Fifteen doors open in unison, and the fifteen Members of Terra’s Executive Directorate enter a long, white room. The underground nexus of Terra’s administrative state is a dull affair: a concrete floor, bare walls, and a polymer table lined with holo-cast displays. The only decoration is the flag of Terra, a blue and white sphere bound by the protective crescents of Fleet. It hangs slack in one corner of the room.

  Brief nods are exchanged as chairs scrape against the hard floor. A pair of attachés fall into place behind each Director while the Directorate’s guards take their positions outside each doorway, assault rifles cradled over thick armor. Then the doors hiss shut, and the meeting begins.

  The man at the head of the table is First Director Alistair Vin. Kaisho did their damndest to murder the man during the height of the Crisis, but Mirem isn’t surprised that even Kaisho’s elite kill-teams weren’t quite up to the task. Elite aug-human bodyguards aside, the old man looks unkillable in the same way a vampire might; his tall form, alabaster skin, and fluid grace bely a body that is biologically at least ninety years old.

  Vin’s background is mostly a black box, but Mirem has accessed what she can of his biography. He was an AI Administrator for much of his life, and he still carries the telltale look of a person whose physical body was, for decades, a bothersome afterthought. Most Admins die in those positions, especially at the planetary administrative level—similar to integrated Fleet officers, they simply become too attached to their AI counterparts and too embedded in their roles to return to the waking world beyond an integration couch—but Vin is unique. Maybe it’s because his Admin specialty dealt with the governance of people rather than the oversight of machines.

  Propaganda, more like, Mirem thinks, eyeing the man warily. She’s scanned the PhD dissertation he wrote nearly sixty-five years ago: a combination of sociology, political science, and the psychology of populations. A technocrat of control.

  “Directors,” Alistair states. His mouth curls with what Mirem guesses is his best facsimile of pleasure as he surveys his fellow Members. “How good to see you all. With a full quorum, I call this twentieth plenary meeting of the three-hundredth and ninety-third caucus of Terra’s Executive Administrative Directorate into session.” He turns to his right. “General Matthis, you have the floor.”

  A beefy, swollen-necked man in a P.A. Special Security uniform stands at attention. Mirem feels her chest tighten.

  The Executive Directorate does not have time to discuss every particular matter. There are countless committees— asteroid mineral extraction boards, AI ethics panels, pollinator rehabilitation working groups— that handle the minutiae of running the planet and executing the Directorate’s strategic vision. Some of these people are even elected, at least at the local level. However, most of Planetary Administration’s sprawling bureaucracy consists of those who have sacrificed a large portion of their youth and sanity to pass the nearly impossible Planetary Administration Civil Service exam, or achieved the equally remarkable feat of graduating in the top ten percent of the University of General Administration. All of which is to say that, despite the inevitable bloat of Terra’s bureaucracy, most P.A. employees are exceedingly good at their jobs. Especially when coupled with their AI counterparts.

  Mirem has found that usually only three kinds of matters reached the Executive Directorate. The first are questions of doctrine, decisions outside the remit of even the most powerful Administrative committees, which are capable of altering Terra’s strategic trajectory. The second are disputes between Terra’s institutional pillars: when Fleet, Administration, and the megacorps enter an impasse, only the Directorate possesses the theoretical authority to compel a degree of compliance. The third is a crisis, whether internal or external.

  The internal sort is General Matthis’ specialty.

  “Thank you Director Vin,” Matthis grunts, nodding to the First Director before turning his glowering attention to the others. “Directors. We have a problem.”

  A holo-cast turns on before each Director. Behind her, Mirem can feel Lennock and Hua shift as they crane their necks to observe Mirem’s ‘cast.

  The image appears to be a map of the city, with several clusters of bright red dots. As General Matthis speaks, each cluster is magnified, and Mirem can begin to make out streets, landmarks, and hundred-story tenement buildings. Cult locations, Mirem coldly realizes.

  “It has now been forty-three hours since the Home Fleet departed for Scoria,” General Matthis rumbles. “As you all know from your security reports, Admin has been closely monitoring Rot-affiliated cult activity for the past two years for any signs of inter-cult orchestration or violence. Most of them are your run-of-the-mill anti-socials and religious fanatics who have latched onto the Anomaly as some kind of god, or a savior. They aren’t doing anything illegal per-se, and I would agree with the committees on education and employment that they derive at least some of their staying power from the entrenched poverty of these areas and recent economic dislocation. However...”

  Mirem’s holocast expands, and a series of images appear. Guns. Lots of guns.

  “At the time of Fleet’s departure our Internal Security services detected a sudden, unprecedented uptick in intercepted, cross-cult communication. Our linguistic forensic teams have been working to make sense of it, but it bears a striking similarity to the height of Kaisho-Renalisis collapse under the control of the Rot. Here is a sample.”

  A sound fills the room. Is that… laughter? Mirem clenches her fists beneath the table. A pall settles on the room as whispered giggles turn to barks of guttural growling. Mirem knows that her own look of uneasiness is mirrored in every other Director’s face.

  “You’re saying that there’s been a planetary re-emergence of the Rot, and a full emergency meeting wasn’t called?” one of the Murkata affiliated Directors barks, slamming her palm on the table. “We should have been made aware at once!”

  “This occurred just in the past day,” General Matthis replies, raising his voice in turn. “Data was still being correlated, as is Internal Security’s purview; until the scope of the emergence was confirmed, it was deemed that operational security was paramount.” The words are met with scoffs of disbelief from the Murkata-Heisen Directors and grimaces from most of the others, and Matthis presses ahead.

