Chương 272: Volume 2 - Intermission 84.60 - Grand Viewing Gala III

"The word itself is telling, if you are willing to pay attention to it.' Decorum.' It comes from one of the oldest pre-Union Terran languages—meaning simply ' that which is fitting.' Not ' that which is correct.

'Not' that which is kind,'or' just,'or' earned.' Merely: Fitting. Appropriate to the shape of the moment. Appropriate to the shape of the person standing inside it. Nobody knows where it started.

This is, in itself, remarkable—the UHF is an institution that tries to document everything, that has maintained unbroken administrative records across seven centuries of galactic warfare and expansion, that can tell you the exact tonnage of ammunition expended in engagements fought before your great-grandmother's grandmother was even born. And yet the origin of Legacy Decorum exists nowhere in any official record, because Legacy Decorum was never written down in the first place—never codified.

Was never, at any point in its history, the subject of a formal ruling or an institutional mandate of any kind. It simply… appeared at some point. And since then it has persisted. And then, gradually and without anyone formally deciding that this was happening, it became the primary language through which the Legacy class communicated power to and over each other.

The basics, such as they are, can be described, of course—though describing them flattens them considerably, the way describing music as ' organised sound' is technically accurate and entirely misses the point. Silence during public broadcasts is perhaps the most well-known tenet—the understanding that a Legacy representative does not speak, does not visibly react, does not allow their expression to shift in any way that could be read as weighted commentary, while official UHF communications are playing.

The pauses built into those broadcasts—and they are built in, deliberately, every sound engineer who works on official UHF media understanding exactly what those pauses are for—are the designated spaces for response and reaction. To speak outside them is not illegal, of course. It is not punishable by any formal mechanism. It simply marks you, instantly and permanently in the memory of everyone present, as someone who either does not know the rules or simply cannot control themselves sufficiently to follow them.

Which reading is more damaging, is up for interpretation on this matter. Clothing operates on a system of similarly invisible rigidity. Prime Legacies wear certain cuts and fabrics, with saturated, expensive dyes that do not fade, that photograph well, that read across a ballroom as authority even before the face above them resolves into a recognisable person.

Major Legacies work within a slightly narrower selection of fabrics, and the specific colours available to them shift depending on regional affiliation, generational standing, and a dozen other variables that no document has ever fully captured but that every Major Legacy representative carries encoded in their bones from childhood.

Minor Legacies wear muted versions of their Legacy's designs—present and identifiable, no doubt, but never saturating the room, never competing with the Majors and Primes for visual authority. There are also colours that are simply forbidden to be worn. Not by law, of course—by something older and, in the right circles, more binding than law. The deep imperial crimson, gold, purple and black combination that has belonged to the Masters for six generations.

The specific pallor of green—a shade with no formal name, catalogued in no colour system—that is simply Dravain and has been Dravain for so long that an unrelated Legacy wearing it would produce, in every informed person present, the same visceral reaction as a clear forgery: Immediate, downright instinctive rejection. To wear a forbidden colour by accident marks you as ignorant. To wear one deliberately marks you as something considerably more dangerous.

The standing rules, the speaking rules, the specific geometry of how a Legacy representative positions themselves relative to their betters, their equals, and those below them—all of it unwritten, all of it enforced by nothing more than collective memory and the quiet, devastating social consequence of getting it wrong—with no second chances available. Why does it persist? Nobody asks. For asking, in certain company, would itself be a violation.

The more useful question—the one that the rare, clear-eyed observer occasionally gets close to asking before thinking better of it—is not why it persists, but whom it serves if it does. And the answer, if you are willing to look at it plainly, is straightforward enough: It serves whomever already knows the rules." Excerpt from " The Emperor's Game: Legacy, Power, and the Politics of the UHF Marine Corps", Dr.

Seren Vael, published in the UHF Academic Press, PFC 931 PoV: Veyra Lindra Sylarion The darkness lasted exactly one heartbeat. Long enough for the last syllable of the address to finish settling into the bones of everyone standing in the ballroom. Long enough for the room to exist, briefly, as nothing but ninety-seven thousand, four hundred and fifty-one dead people and the silence that surrounded their passing's announcement. Then the UHF Marine Corps emblem blazed back onto the screen.

Gold, crimson and grey, filling the upper staircase wall from rail to ceiling—and this time it came with exactly what it had been missing before: The fanfare. The rising brass. The soaring, ceremonial score that had accompanied every official UHF broadcast for longer than anyone in this room had been alive. It was quiet—far quieter than usual—like an undercurrent or background music to the sinking feeling that undoubtedly everyone was feeling in their chest—Veyra was.

