manage to school in time—and she nodded quickly. Then, almost as quickly, she answered, "Yes, but—can you explain it anyway? In your own words? Please." Thea did her best, trying to channel her inner Runepriest to do the work.

Wielders were, at their core, Psykers—but without the Psychic Attribute unlocked, and without the kind of fine-control that full Psykers had access to. They got one of their Path's Powers from the outset, along with the General Psychic Power that came standard. The main difference was in the fuel: Where Psykers drew on their Psychic Resource, Wielders ran everything through Focus instead until that first one was unlocked.

"Which," she said, with a fairly dry tone, "is why I nearly Overdrew myself into oblivion on day one. I didn't realize I was burning through my own Focus until it was almost too late. Nobody had explained that part to me yet." She let that sit for a second, then added, "But I don't really do that anymore. No need to worry on that front.

I've actually got someone walking me through the specifics properly—the Runepriest has been—" The sound that Evelyne's throat made in that moment was, genuinely, one of the most alarming and disturbing things Thea had ever heard in her entire life. Her head snapped towards the girl. Evelyne had gone pale. Not figuratively, but actually, visibly pale, color draining out of her face in real time as her heartrate hit a register that Thea hadn't clocked from her even during the height of her earlier fury.

"R—R— Runepriest?!" The word came out in pieces.

"Runepriest Vedun," Thea said, nodding slowly while keeping her voice even, watching the girl carefully.

"He arrived aboard about a week ago or so to teach me."

"V— Vedun?!" Evelyne repeated, and she sounded genuinely like she was having some difficulty with basic sentence construction—which Thea could very much emphasize with.

"Runepriest Vedun is here right now? This ship?! The Sovereign?! To teach you?!"

"... Yes?" Thea confirmed slowly once again. She was thoroughly confused—and that was already two separate confusions running at the same time, which she was quietly trying to sort through. The first and most obvious was why, exactly, Evelyne was reacting to the Runepriest's presence aboard the Sovereign like she'd just been told the ship was on fire, being attacked by Void Daemons and surrounded by enemy fleets all at once.

The second, which had surfaced right alongside it and was arguably the more interesting of the two, however, was the simple fact that Evelyne clearly already knew what a Runepriest was. She had recognized the title immediately. And even more importantly, she had recognized the name. She knew about Vedun, specifically. Which felt very notable. Because as far as Thea was aware, nobody in Alpha Squad had known anything about Runepriests before Vedun had simply turned up in person.

Not even Corvus, who wasn't just a social prodigy but also a Minor Legacy at that—somebody who, at his own admission, had received quite a decent amount of knowledge about the Allbright System and the UHF workings before Integration. So the question of where Evelyne had gotten that knowledge from, and what exactly it meant to her, was now sitting at the front of Thea's mind alongside a quietly growing list of things she didn't yet have answers to in regards to the girl.

But unlike those other questions, this one had a straightforward solution.

"Do you know anything about Runepriest Vedun?" Thea decided to simply ask.

"I've only had one session with him so far and he seems… strange, to say the least. Friendly, but also very intimidating at times. Anything you could tell me would already be more than I knew before." Evelyne held both hands up in a stopping motion.

"Wait. Wait. Wait! Wait just a minute, please. I don't— What?!" Whatever composure she'd carefully curated in the past, was clearly nowhere to be found.

"Let me get this straight." She said it slowly, like she was laying bricks.

"You're a Wielder, and the UHF decided to call in Runepriest Vedun to teach you?"

"That sounds about right." Thea nodded, then tilted her head slightly.

"I remember Major Quinn mentioning she pulled some strings—I'm not entirely sure about the politics of it all. Not really my area." Evelyne stared at her. Blank-faced, unblinking, for several long seconds. Then she shook her head sharply, like she was trying to physically clear it, her expression settling back into its usual neutral.

"Okay. Sure. Alright. Fine. Yeah, that makes complete sense…" she muttered, before straightening up and addressing Thea properly.

"I apologize for that. Again. I was not expecting any of that." She folded her hands in her lap and took a slow breath.

"As for your question—yes. I do know of Runepriest Vedun. By name, not personally of course. Anyone who's spent any real amount of time researching the UHF's military hierarchy should, really." She paused briefly, collecting her thoughts.

