[TAS] Volume 2 - Chapter 107 - Connections

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------------------- Start of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) -------------------
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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

RR has received Intermission 106.1 - Breach today with no major changes.

For the Wolf Lords, this chapter IS NEW

And also: Please do not read the chapters here on Patreon, but go for the googledoc, .pdf or .epub instead. Patreon butchers all forms of formatting and you're missing out on easier and more enjoyable reading experiences.

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I apologize for the delay on this chapter.

I only got around to writing VERY late today, so I didn't make it in-time for the usual scheduled release :(

It's a bit larger than usual tho, so hopefully that'll make up for it!

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I'm looking forward to hearing your first impressions and opinions on this chapter. \o/

I hope you will enjoy it!

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-------------------- End of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) ------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is the link to the chapter:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_iOrAS5p2R1wJfPK047t-P91mGBaBkzgiUlROCz0SBE/edit?usp=sharing

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Volume 2 - Chapter 107 - Connections

Akin: "Hi. Um. H-Hello, everyone."

[Feedback whine from the microphone. The speaker flinches visibly.]

Akin: "So—sorry! Is this… it's too close, isn't it… Okay. There. Um. Hi. Again.

So, uh… wow. That is—that is a lot more of you than they told me there would be. They said "a small internal seminar," and I—I want it on the record that this is not small? Somebody in scheduling lied to me and I would… I would really like their name afterwards!"

[Scattered laughter.]

Akin: "Yep… That was—that was a joke. Totally.

Um… Okay. So. My name is Peria Akin, I'm an 'Expert Weapons Consultation Specialist' here at the Sovereign branch, and Corporate asked me to talk to you today about VIP acquisition and retention, because of, um. 

Well, because of reasons I'm sure you've all heard through the rumour mill by now, and which I am not going to confirm or deny, because—section four, people: VIP confidentiality. Come on. We all did the same onboarding, I'm sure…"

[A pause. The sound of a datapad being picked up. A longer pause. The datapad is put back down without being read.]

Akin: "Okay, so, I have notes, but if I read off the notes I'm going to sound like a service drone and also very possibly pass out, so we're just going to… talk? Great. Nobody openly objected, so that's what we'll do.

The thing they want me to teach you—and the thing I actually believe, like, genuinely, not corporate-training-video believe—is this:

Own your niche."

[Pause.]

Akin: "I'm—I'm actually going to say it again, because I saw maybe three people write it down, and it's… it's kind of the whole seminar? 

Own. Your. Niche. 

Everything else today is basically just this sentence wearing, um… different hats.

So… every one of us got taught to be… fine at everything. Right? Broad competence. And for ninety-nine percent of customers, that's exactly right. That's most of our job and it matters.

But broad competence will never—not once, not ever—get you a VIP.

A—And here's why: Think about who our customers are. 

They're Marines. 

And what is a Marine, structurally speaking? A Marine is somebody the UHF spent an absolutely obscene amount of resources turning into an expert. 

The sniper isn't 'pretty good at sniping.'
The Defensive Heavy isn't 'decent with a shield.' 

They're hyper-specialised, terrifying, walking-encyclopedia experts. 

And the equipment we sell them is expert-level, life-or-death equipment. Like… actually life-or-death. Their lives literally depend on the thing we hand them across the counter.

So ask yourself: When an expert, holding expert questions, about expert life-or-death equipment, walks into our store…

…who do you think they want to talk to?"

[Pause.]

Akin: "Yeah… Exactly. 

And I'm watching a lot of you write that down now, which—good, yes. 

You're trying to sell experts their tools. So you have to be an expert too. In something.

One weird little corner of the catalogue you know so deeply that when the one-in-a-thousand customer walks in with the one-in-a-thousand question, the answer, in this entire store, is you.

Because that's… um."

[Pause.]

Akin: "Because that's how it happened for me.

When the VIP that, um. That selected me. 

When they first came in, they came with questions—really high-spec questions. 

