---[ POV: Flynn ]---

"Lieutenant Flynn! Commander Regus to Lieutenant Flynn! Do you copy?!"

The blaring and hurried voice of the Commander boomed like the bellow of a bull through Valerian Flynn's communication system.

The lieutenant looked around him to take in the carnage. A few seconds ago, the bay of hangar 12 where he was busying himself on the routine maintenance of his combat-class corvette with his men had suddenly burst into a huge explosion.

Lieutenant Flynn had been catapulted a few meters away by the blast and crashed into a pile of tools and supply crates. Fortunately, the Aegis implant embedded into the bone of his sternum had automatically deployed its force shield to protect him, leaving the young man mildly stunned rather than heavily injured.

One of the pilots Flynn was in charge of had miraculously weathered the explosion without so much as a scratch and ran toward his superior officer to help him out. The soldier extended a hand to help Flynn back up.

"You okay, Lieutenant?"

"Yeah... Yeah, thank you. My Aegis saved my ass there, or at least, avoided me a concussion." Flynn grabbed the offered hand and grunted while getting back on his feet.

"Ah, yeah. I sometimes forget about those. Wish I had one in me too instead of just in my armor."

"You have been nominated for promotion, Layton. Just accept the damn thing and you'll get one like all the other officers."

"Nah... You know me. Responsibilities ain't for me." The soldier waved his hand as to dismiss Flynn's remark. "I wonder though, did it hurt when they drilled into your bones to implant it?"

"Now's really not the time for that crap Layton." said Flynn. "Since you seem fine, go and help the others. If I see you slacking I'm gonna make you wash the hangar floor with a toothbrush again."

"Aye aye, Captain Grump!" the soldier saluted over dramatically and left.

Flynn had no idea how that man was able to take such a serious event with so little care. Maybe it was a good thing he didn't want his promotion after all. He would have to talk to him later about this 'Captain Grump' insubordination but he had to admit the playfulness of Layton played a huge role in maintaining the squadron morale so he had trouble getting really mad at him. Despite his flaw, Layton was a dedicated team player.

Flynn brought his disheveled red hair back to tie them in a knot as they were before the explosion. He looked around him to assess the situation. The emergency lights and sirens signaling an accident had been turned on and the people that still could were getting back up after the initial surprise.

There was equipment and debris scattered everywhere but damages to the ships and personnel seemed minimal. Flynn was relieved it was the case but as the officer in charge of hangar 12, he was not so naive as to think an accident just occurred. He knew that such an explosion was not a coincidence.

The ship he was serving on, the ISF Starfall, was a gigantic star-class battlecruiser of the Unified Stellar Empire equipped with the most advanced armament and warfare technologies currently available.

The Starfall had been often deployed as the centerpiece of a battle fleet or dispatched on critical missions over the last 10 years and its name was now known and feared by the enemies of humanity.

It was clear by now that this ship was a target of choice for the Mind Eaters, the primary foes of mankind over the last two thousand years.

There was no doubt in the lieutenant's mind that the Starfall was under attack but, trying not to jump to conclusion too quickly, he opened the pending communication channel Regus had used to contact him earlier and tried to address the Commander without sounding too dazed.

"Lieutenant Flynn to Regus. Copy that."

As if to confirm Flynn's suspicions, Commander Regus answered him with disturbing news.

"Status is not good, Lieutenant. I am with high command right now and they are jumping and running around like crazy little monkeys. Starfall has been forced to reintegrate real space by an unidentified force field. We have been hit by multiple long-distance particle lances as soon as our dimension folders failed and we exited hyperspace. The energy signature matches the weaponry of the Mind Eaters but the hyperspace net they used - or whatever the fuck that was -, and the sheer power of those lances is all new to command. It punched right through our emergency shields before we could deploy our full defense and destroyed our entire escort fleet."

Regus took a moment to let his lieutenant digest the information and Flynn could hear the commander let out a caustic chuckle as if he had difficulty believing what he was saying himself.

"A large enemy fleet composed of three battleships, two dozen destroyers, and almost fifty combat frigates have been detected. Contact estimated in T-minus 9 minutes. Command is about to declare a state of emergency battle alert. We are to engage the enemy as the trick they used to get us out of hyperspace is also preventing us from jumping again."

Right on cue, the yellow emergency light turned red, and the battle sirens started to trumpet everywhere on the Starfall. Everyone could be seen immediately tensing up, some more than others.