"Runepriest Vedun is the fourth most powerful Psyker in the entirety of the UHF—barring any hidden or classified powers not publicly known. In terms of knowledge and overall capability, though, he's closer to number two. He's just not particularly focused on power for its own sake. More on the research side of things." She folded her hands a little tighter.

"He also holds a Unique Title. On the Battlefield, he's simply known by it: The Black Sigil. From what I know, it refers to some kind of Psychic Power that he either created or unveiled himself—I'm not entirely sure about the process behind it. Either way, he's the only known Psyker in the entire galaxy capable of using it, and there are… numerous rumors surrounding how it came to be, what it actually does, all sorts of myths built up around it. I couldn't tell you what's true and what isn't.

It's impossible to find out, at least from where I'm standing." Evelyne was shaking her head slowly, like the sheer memory of whatever she'd read about the Runepriest was causing her some kind of low-grade distress.

"Suffice to say, I was— am —surprised to hear that one of the most infamous and legendary Psykers the UHF has ever produced is aboard this ship. And to teach you, of all things." Her eyes went wide a fraction of a second later and she quickly added, "No offense meant, of course! I meant it more like 'a Recruit'—not you specifically! I didn't mean to say that—""It's fine, don't worry," Thea said, and meant it, waving the apologies off with a short laugh.

"Didn't take it as an insult. And you're not wrong—I was pretty surprised too, when I first heard. Even without knowing what a Runepriest actually was. Still don't, really, beyond the basics. But I could tell it was a big deal from how Major Quinn talked about it." Evelyne had started massaging her temple with one hand.

"Right… and Major Quinn personally pulled strings for that… You did mention that…" She was clearly struggling to fit all of it together, Thea noticed.' A bit much at once, huh…? I can't really blame her, honestly. I don't know most of the political background or whatever's happening behind the scenes either, and even I thought it was pretty extreme when the Runepriest just suddenly showed up. Not that I'm complaining about it, of course…'

"So… what are Runepriests, exactly?" Thea asked, trying to pull the girl out of her stupor.

"If you happen to know and don't mind explaining, of course…" That seemed to do the trick. Evelyne looked back at her, a slight flush creeping onto her face as their eyes met, and nodded.

"Ahh—yes. Of course. Right. So… Runepriests…" She gathered herself.

"I guess you could think of 'Runepriest' as a rank. Kind of like Major or General are ranks in the Marine Corps, Runepriest is a rank on the Psyker side of things.

"There's a point at which you stop simply being a Marine who happens to be a Psyker, and become a fully-fledged Psyker first and foremost. I'm not entirely sure where that line is exactly, but it should be somewhere around the Zeta or Epsilon designation—actually, I'm not sure if you know what that is either…?" Thea shook her head. She'd never heard of it.

"Haaa…" Evelyne let out a slow, heavy breath.

"It'll be covered in Psychic 101, I'm fairly sure. And I have no doubt the Runepriest will go over it too, if he really is your teacher for these kinds of things—not that I doubt your word on it, of course! More… the Runepriest's level of personal investment in teaching someone, really.

"Either way, somewhere around that designation, Psykers get pulled out of the standard Marine Corps hierarchy and placed into the Psyker-specific one. Within that hierarchy, Runepriest is the second highest rank—with only the Void Speaker above them, and there's only ever one of those at any given time. As a result, Runepriests enjoy quite a lot of freedom in what they choose to do, since there's not really anyone in a position to tell them otherwise." Thea nodded at that.

It lined up with things Vedun had said, and it explained quite a lot about how he carried himself in general.

"There are balance checks within the UHF, of course—measures capable of handling even Runepriests, should they become a problem. Which, unfortunately, is more of a necessity than anyone would really like to admit. Psykers are… highly volatile, at the best of times."

"Yeah," Thea said, with a grimace she didn't bother hiding.

"I've definitely… experienced that part already."

"I don't envy you," Evelyne replied, and it sounded genuinely meant.

"Either way—there are the Knights and the Arch-Knight, who effectively serve as the counterbalance to the Runepriests and the Void Speaker within the UHF structure. I'd pray you never meet any of them in person, though, because if you do, it likely won't be under good circumstances. There aren't many of them on either side, and they're in extremely high demand for high-end Battlefield purposes—or just as deterrents in general. Whenever the UHF brings them together on purpose…" She trailed off briefly.