A countdown followed, white numerals beneath the emblem. 5: 00. 4: 59. Veyra watched it tick. She suspected, somewhere in the quiet working part of her mind that was always watching and never quite stopped, that the five minutes had been calculated. Not estimated, but calculated. Just long enough for a room full of Legacy representatives to process what they had been told. Just long enough for the grief to arrive and be met and, if the people present were disciplined enough, be set aside.

The UHF had always been precise about the time it allowed for things like this. She let her eyes move from the countdown across the ballroom, slowly, the way she'd been taught to scan a room from a young age—not darting, never darting, a slow and even sweep that looked like nothing more than a woman casually taking in her surroundings. What she found, in the four minutes and fifty-some seconds that the countdown still had left on it, was a room coming apart at the seams. Not all of it, of course.

Not the parts that mattered most, not the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the old, load-bearing pillars of the Legacy system, who had long since learned how to absorb the weight of bad news without letting it show in their posture. Madam Dravain to her left, had not moved. Thal Masters had not moved. Thal Sen had not so much as shifted her weight to another foot since the beginning of the broadcast. But the room was larger than its pillars.

The first sign was a young woman maybe three clusters away—Minor Legacy, eastern affiliation from the colour of her formal wear, here in place of someone more senior, which tonight had turned out to be a very particular kind of misfortune.

Veyra had been introduced to her briefly by Thal Sen earlier—not on purpose, just as part of a larger group that the Thal had aimed for—and she had retained the name because that's what she had been taught to do with names: Osse, second cousin to someone whose name the UHF would now have to add to the Eternal Registry. She was standing very still, not composure but the thing that came before it collapsed—a rigid, frozen stillness. Her companion had noticed as well and leaned in, said something low and quiet to her.

Osse did not respond. Her eyes were fixed only on the countdown. Veyra moved her gaze on. A small cluster near the far left wall—three people, two of them young, one of them older and clearly trying to hold the other two together by the sheer force of a hand pressed to one shoulder each. The two younger ones were talking at once, overlapping, voices too low to carry across the room but the cadence of it perfectly legible regardless.

The rapid, stumbling way of talking that happened when the mind was outpacing the mouth and neither of them had gotten to a stop yet." It couldn't be—but the address said—no, wait, were they—which ship was Fellana on—" The older one was saying something quiet to both of them, the same thing on a loop—as far as Veyra could tell—and it wasn't working. She looked away. Three men near the refreshment display had formed a tight triangle, shoulders in, voices dropped to nothing, datapads already out.

One of them was scrolling with the particular frantic focus of someone trying to confirm something they very much did not want confirmed.

The second was watching the first with an expression that had stopped performing anything at all—raw and unfiltered grief and the question of " how do we deal with this" written clearly on his face. The third was staring at the countdown with his jaw set so hard she could see the tension in it from across the room. 4: 48. 4: 47. The crack spread. It happened the way all cracks spread in rooms like this—not all at once, but in increments, each one giving permission for the next.

A voice rose somewhere to the front-left of her—male, young, sharp—with the brittle energy of someone whose disbelief had just curdled into something louder.

"That can't be right." Simple words. Said too clearly, at a volume the room was not supposed to be using yet.

"The numbers are wrong. They have to be wrong. They have to run them again." Nobody ran it again. But the voice had broken something. To her left, two women from a Legacy she placed as mid-tier Minor in the western sectors finally stopped maintaining their expressions and turned toward each other properly, the careful architecture of composed faces giving way to something rawer and less arranged. One of them pressed a hand over her mouth. The other reached for her arm. Both started sobbing.

A young man near the base of the staircase—Veyra had not been introduced to him, Minor Legacy by the dress—made a sound that was not quite words and was not quite not-words, and then walked very quickly toward the side corridor that led to the estate's secondary rooms, and nobody stopped him. Because stopping him would have meant acknowledging what was happening to him, and the room was not yet ready to do that collectively. Decorum did not allow it. 4: 28.

The man who had said the numbers were wrong mere moments ago said it again. Louder.

"This—This is a mistake. The UHF makes mistakes. It's only natural. They have made mistakes before, even in Assessment data and in casualty reports—someone verify this! Someone contact Command directly and verify—""Hallerd." The woman beside him said his name quietly and precisely. He didn't stop.