Lieutenant Flynn gritted his teeth. In normal circumstances, even if the ISF Starfall was a state-of-the-art battlecruiser, engaging such an overwhelming enemy fleet armed with never seen before weaponry was quite a risk. Now that the Starfall was without the support of an allied fleet of its own and, to top it all, was already damaged by long-distance sniping attacks, engaging the enemy was an almost guaranteed death sentence. The young man's face turned somber: as a combat pilot, he would be deployed to lead his squadron as vanguard and interceptor.

Flynn found it strange that Regus, the Commander in charge of the Hangar Division for the entire ship, had decided to contact him directly rather than relaying order through the chain of command. There were quite a few people between him and the commander. Flynn's best guess was that some of them might have been hurt or killed during the attack. After all, the Starfall was gigantic and for the moment he had no way to know how the other sections of the ship had been affected by the recent attack.

"It's your lucky day, Lieutenant. You are to board our fastest corvette and get the hell out of here ASAP. Command has recorded all the data they could on the new weapons of the enemy and made it a priority to get it back to Central on Earth. A Regulator squad, codename Delta-6, has been dispatched to your position and should reach hangar 12 in 2 minutes. They are carrying the package that is to be delivered to Central and are to act as your escort for this mission. Get a scouting corvette ready for departure as soon as possible."

Lieutenant Flynn had some trouble believing what he heard. Command could probably send an encrypted FTL communication that would reach Earth in a couple of days if they wanted, so why take the risk to send a single corvette out there in what was probably the less efficient way to dispatch information across the galaxy.

A corvette was not equipped with the same powerful dimension folder - more commonly known as 'hyper-drive engine' - as a battlecruiser, so reaching Earth would probably take him weeks or months. Of course, a scout corvette had a somewhat better folder than the combat one he was used to piloting, but the difference was marginal.

The young man shivered at the thought that if high command was resorting to this sub-par method, the situation was probably a lot worse than what he originally imagined.

Nonetheless, he was a soldier of the Unified Stellar Empire; loyalty, devotion, pride, and duty had been burned into his soul and bones.

"Received Commander. Imperium Omnia Sidera!"

The motto of the ISF, and the Unified Stellar Empire at large: "The Empire rules over all stars".Flynn had heard that the Empire based a lot of its nomenclature on the dialects and cultures of ancient human societies that predated even the space age. The language used for this motto was from a primitive human civilization which had apparently been the greatest power of its time, and one of the closest one to unify humanity before the Empire was established, thousands of years later. Now, humanity was one, unified, and most of the cosmos were theirs so, 'Omnia Sidera' was only fitting a motto. The Unified Stellar Empire was by far the most dominating civilization in the galaxy, with thousands of vassal states and almost a hundred sapient alien species integrated into its folds.

The symbol of the Empire, displayed on its flags, soldiers, and ships, was the outline of a stylized golden sun whose interior was filled with glimmering stars. The words 'Omnia Sidera', now synonymous with the glory and might of the Empire, were written beneath the golden sun.

"You're goddamn right kid! You're by far our best pilot so high command expects nothing less than perfect from you. Let me know once the package is loaded and secured, then wait for my signal to depart. Command is planning quite the fireworks. You will use that screen to get out and reach a point where it is possible to use your folder to jump again. For the moment we have no idea just how large that anti-jump net is."

As Commander Regus was finishing his explanation, Flynn could see that the entire hangar was in effervescence. The support personnel had started to prepare the undamaged combat corvettes and the fighter interceptors for battle while pilots were gearing up for departure. Some medical technicians and androids were carrying the injured away, but most people seemed fine, probably because most of them wore outfits equipped with Aegis devices.

The young man looked around and spotted the only two scout corvettes parked in the hangar. They were of the Hermes-III line, one of the most recent lines on the market and one praised for its high specifications as well as its versatility. Hermes-III corvettes were used by the Empire for both stealth reconnaissance and scientific data collection missions. Since it was designed to scout and gather information, it was one of the fastest and stealthiest ships around, at the expense of its firepower.

Flynn rushed toward the closest one while signaling to a maintenance crew about his intention to board it. The crew saluted him as he was their superior officer then immediately launched a diagnostic. After a few seconds, one of the technicians signaled the lieutenant that everything was fine and pressed a button on his arm-pad to lower the ramp to the cargo bay situated at the back of the ship. Those kinds of corvette had small airlocks on both sides but those were almost never used since they were small enough to dock inside pressurized hangars.