The tier where the standard product sheet just sort of… shrugs at you? And on that shift, in this branch, there was nobody else who could answer them. 

Not because I'm smarter than anybody—I'm really not, please don't write that down—but because I'd spent an embarrassing number of off-hours reading weapons-engineering documentation for fun. 

For three years that was mostly just a major personality flaw—"

[Laughter.]

Akin: "—and then one day it suddenly wasn't! One day it was the exact thing the single most important customer this branch has ever had happened to need, at the exact moment they needed it. 

That's the whole story. 

I didn't out-charm anybody, didn't out-sale-speech anyone… Gods know I definitely didn't out-protocol anybody either—"

[The speaker stops abruptly.]

Akin: "—which, um. Legal has asked me not to elaborate… The Akin Clause in section four exists as a direct result of the leadership's formidable and forward-thinking judgment, for which we are all, continually, very grateful."

[Silence.]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: "…That sounded really rehearsed?"

Akin: "It was reviewed by legal. Everything I say about the Clause is reviewed by legal. P—Please sit down."

[Extended laughter. The speaker waits it out, visibly relieved.]

Akin: "Okay! Um… Takeaway time, apparently. 

One: Pick your niche today—it's the section of the catalogue you read past closing time without noticing it's past closing time. 

Two: When the deep questions come, step up. 

Don't route it up the chain to look safe. 

Nobody up the chain read the technical appendices for fun. 

That's just you. 

That's always going to be just you. 

Three: The manual gets them in the door… but you are why they come back.

And four—

…four is just 'own your niche' again. I—I told you. It's the whole damn talk, really.

Um... Thank you. 

That's—that's everything I had. 

Thank you for listening, and for laughing at the right parts, that helped a lot more than you know. 

[Applause.]

P—Please stop clapping, I don't know what to do with my hands…

[Applause intensifies.] 

O—Okay… T—Thank you…”

—

[Shortened Excerpt from: "VIP Acquisition & Retention — Own Your Niche", internal training seminar held by Expert Weapons Consultation Specialist Peria Akin — Abundant Ammunitions Internal Training Records, Sovereign Branch, PFC 943]

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"—which makes her, as far as I can tell, the de-facto heir of the Sen Legacy," Corvus concluded, letting the words settle over the table. 

"That part, at least, is easy enough to verify: The Sen mark their heirs. It's a bit of a strange custom, honestly, even for Legacies—they implant something directly beneath the skin of the face, right under the left eye. A small ridge of it stays visible, looks like a thin scar if you don't know what you're looking at. As far as I'm aware, nobody outside the Sen actually knows what the implant is. Just that only ever one living member—or two, counting the actual Matriach—carries it at a time… I haven’t had the chance to meet Evelyne directly yet, so I haven’t been able to confirm it first-hand but—"

"She definitely has that one," Lucas said immediately, interrupting Corvus, tapping a finger against his own cheekbone. "Right here. Thin line, under the left eye. I figured it was just a scar…"

"Same," Thea nodded along. "I saw it back on the Digital Mission Deck, the first time I met her. It's subtle, but it's definitely there, exactly like you described."

'I just filed that away as "old injury" and moved on,' she thought, mildly annoyed at herself. 'Never even thought about it potentially having other purposes somehow... Just figured it was sentimental and that’s why she kept it—like Isabella’s…'

It was now the afternoon following the Psychic 101 lecture, and Alpha Squad had come together around the common dining table of their dorm for what Desmond had immediately dubbed "Corvus' conspiracy hour"—a full-squad briefing on everything their Squad Leader knew about Evelyne Midra Sen and the Sen Legacy as a whole.

The goal was simple: Get everyone on the same page about Eve, and figure out whether continuing to cooperate with her—especially in regards to Lucas' training and the fast-approaching Challenge—was actually a smart thing to do.

Corvus had, characteristically, prepared. 

A datapad lay in the middle of the table, projecting a sparse holographic display: The Sen family crest, a handful of names, and a mostly-empty relationship web that looked far too empty for how long Corvus had supposedly been digging.