"Ninety-seven thousand people do not just—a ship does not just—the UHF would know more. They would have confirmed everything before they announced, not—not this " undetermined"and" unknown" business! They would not put this on a broadcast without—" His voice caught somewhere in the middle of that sentence, and he pushed through it anyway, which was somehow worse than if he'd simply stopped." Someone just needs to contact the Monarch directly. It's possible the ship sustained damage but the crew is intact.

It's possible the AI severed connection and the casualty count is an estimate, not a confirmed figure—"" Hallerd." Her voice was not quiet this time. He stopped then, and the silence he left behind had a different texture than the one before. Across the room, the fractures at his words echoing through the space had multiplied past the point where Veyra could track all of them individually.

Clusters had compressed inward, the formal spacing of Legacy social architecture completely abandoned in favour of proximity and the primal, human need to be physically near other people when the floor dropped out. A few faces she recognised from the earlier introductions had gone the colour of old fabric. At least two people were visibly crying, without any apparent intention to stop or even the awareness that they had started doing so.

Near the press line, the journalists had gone very still and quiet—not the stillness of people paying respects, but the predatory stillness of people who had understood immediately that they were watching something important unfold, and had made themselves invisible so they could keep watching it.' Vultures…' Veyra couldn't help but think at the sight, disgust creeping up her throat. 4: 02.

One of the younger women in the eastern cluster—the one whose companion had been trying to hold them together earlier—pulled free of the steadying hand and turned away from the wall entirely, voice coming up with anger because it was far easier to hold than grief:"Where is the accountability in this? A Titanicus -class entity, undetected, until contact—how is that even possible? What was the Navy doing? What were the Astropaths in charge of that corridor doing?

You do not lose a ship of that size, with that number of people aboard, without somebody making a mistake somewhere, and I want to know whose mistake it was right now and—" That seemed to be the last straw, as voices started coming in from all angles now, each one louder than the last, in the specific way that rooms get louder over time as people try to speak over other voices to be heard themselves.

"—because someone is responsible for ninety-seven thousand—!"

"—my cousin was a Sergeant aboard—""—I need to send a message—does this estate have an external comms link—""—they said MIA-Zero, that means they're all dead aren't—""—someone verify the list, there must be a list—!" 3: 53.

The voices were still going, the grief-argument from the eastern wall still threading through the ambient noise, the rapid overlapping exchanges of the cluster near the staircase still running over each other—and then, into all of it, without effort, without raising his voice in any way that should have carried across a ballroom in this state, Thal Masters spoke.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please." It was not loud. It did not need to be. The presence behind it moved through the room the way it always did—by sheer weight alone, filling the space from floor to ceiling and wall to wall with the particular quality of someone whose voice the room had, on some deep collective level, already decided to listen to before the evening had begun. The murmurs, outcries and conversations stopped. The countdown read 3: 47, Veyra noted, when the ballroom regained some of its composure.

Raymond Oleaven Masters looked at the room—all of it including the grief, the anger, the frozen shock and the careful composure of the ones still holding—and said nothing for a moment. Merely looked. And something about being looked at like that, steadily, without flinching and without any apparent need for the moment to be anything other than what it was, finished the job that his voice had started: The ballroom went silent once again. He let it hold for a breath longer, before he spoke.

"There are people in this room who have lost someone tonight." His voice was level, unhurried and easily carried to every corner without effort.

"I will not pretend otherwise, and I will not move past it as though it were a mere formality to be cleared before we continue with the evening. To every family represented here who is carrying that tonight—you have my sincerest condolences. The entire Masters Legacy's condolences. Unconditionally, and without reservation." He paused briefly, nodding gravely to certain individuals in the crowd. Then he took a deep breath, and continued, "The IGS Monarch was a ship I knew.

Many of the people aboard her were men and women I had met, in rooms not entirely unlike this one, at various points across the years. I do not say that to center myself in a loss that belongs to others, however. I say it because I want this room to know that the pledge I am about to make is not a political calculation, but a personal one." His eyes slowly moved across the assembled faces.

"The Masters Legacy will be committing fully to the UHF's hunt for the entity responsible for this tragedy. I will be joining the effort personally, alongside three other Tier 5 Primes from our Legacy, to be named in the coming days once the operational parameters have been confirmed with UHF Command." He stepped back down the few stairs he had slowly ascended previously to give everyone an easy look at him. Not far—just enough to signal that he was done, that the floor was open. The room absorbed it.