Rather than a large combat room, the first deck of a scout corvette was occupied by a small cargo bay housing basic engineering. A steep ramp allowed access to the second deck, which was composed of a catwalk circling around the cargo bay and giving access to the various amenities of the corvette such as the cockpit, the galley, the research station, some rudimentary crew quarters, etc. Reconnaissance or science mission could last for way longer than a battle and thus required much more flexibility and adaptability.

Flynn walked in at a hurried pace and got to the flight deck situated at the end of a small hallway just in front of the inter-deck ramp. He sat in the pilot seat and immediately started to fire the relevant systems before synchronizing his neural stack to the vessel AI.

A neural stack was a dynamic memory and processing matrix implanted at the base of the skull and extended along the cervical vertebrae. It linked a computing interface to the brain and central nervous system of its host. In addition to acting as an integrated computer and data storage device, neural stacks had a vast number of uses such as enhancing the mental capacities of its host and allowing him to link directly with other implants or external systems.

For a pilot with eye and motor implants like Lieutenant Flynn, a good neural stack was a must-have. Fortunately, as an officer, he was equipped with a good quality one and could have it upgraded every 4 years of services in the ISF. He just got a shiny new one a couple of months ago with a state-of-the-art chipware interface that allowed him to boost his stack with up to 7 external chips for additional capacities.

Of course, his chips were currently all geared toward piloting, officer duty, and ship maintenance as those were his main functions since he got promoted from a pilot sergeant to lieutenant in charge of hangar 12 two years ago.

For this reason, getting the scout corvette ready for take-off was as easy for him as tying his boots, even though he had never piloted one before.

Lieutenant Flynn neural stack and the ship AI conveyed to him everything he had to know and even took autonomous actions that did not require human input or validation.

Once he was done getting the corvette ready, he activated the cameras in the cargo bay to get a visual of the Regulator team's arrival. Soon enough, a squad of four imposing assault soldiers appeared.

Those mean-looking bastards were not just any rank and file combatant; they were Regulators, the elite close-quarter infantry of the Empire. A typical Regulator assault unit was composed of 4 to 6 members equipped with heavy but agile battle armors and powerful close-combat capabilities. They were usually deployed to defend the inside of a ship against boarding actions or to board enemy vessels themselves. Their equipment load was optimized for a fight in a restricted environment and to limit collateral damage. This meant they entirely surrendered explosives and long-range firearms at the profit of melee weapons such as searing-blades, power-hammers, energy-spears, and short-range blasters.

This particular squad battle armor was the melee-focused Stygian Predator, a black and gold suit praised for both its solidity and mobility. They were also armed with formidable power-hammers. Judging by their equipment load, they had obviously been tasked to stay close to the package they were carrying and defend it at all cost.

A menacing red light was emanating from beneath their black full-face helmet from where their left eyes should have been located and the other side of the helmet was painted with a skull pattern. It was against regulation to paint one's armor this way, but some elite teams did it nonetheless with little to no reprimand from the higher-ups.

The package, carried by two of them on one shoulder, was a long and heavy-looking armored crate. Lieutenant Flynn could easily fit twice in that box and wondered just how heavy it was. The crate was probably too massive for anyone else to transport it so effortlessly, but those Regulators were genetically enhanced, and their strength was boosted by cybernetic augmentations as well as a good dose of symbiotic muscles straddled all over their body beneath their armor.

The young man could hear their heavy metallic footstep from the second deck as they boarded the corvette. The two soldiers transporting the crate put their load on the ground and started to fix it in place with the magnetic anchors embedded into the corvette floor.

One of the other two punched the button to close the corvette's ramp and airlock with the side of his fist while the last one, the squad leader, turned toward a camera as if he knew Flynn was observing him through it and opened a communication channel.

"Delta-6 to Lieutenant Flynn. The package is secured. Ready for departure anytime now. Over."

The tone was firm and emotionless.

"Copy that. We wait for command now. Get yourself strapped in; this might get a bit rough if we are pursued."

The colossus in black armor nodded, his red eye gleaming in the dim light of the cargo bay.

"We are under your care, Lieutenant."

The four Regulators walked to the sides of the cargo bay, two on each side, and proceeded to lock themselves in a secure position by anchoring their magnetic boots to the ground, grabbing a hand handle, and locking part of their armor in this solid position.

Everything was done in complete silence and with utter efficiency.

Flynn's sighed slightly at the loose definition of 'strapped in' those soldiers had but he also knew that even a plasma blast to the face probably wouldn't be enough to make them budge from their current position.

The young pilot adjusted his seat and engaged the engines.

"Lieutenant Flynn to Commander Regus. The package is on board. We are ready to take off."