"Now, before we get into the details of what the Sen actually do," Corvus continued, leaning forward and lacing his fingers together on the tabletop, "I need everyone to properly understand the scale we're talking about here." 

He paused briefly, meeting everyone’s eyes individually. "Evelyne Midra Sen is, by a comfortable margin, the most dangerous person aboard this ship, politically speaking. With the only exceptions being the Proprietor and the Runepriest himself—and even then, she might actually rival them."

That was the exact moment Thea caught Desmond rolling his eyes.

So did Corvus.

"Something you'd like to share, Desmond?" he asked, his tone perfectly level.

"I mean—come on." Desmond spread his hands. "'The most dangerous person aboard.' She's a Recruit, Corvus. Not even Alpha Squad. I get that her family's scary somehow, but that’ll mostly come to play in some gala on some planet I'll never visit. We're on a warship in the middle of a Drive… Literally going to go to war right after we’re done with this Recruit year. What's she going to do, really, politics me to death? I'll take my cha—"

"Pay fucking attention."

The words came out flat and hard—and they did not come from Corvus.

Desmond's grin died on his face. 

Thea's head turned along with everyone else's towards the speaker, because Isabella had said that without any of her usual snark.

"Politics is not something you get to make fucking light of, Desmond. Especially not in a military," Isabella continued, arms crossed, her eyes pinning him in place. "You know what I did before this, yeah? Merc work. Damn years of it. And let me tell you—there was no getting around politics out there. None. Fucking zero.”

She steadies herself in the chair, then continues, “You take a job from one corporation, congratu-fucking-lations, you've just pissed off their rival, and now there's a bounty channel out there with your org’s name sitting in it. 

“One government hires you to guard a convoy, but, surprise surprise, turns out the fucking cargo's actually a big fat 'fuck you' addressed to a different government, and suddenly the border you need to cross to get home has your biometrics flagged and shoot-on-sight orders attached." 

She shook her head slowly. "Every single contract, the first thing our experienced handlers did—before personnel assignments, before transport, before discussing pay, even, and believe me, we cared a whole damn lot about the pay—was map out the politics of the job. 

“Who benefits if we succeed. Who gets embarrassed. Who'd rather we didn't come back at all. You get that map wrong, or you skip it 'cause 'politics is boring'…" 

She snapped her fingers once. "Everyone's fucking dead. Simple as that.”

She took a deep breath, calming herself back down again, “I watched it happen to two entire outfits I knew personally. Damn good fighters, every single one of them… Hard bastards, well-fucking-geared, knew their trade inside and out… Dead anyway—'cause they thought exactly like you're thinking right now. Went into the meat grinder blind and got processed like everyone else…"

She uncrossed her arms and planted both elbows on the table.

"The UHF is the exact same beast, just scaled up so damn big none of us can see the edges of it anymore. The Legacies though? They're the ones drawing the fucking maps, I promise you." 

She jabbed a finger toward the hologram of the Sen crest. 

"You think Evelyne and the rest of the Legacy kids—Masters included—are here to collect shiny medals and play soldier with us commoners? They're playing games in the shadows, about control, Desmond. 

“They’re stacking up their own personal power bases all throughout the Galactic War. Because they know—shit, their families have probably been preparing for fucking decades by now—that the whole Faction-based setup isn't going to last much longer.

“The War's fucking ending, Desmond. Not this year, no, not even in ten. But it is ending, and every single bastard with real money and real connections is already elbowing for position at the table for whatever comes after." 

She leaned back again, pointing a finger at everyone collectively. "And us? All six of us sitting at this table right now? We're dead-center in the first generation of Marines that'll likely get to see that fucked-up end. However it actually ends up looking. That makes us assets. 

“Long-term, high-value, worth-the-investment kind-of assets. I'd bet my whole damn fucking arm that Evelyne's initial goal here was to check each of us out, one by one, and start reeling us into her orbit. Nice and slow… Get us comfortable. Get us grateful. Then one day, years from now, we all wake up on the Sen Legacy's payroll of contacts without a single one of us ever noticing we'd been fucking recruited all the way back here."