Some of the frozen faces had shifted slightly—not better, exactly, but different. It was Thal Sen who spoke next. She did not step forward. She did not change her posture or her expression or anything about the way she had been standing for the past several minutes. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

She simply began speaking, in the same even, unhurried register she applied to everything, and the room attended to her the same way it always did—with one part respect and two parts wariness.

"The Sen Legacy will be committing one of our most experienced Astropaths to the hunt. That is our pledge." Veyra watched the room's response from the corner of her eyes and noted the quality of it—the almost imperceptible recalibration that moved through the assembled Legacies, the subtle repositioning of people who understood what an Astropath commitment meant and were revising their read of everything accordingly.

It was the same recalibration she'd seen happen six times tonight already when Madam Sen had said or done anything at all, only this time it was larger, quieter, and considerably more loaded. Madam Dravain, standing on the opposite side of Thal Sen to Veyra, spoke third.

"The Dravain Legacy commits its full intelligence resources to the hunt's operational planning phase. Additionally, we will be making available our most recent Void cartography data for the Sector-cluster in question, including three cycles of updated transit mapping." The pledges continued after that.

The Tudor Legacy—a Major Legacy that Veyra had not managed to spot among the guests until just now—committed a significant capital sum, stated plainly and without flourish, the number large enough that it produced a small, contained ripple of reaction from the cluster of Minor Legacies nearest to her.

The Von Cecil representatives—a brother and sister by the looks that she had only briefly spotted near Thal Masters earlier in the evening—offered jointly: Three cycles of long-range sensor data from their western Rim deep-Void stations, and whatever logistical infrastructure the hunt required in their territories.

The Diallo representative—the brother of the Major Legacy's Patriarch, as Veyra immediately recognized—committed two support vessels and their experienced crews to whatever staging operation Command deemed appropriate, for however long necessary. Each pledge landed and was received with the measured, formal acknowledgement of people who took commitments very seriously and would remember every word of what had just been said. Veyra carefully tracked all of it, feeling slightly overwhelmed by the gravitas of it all.'

This is a monumental event… One that likely happens more often than we'd all like. The tragic death of thousands of Marines—young men and women that—' Madam Sen's eyes suddenly found hers. The look had no components that Veyra could point to individually and call the signal. It was simply a look, and the look said:"Now." Veyra kept her expression still.' She—she can't mean—' She did a rapid, brutal calculation: Monetary commitment to a Titanicus -hunt.

Not a Legacy skirmish fund, not a Drive sponsorship, not the kind of quiet financial support that Minor Legacies contributed to UHF initiatives as a matter of routine. This was something else entirely. The operational costs of a hunt at this level—Tier 5 Primes, Astropaths, naval escorts, sustained Void tracking across several entire Sector-clusters—were not numbers the Sylarion Legacy could meet at the level being implied by the pledges preceding her. But she didn't have to meet them at that level…

She merely had to commit. To say the words and attach the Sylarion name to this moment and let what came after be what it was.' We can sustain it,'she thought, with less certainty than she would have liked.' Barely. If Orvyn agrees to restructure the industrial holdings and we defer the Kalth Prime expansion by at least two cycles, we can sustain a meaningful contribution without—' She looked at Madam Sen again. The look had not changed in the least.'

She wouldn't do this to me,' Veyra thought, and believed it, because the alternative was too bleak to sit with.' She spent the entire evening positioning me carefully in front of every face that mattered in this room. She gave me Madam Dravain. She would not then nudge me into publicly overextending a Minor Legacy's finances just to squeeze an additional drop of Credits into a fund of this scale—that isn't her play. That has never been what her play tonight has led up to. This isn't it.

She's still positioning me...' Whatever the play was, however, Veyra couldn't see.

But she had trusted Madam Sen's direction for the entirety of this evening, and every instance of that trust had produced something she had not anticipated and could not have manufactured alone. She took a deep breath, then spoke into the relative quiet of the room.

"The Sylarion Legacy." Her voice was level. Not loud, nor performed, merely as close to Madam Dravain's clipped precision as she could manage.

"We pledge our full financial support to the hunt's operational costs, for as long as the effort requires it." She kept her eyes forward, on no one in particular. The room's response was not uniform and she felt all of it without looking at it directly. From her left, genuine. Two or three faces that had been introduced to her tonight turning in her direction with something on them that she recognised, after a moment, as surprise and actual, honest appreciation. From elsewhere, the careful mask.

