Once more into the breach, dear friends

[hellonspectacles]

It is nighttime, or what passes for nighttime in space, and the ship Mount Ida is quiet.

It isn’t a particularly large vessel. There are berths for a dozen crew members and private rooms for the ship’s two officers, a mess hall, a med bay, an armory, a brig. Nothing about it is particularly luxurious—Blood of Eden doesn’t go in for luxury, and the members of Troia Cell are no different—but everything is functional and well maintained. The ship hums faintly with the sound of engines and life support and electric lights, a but most of the crew don’t notice it anymore.

Near the officer’s cabins is another berth, occupied (or so it seems) by a single person. It contains a bed, and a sink, and a table on which, strangely, sits the perfectly formed skeleton of a human hand. The door is locked from the outside and a crew member stands guard. Are these precautions to keep the person inside from escaping, or to protect them from coming to harm? No one is sure anymore.

The crew member, Sergeant Hot Coals of Vengeance, is bored. Their shift is almost over, they need a piss, and they’re not even sure what the point of this assignment is anyway. Sure, the room’s occupant might be a zombie lover, and she might be a little weird. And sure, she did dislocate Lieutenant Pash’s arm when they tried to take that gross little bag of bones from her, but that was months ago. These days, she’s polite, and she spends long hours in secret meetings with the Commander, and she always asks for an escort when she needs to leave the room.

Coals really needs to piss. They peek through the little window in the door.

Inside, Camilla Hect is curled up on a narrow bed, breathing steadily. She’s asleep, and anyway, the door is locked. What’s the worst that could happen if they stepped away for a few minutes?

Coals leaves their post, and Camilla sleeps on—or so it seems.

Comments

[hellonspectacles]

Camilla is beginning to see why Palamedes said that she would like Lieutenant Tayray. Of course she has questions, as any intelligent person would, but she understands that sometimes, in times of precarity, all but the most important questions must be set aside. As it is, those that she asks have answers that are decided complex.

Shrugging off Ari’s I’m sorry, she does her best to explain Blood of Eden. “In the Houses we call them terrorists. I think they would prefer ‘freedom fighters’.” She presses her lips together. “The Emperor has colonies on habitable planets across the galaxy. Most of them signed contracts thousands of years ago granting the Houses full use of their natural resources during the Emperor’s lifetime. What they did not realize is that the Emperor would never die, or that the extraction of natural resources would involve the destruction of most organic life on the planet and the displacement of its people. Blood of Eden is made up of individuals from those planets who object to these conditions. Violently.”

Camilla Hect nearly, nearly smiles. “More of an acquisition, as we remain entirely separate entities.” The Sixth likes contracts and corporate-speak in their own way, too. “One of them is still in the infirmary, chained up and slowly dying of a gut wound sustained while we were at Canaan House. The other one bunks with the rest of the crew.” Meaning: Judith Duteros, Second House heir and Captain of the Cohort, remains a prisoner of war, while Coronabeth Tridentarius, Princess of Ida, has forsworn her titles and joined Blood of Eden. Nothing in Camilla’s expression reveals what she thinks of either of these choices.

And now for the important bit: “The Warden wants to convince the Sixth House to secede from the Empire under the guarenteened protection of Blood of Eden.”