She finally looked away from Desmond and around the rest of the table.

"So… Yeah. Pay fucking attention to the briefing. It’ll literally save your ignorant life."

Nobody said anything. 

Nobody said anything for a solid while, actually.

Thea realised at some point that her mouth was slightly open and closed it. 

Across the table, Desmond looked like a man who'd reached for a light switch and grabbed a live wire. Even Kara—Kara—was staring at Isabella with her head tilted, wearing the exact type of expression she usually reserved for interesting medical scan results.

'…I never even considered any of that,' Thea thought, genuinely floored. 'I've been so deep in Builds, Attributes and Psyker-bullshit that the entire political layer of this place just… didn't even occur to me… And Ela's just been walking around with all of this in her head the whole time?! What?'

She'd known Isabella had history—the merc stories came out whenever food and drink lined up just right. But those were practically always told for laughs. Botched extractions, terrible clients, a commanding officer who'd once traded their only vehicle for a crate of counterfeit whisky… Those kinds of stories.

This, however, was something else entirely. This was some serious depth, on a topic Thea would have confidently ranked Isabella dead last in, squad-wide.

'Note to self: Stop ranking people you clearly know nothing about. You keep being horribly fucking wrong about basically everyone…'

Corvus was the first to actually manage to recover.

"Th—well." He cleared his throat, visibly re-scheduling his entire prepared briefing in real time. "That was… I had roughly a third of that in my notes for the end of this discussion, and I'll be honest, Isabella just delivered it better than I was going to…" 

He gave her a small, appreciative nod. "Well said. Truly."

"Damn right it was," Isabella replied, the usual volume and snark already returning as she reached over and stole one of the nutrient crackers from the bowl in front of Desmond, specifically. "Merc school beats fancy school on this topic, eh? Enjoy your loss, Bossman.”

"I'll frame it," Corvus retorted dryly, and the tension around the table slowly broke into scattered chuckles.

"Well… To formally put it on the record, though," he continued, tapping the datapad and steadying back into his briefing cadence, "I agree with effectively everything she just said—including the read on Evelyne's initial goal. Her actual motivations, and what I think she's really doing aboard this ship, is a topic we'll get to properly later. I have quite some thoughts about that. Some of them, frankly, worry me greatly." 

His eyes swept the table. "But for any of that to make sense, you first need to understand what the Sen Legacy actually is. So—back to the beginning."

The hologram shifted, the crest rotating slowly.

"The Sen are a Major Legacy—same tier as the Masters, on paper. But comparing the two is like comparing a Decimator to a scalpel, and I mean that in every possible direction. 

“Masters are loud. They want to be seen: They have grand galas, several dozen estates, public bloodline records going back six generations, and frame themselves as the best Defensive Heavies humanity’s ever produced, marching in the front of every parade they can make it to. That whole loudness is their entire strategy—visible excellence, visible power." 

He tapped the table once. "The Sen are the complete polar opposite. Ask a hundred Legacies what the Masters do, and you'll get a hundred roughly correct answers. Ask them what the Sen do, and you'll get a hundred non-committal shrugs—from the same people who could recite the Sen name's importance in their sleep. Everyone knows they matter. Almost nobody can tell you why." 

He looked around the table, making sure he had every set of eyes. "That gap in perception is not an accident. Not in the least. The Sen have spent generations manufacturing it."

He let that hang for a beat.

"What I'm about to walk you through is everything my family actually knows about them—which is more than most Minor Legacies get to know, and still, I want this understood up front, likely less than a tenth of the actual picture. So treat all of it as 'best available information.' Not truth." 

A humourless little smile crossed his face. "Because if there's one thing every Legacy agrees on, from the lowest Minor family to basically every Major one as well, it's this: Nobody has ever had the full picture of the Sen. And the people who claimed they did a bit too aggressively…"

He flicked the datapad, and the hologram shifted to a short list of family crests—each one marked with a small, grey icon.