The polite blankness that Veyra had spent enough years in rooms like this to read without difficulty: " A Minor Legacy, speaking out of turn, in a moment like this, pledging resources she can barely justify…" The unmistakable quality of people watching someone work above their station and composing their faces accordingly.' I just broke decorum,'she thought, very steadily, behind the schooled expression that showed nothing.' In a moment of stark grief.

With a Legacy name that has no business being in this conversation. Half this room is going to remember this as the Sylarions seeing an opportunity and taking it, and they are not entirely wrong to think that, because I cannot explain what I was actually doing without explaining Madam Sen, and I am not going to try to explain Madam Sen…' She thought about Orvyn. About the decades.

About the careful, grinding, incremental work of building a Legacy name one correct decision at a time, in rooms where Minor Legacies were expected to know their place and hold it.' If this cost us that—if this is what finally—' Her eyes moved, briefly and without her permission, to the press line. Every single journalist in it was writing —or whatever their equivalent to it was. Some dictated quietly, others simply had their eyes rapidly moving as if traversing an invisible keyboard.

She felt the anxiety arrive deep inside her chest, yet kept it entirely off her face, which was just about the only thing she had full control over right now.

'I hope you know what you're doing, Madam Sen,' she thought, with the particular, helpless quality of a prayer directed at someone who almost certainly did. It was right around that time that the broadcast's fanfare started gaining in volume—many eyes instinctively moving towards it, Veyra's included. 0: 59. Thal Masters let it drop for a few more seconds before he spoke again, and when he did, his voice rode the increasingly loud fanfare rather than competing with it.

"For anyone in this room who wishes to contribute to the hunt but is uncertain whether what they can offer would be enough—I would ask that you find me after the evening concludes.

"There is no threshold, no minimum. The Masters Legacy will handle the logistics and the bureaucracy of coordinating with UHF Command on this matter, and we will make sure that whatever this room can collectively provide reaches the UHF in a form it can use—no matter what it is and how much. No contribution will be turned away. No Legacy will be asked to overextend. That is my personal guarantee." The fanfare was still climbing. 0: 41.

He looked across the room one final time and something in his expression shifted, just slightly, towards something almost warm.

"The Monarch's loss is a wound that will not close quickly," he continued.

"I will not pretend otherwise, and I would not insult anyone here by trying or demanding that others do so." He let that settle for exactly the time it needed to.

"But the men and women aboard the IGS Sovereign, and the other ships of this Drive, are alive. They are serving. They have done things in the course of their Cube Trial, their two years of Basic and this first, initial Assessment that I suspect none of us are fully prepared to see tonight, if rumors hold true—and they deserve exactly what every Drive before this one has received in their place: Our attention. Our admiration. Our voices, when something warrants them." 0: 23.

"Let us set it all aside—the grief, the anger, whatever each of us is rightfully and righteously carrying tonight—for just a few more hours. It will still be there when the evening ends. It is not going anywhere for a long time." His mouth curved, briefly, into a smile that reached his eyes.

"But the next generation of UHF Marines has seen fit to give us a great deal to talk about tonight. And the people we've lost would have been among the first ones in this room to demand we pay attention to them, as they too, had been a part of this Drive. So… Let us not disappoint the honoured dead and give these Marines the respect they deserve." 0: 05.

He stepped back without another word, folding himself back into the assembled crowd the same way he had before: Simply present, looking up at the screen, the three meters of ceremonial armour almost—and strangely—indistinguishable from any other guest in the dark now. 0: 01. The fanfare crested, as the emblem dissolved, and the broadcast began. The screen held the emblem for one final moment, then dissolved into something new entirely.

A simple title card: Clean text on a dark field, no presenter, no commentary track, no framing voice to guide the room's reaction. The UHF had, apparently, decided the material would speak for itself. IGS SOVEREIGN — RECRUITMENT DRIVE PFC 943 ALPHA SQUAD — POST CUBE TRIAL COMPOSITION PRESENTED IN ORDER OF CUBE TRIAL SCORE: LOWEST TO HIGHEST — HIGHLIGHTS NOT LIMITED TO CUBE TRIAL Around Veyra, she felt the room settle—the grief not gone, but set aside as it was momentarily overpowered by new stimuli.

The fanfare faded to a low ambient score, then the first card appeared. DESMOND REIMART — HOME PLANET: DANNAS I — CUBE TRIAL PFC 941 — ROLE: SUPPORT (DRONE OPERATOR) The name meant nothing to the room, and Veyra could see that in the small, uniform adjustments around her—people committing slightly more attention than they might have otherwise, precisely because there was no prior association to shortcut the process. No known Legacy name attached to the planet to cross-reference.