"Let's just say it's usually not for any good reasons." Thea could see it clearly enough. With both sides sitting at the very top of their respective ladders, if they were ever brought together for any reason, it either meant a problem so truly catastrophic it required both branches working in concert to solve—or the problem was one of the branches itself. Neither option sounded like anything she'd ever want to be anywhere near, and she said as much with a short nod.

"Yeah. I'll take your advice on that one and hope I never find out firsthand…" They didn't get much further than that. The sound of heavy footsteps preceded Lucas by a few seconds, and then he came trudging into view looking exactly like someone who had spent the last several hours being put through the wringer—soaked through with sweat, shoulders low, the particular kind of tired that settled into a person's whole body rather than just their legs.

"We're done," he announced, in the tone of a man who had decided that was the only sentence he had left in him. Both Thea and Evelyne looked at him, then instinctively checked the time. Thea blinked. Nearly an hour. They'd been sitting here talking for the better part of an hour without either of them noticing. She glanced over at Evelyne, who looked equally caught off guard by it, and felt a faint flicker of something that might have been amusement.

"We'll pick this up next time," Thea said, pushing herself up from the wall and stretching her arms out briefly. Then she looked at Evelyne properly.

"Seriously—thank you. For today. Both the training help and all of this." She gestured vaguely between them, meaning the conversation as a whole.

"It was genuinely invaluable." Evelyne stared at her. Not the focused, analytic kind of stare she'd been wearing on and off throughout their conversation—just a plain, slightly stunned one, like the words had landed somewhere she hadn't been braced for. The flush from earlier made a quiet return.

"I—of course," she managed after a moment.

"It was… no trouble at all." The three of them logged out of the VR session together, the familiar weight of reality settling back in around them as the arcade's ambient noise replaced the training environment. Desmond made a beeline for the nearest drink dispenser without a word, and that was more than enough of a suggestion.

They ended up clustered around one of the small tables near the exit for a few minutes, working through whatever snacks and drinks were on hand, conversation drifting into the loose, low-effort kind that happened naturally when everyone was tired and satisfied enough to just exist for a bit. It didn't last long. The tiredness had real weight to it by now, and one by one the energy for even casual talk ran dry.

They parted ways with Evelyne at the arcade entrance, and the walk back to the Squad Dorms was a quiet one—the comfortable kind, where nobody felt any particular need to fill the silence. By the time Thea made it back to her room and the door slid shut behind her, the day had the distinct feeling of one that had gone about as well as it reasonably could have…

PoV: Evelyne Midra Sen Stumbling away from the arcade in a half-stupor, the sheer number of revelations still bouncing around in her head, Evelyne couldn't wrap her head around even a small portion of it.' What the actual fuck did I get myself into…?' She had thought she'd found MMM first—spotted a diamond in the rough that nobody else had bothered to pick up yet.

Instead, she'd somehow ended up sitting squarely in the middle of a web of intrigue, politics, and lies threaded so deep she had no idea where to even begin trying to untangle any of it. As if the first revelation—that Alpha Squad's star Medic wasn't just any random genius, but a runaway Prime Legacy, or at least that was what Evelyne suspected after their little "conversation" earlier in the day—hadn't already been enough to rattle her worldview on its own. No, of course not.

Then Thea herself— her MMM—had casually dropped that not only was there a Runepriest aboard this ship that Evelyne hadn't known anything about, but that it was Vedun—The Black Sigil himself —of all people. And not just coincidentally either. Specifically to teach Thea. To teach MMM.' Just what the fuck kind of monster is the UHF trying to create here…?' The thought came unbidden, and an ice-cold shudder ran down her spine right along with it.

Any aspirations she'd had of trying to scoop MMM up for the Sen Legacy's benefit had rapidly collapsed into something far more humble—a simple "New Objective: Survive" kind of situation. And to make it all worse, her very first payment had somehow ended up with her handing over more information than she'd actually gotten back—at least in direct relation to her MMM.' How the fuck did I get outplayed by her of all people…?' she thought, genuinely distressed by it all.

'Was she actually a genius Diplomancer this the entire time…? Just hiding it all behind fake social anxiety and awkwardness to get everyone to drop their guard…? What in the Emperor's damned name happened today…?' There were too many questions rattling around in her head to find any real sleep that night.

So, for yet another night aboard the Sovereign this past week, she lay staring up at the bunk above hers, listening to everyone around her sleep, wondering what the fuck was actually going on aboard this ship and inside the UHF…