"…well. These are the Legacies that tried to actively move against them. Notice anything they have in common?"

Thea leaned in, scanning the crests. 

None of them were familiar to her, of course, as she had no idea about any politics at all, but she also quickly realised, staring at the grey markers, that it was also exactly the point.

"They're all extinct," Desmond said quietly.

"They're all extinct," Corvus confirmed with a nod. "Or, as the records will show, they simply… fizzled out naturally. Lost the connections that made them Legacy-worthy. Had a few bad years with their heirs ending up in bad deployments—purely based on bad luck, I'm sure… You get the picture."

Everyone nodded or met Corvus' eyes, signalling their understanding—this was more serious than Thea had ever expected, for sure.

'I thought Eve was a bit weird, sure, but… This shit is a lot scarier than I thought,' she thought, letting out a quiet sigh of pure exhaustion. 'Why can stuff not just be simple for once? Just… A simple mission with simple objectives, and no strange curveballs of politics, Psychic nonsense or anything of the sort. I just want to shoot some Freaks and get some highscores…'

"Now," Corvus continued, and Thea reluctantly moved her attention back to him. "Nobody is really sure what generation of Major Legacy the Sen actually are, but records—and the knowledge from my family—point them somewhere toward the seventh or eighth generation, which makes them even more entrenched than the Masters Le—"

"They're ninth generation, counting Evelyne," Kara quietly interrupted. "Her daughter will be the first generation of Prime Legacy for the Sen."

Everyone's eyes fell on her at once.

Kara did not meet a single one of them in return.

She sat perfectly still, gaze fixed on some unremarkable point in the middle of the table, her hands folded in her lap—and Thea felt a twinge of something sharp in her chest at the sight of it. 

Kara didn't do small and reclusive like this. 

'Should I…?'

She considered it for exactly one more heartbeat—then thought back to the thought she'd had just a few seconds ago, and almost snorted at herself.

'You wanted a simple mission with simple objectives, Thea? Congratulations. Here's one: Support your best friend when she's clearly uncomfortable. No politics, no Psychic nonsense. Simplest mission brief in existence… Now… How do I…?'

Thea considered it for an extra second, then just did the first thing that came to her mind.

Quietly, beneath the table, she reached over and squeezed Kara's hand.

And Kara—miraculously—did not flinch away. 

Her fingers stayed stiff for a moment, then turned, and squeezed back. 

'Did… Did I just do that right?!' Thea was downright shocked at the smooth success of it, but kept the shock firmly closeted away as Corvus started to speak again.

"I'm not going to ask how you possibly know that information, Karania," he said, his voice deliberately even, deliberately unbothered—smoothing the moment over the way only Corvus could immediately recognize was necessary and implement in the same breath. "And I'd appreciate it if everyone else took it at face value as well." 

His eyes made a brief, meaningful circuit of the table, lingering half a second on Desmond, who slightly raised both hands in wordless innocence. "I trust Kara's input on this topic implicitly. Which…"

He exhaled slowly through his nose.

"…Which makes Evelyne even more important—and far, far more dangerous—than I'd assumed… Even in my worst-case read of her."

He tapped the datapad, and the hologram shifted back to the Sen crest.

"There's a massive change in what a Legacy is when it crosses from Major to Prime. It's not merely another step on the same ladder but a whole different ladder entirely, from what I know, although I will admit that my knowledge of Prime Legacies is… Lacking. 

“Fundamentally, however, a Prime Legacy stops being a mere generational family that serves the UHF and effectively becomes an institution in itself. Their internal rulings start carrying weight comparable to straight up High-Command directives, at times. Other Legacies stop competing with them entirely—they orient around them, like stars around a black hole. 

“Comperatively speaking, there are only a small handful of Prime Legacies in existence, but every single one of them has fundamentally shaped what the UHF looks like today…" 

He paused. "And if Kara is right—and I'm operating on the assumption that she is—then Evelyne's daughter will be the Sen's first Prime generation..."