No family or business connections to locate and contextualise. Nothing. Just an unknown name and a planet and whatever the next moments chose to show. The clip ran. The setting was unmistakably set in the middle of a warzone. It showed a Marine dressed in Medium-type armour, hunkered behind a Defensive Heavy's full-cover shield, drone-controller helmet on. Three drones flew through the air around him simultaneously, which had a few Legacies audibly adjust their footing.'

They're not being controlled in sequence or cycled through… No visible breaks between transitions of each control. Definitely concurrent. That's undeniably impressive for somebody not even yet Integrated at the time,' Veyra thought as she watched the active feed—the main one.

The broadcast had split the display into four: The main screen carrying a wide-angle view of the terrain that tracked loosely across all three drones at once, with the individual drone feeds arranged in a compact row beneath it, each one live, active and feeding completely different points of views and movement vectors. Veyra watched the drones move and did the quiet arithmetic inside her own head.

The split-attention management required to run three independent units without visible degradation in any of them pointed clearly at a Perception profile that had no business existing at this Tier. The positioning logic was sound too, it wasn't just him having the drones commit to busywork—overlapping coverage, no redundant angles, each drone placed to cover exactly the gap the other two left open. Around her, heads were slowly nodding as they likely came to the same conclusion.

Not effusively, of course—this was still a Legacy ballroom and the first introduction of the evening—but the specific nods of people who knew enough about Allbright System Builds to recognise what they were seeing and were choosing to acknowledge it.' That kid's gonna go far, if he has this kind of skill pre-Integration… And he's the " lowest" ranked amongst the squad coming out of the Cube Trial…'

The clip ended after a brief showcase of Desmond Reimart's abilities to control the drones under active fire, providing the Marines around him with a continuous stream of intel and keeping the enemy attention away from them as they pushed into the point. The card returned briefly, then gave way to the next. LUCAS CALLAHAN — HOME PLANET: QUARIS — ASSESSMENT PFC 943 — ROLE: DEFENSIVE HEAVY The clip opened mid-engagement.

A sniper, pinned—the angles made the positioning clear immediately, the incoming fire from the top of a massive wall heavy enough that repositioning wasn't an option in the least.

And then Lucas Callahan entered from the left of the frame, and what he did next was not complicated, which was precisely what made it effective: He put himself between the sniper and the wall, brought the heavy full-cover shield down into the dirt and anchored it, motioning for the sniper to start working through the cannon housings directly.

Methodically and unhurried, absorbing the hits that made it to his position with the practised quality of someone who had long since made their peace with being shot at and found it largely irrelevant. The sniper behind him kept firing their massive anti-materiel railgun throughout—largely uninterrupted. Which had been the entire point. Lucas Callahan was, after all, a Defensive Heavy. Several massive cannons atop the wall fell to their teamwork in the short clip.

Veyra could almost swear she felt the appreciation radiating off of Thal Masters before she located him in the room. She found him without turning her head from the screen fully, and his expression had settled into something that she read, after a mere moment, as appreciation of the uncomplicated kind. The nod that accompanied it was small, but unmistakable.' Of course,' she thought with a smile that she did not let show on her face.'

Defensive Heavy, decorated, five decades of frontline service before the Legacy work consumed him entirely. He's feeling, rather than watching, every single one of those shots impacting the shield—bracing them with his own body… Typical Defensive Heavy...' The card returned.

ISABELLA ITOKU — HOME PLANET: ILLYA — ASSESSMENT PFC 943 — ROLE: OFFENSIVE HEAVY The reaction to the title card alone was immediate and uneven—a ripple moving through the room before the clip had even started, the particular, poorly-contained ripple of some of the more well read and educated people registering a Mid-World's planet name in a slot where nobody had been expecting one. A few heads turned toward neighbours.

A few quiet, whispered exchanges, the body language of people recalibrating before they'd even seen what the clip had to show. Then the clip started, and the room went back to silent watching. Heavy-type armour. A massive, two-handed chainsword.

A group of Stellar Republic-clad Soldiers—Unintegrated, legible within the first few seconds from the movement patterns and the response times, the particular flatness of people whose reflexes hadn't been sharpened by Integration yet—arranged in a configuration that most Marines would have assessed, planned around, and carefully engaged at range. The Mid-Worlder woman did not engage at range. She moved through them, instead.

