[AgentZero]

You were saying....



Kaelan O'Shea stared at his bedside monitor in disbelief. Barely half an hour ago, he'd received a brief, terse message from Saraea telling him that Kagan and Alice were dead, and now this. He shook his head and squinted at the screen, convinced what he was seeing was a trick of the eye, a sick joke, anything but true. But all the authentication codes checked out fine, no matter how unbelievable the news was, there was no questioning the authenticity of the message. Kaelan reached for the the glass sitting on his bedside table, and, finding it empty, cursed loudly and pushed himself out of bed in search of something with which to fill it. The message had been sent by a pretty, young comms officer aboard Admiral McArthur's command station. It was a copy of a dispatch being sent all over the fleet, but what was contained within it was-
“Hey...” The prone figure in his bed stirred sleepily. The petite brunette he'd picked up on his last port of call sat up on the bed and stared at him drowsily. “What's wrong?” she asked, noticing the expression on his face.
“End of the feckin world,” Kaelan replied, waving a hand at the bedside monitor.
“Can I look?” she asked.
“Yeah, work away,” he replied, trying to remember her name. Karen? Kelly? Kaelan? Yeah, that sounded familiar. Oh... Right. He groaned softly at the load taxing his mind and tried vainly to push his eyeballs further back into his head. He wandered out of the bedroom and stumbled over a bottle of scotch.
“Well look at you!” he declared happily, scooping it up off the ground and holding it up to eye level. “Thought you were getting away did ya? Back inside with ye!”
He marched back into the bedroom triumphantly to find Katherine? Kristin. Yes! That was it! Kristin was curled up in a tight ball, staring fearfully at the monitor.
“It can't be,” she whispered tearful. “Not again, it can't be.”
“Aye, but it is,” Kaelan said, pouring two large glasses of scotch. “So drink up and enjoy yourself, for only the Nine Whores know how much longer it'll last.
The girl took a glass with a shaky hand and drank deeply as Kaelan settled himself in beside her to run through the dispatch again. It started out with a thin line of text stating that the old enemy, that which had nearly wiped out the Second Dynasty, that which was supposedly exterminated, had returned. Following that eye-catching proclamation, there were several pages of sensor analysis, comparing recent scans of ships that had been attacking the Imperium all across it's borders to scans taken thousands of years ago, and if that wasn't enough to satisfy the reader, it ended with footage from a battle showing a gutted ship spewing bodies out into space, and whoever had taken the footage had managed to get a good clean shot of the faces of those being sucked out. One look at one of those skull-like, demonic faces was all Kaelan needed to convince him beyond a shadow of a doubt. That horrific visage was burned into the minds of all school children as the personification of all that was truly evil.
“What are we going to do?” asked Kristin, interrupting his musings.
“Well,” Kaelan said slowly. “We are first going to get very, very drunk. Then, when we wake up, we're going to stop off at the nearest spaceport, buy up a lifetimes worth of supplies, and get the bloody hell out of Terran space.”
“Where will we go?”
“Doesn't much matter,” he replied. “The Second Dynasty barely survived the last invasion and they were thousands of years ahead of us. The Imperium doesn't stand a chance, that report says as much, so the further away we get from here, the better.”
The following morning, Kaelan awoke to find himself on the bridge to the sound of a console beeping. He pushed himself out of the command chair, and stumbled over to the source of the noise, only to find that it was the communications terminal with a message confirming that all supplies had been loaded, and he was cleared to depart. With a fuzzy minded scowl, he looked over the manifest of cargo that had been transferred onto his ship. Several lifetimes worth of fine food, drink and medical supplies now filled his cargo hold. He scratched his head blearily and was still trying to figure out how this had all happened when Kristin strolled casually onto the bridge.
“You decided there was no time like the present after your third bottle,” she informed him after taking one look at the confused expression on his face. “So you came up here, sorted everything out, and passed out as soon as they told you it'd take seven hours to prepare everything and get it loaded.”
“Oh,” he said slowly. “Well, in that case, is there anything you want before we go?”
Kristin, a social outcast and only child to deceased parents, shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “I'm all done here.”
Kaelan reflected for a moment, then decided, “Me too.”
With that, he brought the ship into the air, rising higher faster and faster, blazing through the nighttime sky until they broke free of the atmosphere, and soon after, broke free of the constraints of normal space and into the limitless freedom of null-space.