"So… Her daughter specifically, by the way—and this is worth the brief detour," he added, raising a finger. "The Sen Legacy exclusively births women. It's also led exclusively by women. No exceptions, not once, in the entire recorded history of the family. And it goes far, far further than that, too: It's said that every Matriarch and every direct Heir is a partial clone of the original Evelyne Sen—the founder herself—through medical processes nobody outside the family has ever gotten a look at. Which is also why every single one of them, Matriarch and Heir both, is named Evelyne Sen. All of them. Every generation." 

A dry, humourless note crept into his voice. "It's intentionally confusing, no doubt. From the outside, the records blur together until it looks less like a bloodline and more like one single, uninterrupted woman—one Evelyne Sen, running the whole thing from its founding to today. And I'd wager quite a lot on that being precisely the impression they want you to walk away with."

Thea felt a chill crawl up the back of her neck.

'One woman… Nine generations. The same face, the same name, over and over…' She thought of the girl who'd trembled asking for her autograph, then of the composed creature who had perfectly laid out all of the Masters’ girls’ Attributes, Abilities and a whole host of notes about her character like they were nothing. 'And I signed an autograph for her like she was some random fan…'

"So, ultimately—putting it all together," Corvus concluded, leaning back. "An Heir of the Sen, one generation removed from Prime status, personally aboard the Sovereign for our Drive… Evelyne is undoubtedly going to be putting serious work into building an impressive web of connections aboard this ship. Contacts she'll be drawing on for the next century, seeded now, while everyone worth knowing is still young and cheap to impress. Of that, there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind any longer… The only real question is what she wants each specific thread of that web for—and that brings us to her motivations, which is something we’ll go over next..."

He went quiet for a second, giving everyone room to digest everything he’d just said.

Thea used the room to feel, once again, thoroughly humbled.

'I keep doing this… Ela. Eve. Even Kara, apparently. I keep sizing people up in two seconds and getting it completely fucking wron—'

The ship-wide speakers activated.

Every head at the table snapped up toward the ceiling in unison, muscles already primed, everyone half a heartbeat away from jumping out of their chairs on the spot. 

There was no scheduled announcement for today. 

Not that any of them were aware of, at least, as the brief round of shared glances that shot across the table confirmed it in the span of half a breath.

"All hands, attention. This is Captain Cross speaking," came the deep, resonant baritone of the Sovereign's Captain—utterly unhurried and absolute.

"At 1600 hours, this vessel will be executing an unscheduled course-alteration, and will exit the Void to do so. Effective immediately: All Digital Missions, Skill Trainings, and Time Dilations are suspended, and all inter-ship communications will remain dark for the duration. 

“Sessions in progress at this time have been forcibly cancelled by my authority. Every Marine and Recruit affected by a cancellation will have their investments refunded in full by the UHF within the coming hours, no exceptions. If your refund has not arrived by end of day, notify your chain of command, and it will be corrected.

"As we exit the Void, you may feel the ship tremble—some of you potentially for the first time, including inside the DDS. Do not be alarmed by it. The tremble is standard procedure and carries no risk whatsoever: Nothing more than the forces of transition acting on the Sovereign's frame, while the ship's AI commits the better part of her considerable attention to keeping every deck exactly as it should be. She has done this more times than most of you have drawn breath. She will do it flawlessly again today, rest assured.

“There is no risk associated with this procedure. I will not be saying it a third time, so let it settle in now. Continue about your duties and your day as normal, wherever they don't fall under the suspended categories. We anticipate re-entry into the Void within a window of approximately five hours, at which point all suspended services will resume in full.

"That is all, Marines. Captain Cross, out."

The very first thing that happened, following the cessation of the announcement, was that Isabella jumped over the table in a single leap, then rammed her back against the counter and pushed herself hard against it, making herself as flat as she could…

“Ain’t gonna fucking get me with this shit again this time, you bitch-ass ship!”

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