That was the only word that covered it accurately— through, not around, or across—the chainsword carving a path with a controlled violence that had a horrible efficiency to it. One that came from knowing exactly where the gaps in other people's reaction times were and having the raw physical capability to exploit all of them at once. The clip was not as short as one might have expected, with a single Marine rushing into a torrent of incoming enemies.

It let the room watch long enough to understand that the opening seconds were not an aberration or mere chance. The full reaction, when it came, arrived in layers. The first was sound—a sharp intake of breath to Veyra's front-right, involuntary and quickly swallowed. Two voices overlapping near the back, closer towards the press corps, both cutting off almost immediately but not quite immediately enough to not carry across the room.

The rustle of people shifting weight, turning fractionally toward neighbours, exchanging glances and much-telling body language.

'A Mid-Worlder. In Alpha Squad. In the UHF's first Mid-World Recruitment Drive… They must have known what kind of effect this would have, undoubtedly. But… Given the footage, she wasn't chosen simply to fill a quota or make the UHF's decision of Mid-World Recruitment look better. That woman truly deserves to be there…' Veyra kept her eyes forward and felt her jaw tighten once, briefly, before she released it. The second layer was the voice.

It came from the left-centre cluster—male, older, Minor Legacy from the western affiliations by the formal wear. One of the Legacies that had apparently spent enough decades in rooms exactly like this one, yet had never fully learned the rooms had ears in every corner.

"Remarkably well-bred, all things considered." A brief, considering pause that managed to be worse than the words themselves.

"If she continues to demonstrate this calibre of value to the Corps, my Legacy would consider taking her in. An acquisition of that kind, with the right framing would do well for her—" The third layer was the response to that —a small wave of careful, measured nods from the faces nearest to the speaker, the nods of people who found this a reasonable, even generous position to hold and were comfortable saying so with their body language in a room full of witnesses.'

Acquisition,'Veyra thought, and kept the word and everything attached to it entirely behind her eyes, where it belonged.' You are watching a Mid-Worlder move through a space full of Soldiers like it's a problem she solved before breakfast, and the first thing your mind produces is "acquisition" logistics… In a ballroom full of Legacies from all over UHF space. Out loud. During the broadcast… Thank the Emperor that I was taught proper manners in my early years.'

She noted the speaker's face, filing it away with no immediate plans to retrieve it, but no intention of ever losing it either—that man was undoubtedly a social toxin to associate with. The card returned without ceremony, and the room recollected itself with the slightly clipped efficiency of people who knew they had bent decorum and were electing not to examine how far.

KARANIA FAULKNER — HOME PLANET: VISCERO — CQC CLASS (PRACTICAL) PFC 943 — ROLE: SQUAD MEDIC The setting shift was immediately apparent to everyone—no war-torn terrain, no open battlefield or ongoing conflict. Instead, the unmistakable interior of a combat training arena aboard a ship. Smaller, with a lighting that killed all shadows on purpose to provide an even and controlled environment. The clip did not ease anyone into what it was showing.

Veyra counted herself lucky that she had a strong stomach, cultivated by her decades inside the Corps, and then again by years of Legacy work that occasionally required being present for things that were not pleasant, and she watched the full clip without looking away.

She noted however, with a detached, peripheral awareness, the number of people around her who did not manage the same—heads turning, chins dipping, at least four people in her relative vicinity finding the wall behind the screen suddenly very interesting. One of the younger proxies near Thal Masters and the staircase made a quiet sound, stepping back half a pace—involuntarily, no doubt. The clip showed Karania Faulkner performing bloody and brutally gory surgery. On herself.

On her own throat, to be precise, slashed open in what was clearly a practical class scenario that had gone in her favour—but not entirely the way one would have wanted. The blood was certainly real, as was the situation, and the young woman on screen responded to both with a focused, methodical precision that was quite frankly more disturbing than the gore surrounding it, because the gore suggested catastrophe, yet the precision her hands were moving at suggested Tuesday.

The clip was, naturally, entirely uncensored.' The UHF chose to show this unedited,'she thought.' To this room. In full. That is not an accident… This isn't the first nor the last time this woman has demonstrated remarkable composure under conditions like these, is it…?'

As the woman's focused look turned into a victorious, downright predatory grin full of bloodied teeth and foam, Veyra let her eyes move from the screen to the room and back, and noted—with considerably more interest than she would have ever showed—that Madam Sen, of all people, was watching the clip with an attention that was distinctly different in quality from the attention she had applied to everything else this evening. It was not more intense, exactly. It was merely more… specific in nature.

The focused, considering quality of someone who had filed something away, had now retrieved it and was examining it more carefully in the light of new information.' Do you have an idea of who that is, Madam Sen…? Someone you recognize? Or just someone you heard of? Vaguely, by your uncertain reaction. If that's a real reaction you're showing right now at all, of course…'

Veyra made a careful note of that, added it to the growing collection of things she didn't yet have a full framework for regarding Madam Sen, and returned her eyes to the screen as the card came back up—only to get practically hammered in the chest at the sight. CORVUS LEANDER SYLARION — HOME PLANET: KALTH PRIME — CUBE TRIAL PFC 941 — ROLE: SQUAD LEADER The title appeared before the clip, and the title came with a designation that Veyra read three times in the space of one second.

'Squad Leader…' The clip ran. A high-tension moment in the Cube Trial—the environment pressurised, the situation clearly deteriorating in the particular way that Cube Trial scenarios were designed to deteriorate, and Corvus stuck right in the middle of it, issuing orders. Not one stream of orders to one unit, as would be expected for a Squad Leader, but multiple.

They were rapid, overlapping commands, issued across several squads simultaneously, each one audibly precise and contextual, delivered with the unhurried certainty of someone whose internal map of the battlefield had simply sharpened under the mounting pressure of the situation rather than deteriorated.

'He looks exactly like his father…' Veyra couldn't help but think. She made a sound, then. It was small and entirely involuntary. It was one of the strange sounds that a person made when their chest did something unexpected and the air moved on the way out, and it was gone almost before it existed—but only almost.

She swallowed hard and corrected before the moment could become anything larger in terms of decorum breach, and she turned to the nearest person—Madam Sen—and said, quietly, "My apologies," because that was the correct thing to do and doing the correct thing was the only tool she had left at this particular moment. Neither Madam Sen nor Madam Dravain, the closest people to her, reacted as though she had ever made a mistake. The ballroom, however, did react.

Not to anything she had done, however, Veyra realized after a brief moment of horror. It was not a loud reaction, nor did it have the brittle, unguarded quality of the initial reaction to Itoku's existence within the squad. This was something different entirely—a deliberate, recalibrating movement. There was a subtle shift of weight, small adjustments in orientation that turned faces and shoulders fractionally toward her side of the room.

She looked then, carefully and without making it obvious that she was looking. The faces that had moved were, almost without exception, the faces she had been introduced to earlier in the evening. The ones Madam Sen had steered her toward, one cluster at a time, across the careful circuit of the ballroom. The ones who had received the Sylarion name with the particular quality of people adding it to a mental register and marking it as worth remembering—and clearly had remembered until this exact moment.

There were also the ones, who had reacted with genuine appreciation when she had pledged the Sylarion Legacy's support during the hunt.' Oh,' Veyra realized then, very quietly, with the feeling of understanding arriving several minutes after the thing it was explaining.' That's what you were doing…' The Sylarion name in the right ears, first. The closeness to Thal Sen, the entire evening—even now—second.

Then the pledge—the Minor Legacy speaking into a Major Legacy moment, attaching itself to something significant, making itself visible in a context where visibility had weight and meaning. And now this: Her Corvus, Squad Leader of the most talked-about Alpha Squad in recent Drive history—if not all of UHF history.

The Sylarion name attached to that as well, and every person Madam Sen had introduced her to tonight now looking in her direction with the expressions of people massively updating their assessments in real time and deciding to act on it—to change their positioning despite the breach of decorum it caused, however mildly. The Sylarion Legacy's value had just changed in this room. Not enormously. Not permanently, at least not yet.

But the trajectory of it had shifted in the space of a single evening by a margin that she and Orvyn could not have manufactured alone in the next decades of careful, grinding work—that much Veyra was certain about now.' Maybe not even in our lifetimes…' She stood very still and kept her face composed, feeling something that was either profound gratitude or profound terror, then suspected it was both, in roughly equal measure.'

The Sen are far too dangerous a Legacy for the UHF to allow to continue to exist,' she thought, in the direction of Madam Sen, with the particular, rueful quality of someone arriving at a conclusion they'd been circling for hours.' And yet you can't do without them, can you? Not the UHF, not the Majors, not even Minors like us. You are exactly the kind of architect this Galactic War requires—and nobody would ever say so out loud, least of all to you. Not that you would even care, would you, Madam Sen…?'

It was then that Corvus' clip finished and the next—and final—title card arrived, featuring the highest-scoring Marine following the Cube Trial and the last member of the Sovereign's Alpha Squad to be revealed…