  “The scope was not as great as we initially feared. We raided the five locations from which the vast majority of these comms were intercepted.”The ‘casts’ images flicker through scenes of armored Special-Sec officers battering down doors to red-lit basements, followed by flashes of stun-grenades and gunfire. “We encountered various degrees of resistance, and our teams did suffer casualties. A significant amount of firearms and munitions were recovered from these scenes. We’re confident that several large-scale terrorist attacks were in motion. Obviously, Internal Security has been placed on the highest level of alert.”

  Not for the first time, Mirem is impressed by the Admin security services’ ability to keep such operations outside of the public eye. What would they have blamed the firefights on? Gas leaks? An extremist political group, like the National Restoration Front? If so, none of it has made the news. She wonders if her uncle had any knowledge of this. Judging from the outrage of the Murkata- affiliated Directors, perhaps not.

  “I thought you had these cults under proper surveillance,” another Murkata Director interrupts, a hard-chinned man dressed in the green and black of the corporation’s security services. He practically spits out his words. “May I ask how they were able to collect such quantities of weaponry that your Special Sec teams suffered casualties?”

  General Matthis glares back. “The investigation is fluid and ongoing. But might I remind the Director that there are many such cults, along with an increase in extremist groups, as mentioned in the Directorate-level reports we have dutifully provided. Now, if Murkata-Heisen would put some of its security forces under Admin’s security services’ remit—”

  The Director barks a laugh, and then leans forward, shaking a finger toward First Director Vin. “If Special-Sec would be more diligent in its intelligence sharing, or if the Directorate would finally give us public data-tap permissions, as we have requested multiple times, Murkata would be more than willing to —”

  “Enough of this damned bickering!” Vin yells, slamming a pale fist on the table and bringing the Murkata Director up short. “General! Continue.”

  General Matthis glares for a sullen moment at the five Murkata directors, unable to disguise his contempt, and then begins again. “As I said, thankfully, it appears that these outbreaks of Rot-like activity were not as prevalent as initially feared. No continued spread outside of these localities has been detected.” I’d hate to see what we consider ‘prevalent,’ Mirem thinks as the general continues to speak, staring bitterly at the map of the city.

  “Surviving members of the cults were brought in for questioning. They did not answer our questions appropriately. To be candid, Directors, they appeared to have lost all attachment to reason, and to pain. Traditional methods of interrogation were not useful. It was then that we liaised with our colleagues at Fleet for the possible use of Enforced Mind Integration. This was discarded as an option due to the Rot’s prior effect on our AI systems. It was then that suggestion was made for the novel use of a Navigator-adjacent resource for interrogation.”

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  Navigator-adjacent resource? What does that mean? Glancing at the other Directors, Mirem knows she isn’t the only one who has questions. General Matthis raises a hand, forestalling the bubbling chorus of interruptions, and shares a look with one of the Fleet Directors. The stocky woman rises to her feet, her hands clasped behind her back.

  Colonel Ying, Mirem remembers; a former Fleet intelligence officer before her elevation to the Directorate. She lifts her chin and begins a rapid-fire dissemination of information.

  “First, I must provide a degree of background. Fleet intelligence hypothesizes that the Home Fleet’s Warp jump may have allowed a brief infiltration of the Rot’s psychic presence back into our dimension, thereby influencing a portion of the population whose minds were already primed to accept the Rot’s influence over them. Think of it, perhaps, as dried kindling catching a spark, or a waiting bomb that needed only to be activated. This ‘activation’ was detected by a number of our Navigation cadets, who, along with several candidates in our pre-training pipeline, simultaneously awoke in the middle of the night, reporting different degrees of emotional distress.”

  There’s a sullen silence as the Directors absorb these words. Then a civilian Director to Vin’s left clears his throat and asks what every other Director is thinking: “Are you saying that every time a Fleet ship jumps now, a portion of the population is going to go mad?” the man says, eyebrows arching. “And if so, would not the Dweller ship detect such a breach? Forgive me if I speak in ignorant hyperbole, but it seems to me that, if it were not for Admiral Lanis, the Dwellers would have been more than content to expunge humanity in the process of cleansing the Rot’s so-called corruption…”

  “Certainly, that appears to be a risk,” the Fleet colonel replies, her voice flat. “I cannot speak to what the Dwellers can detect, or how they will respond. All I can say is that all Fleet assets continue to be on the highest level of readiness for any hostiles, be they Dweller or otherwise.”

  The Admin Director who asked the question slumps back in his seat, pale. Mirem isn’t sure what the man expected to hear— some kind of reassurance, perhaps? About three years too late for that, Mirem thinks, but she sympathizes with his vacant look of defeat. If that Dweller ship returns, Terra might as well give up.

  General Matthis takes over from the Fleet colonel. “To bring us back to what we can control, Directors: our Security Admins conducted a meta-data analysis of clusters of cult-susceptible locations and discovered several remarkable correlations. Besides their correlation with population density and poverty, the cults’ prevalence was inversely correlated to areas that have undertaken a degree of worship to the so-called Order of the Navigator. Specifically, to Admiral Lanis Osgell.” Mirem notices Matthis unconsciously glance toward her, and then quickly away. Her jaw tightens. “We had already hypothesized a causal link between these places of worship and population-level stability, but these data points put the connection on firmer footing. It is therefore the recommendation of Internal Security that a far more substantial push be made in disseminating the Order to counter the cults of the Rot.”

  “You want to make her into a god,” Mirem states, staring at General Matthis before turning her gaze to the other Directors, more than one of whom refuses to meet her eyes. “That’s it, isn’t it?” She laughs in disbelief at the insanity of the suggestion. “Might I remind you all that Lanis is not a god?”

  First Director Vin narrows his eyes at Mirem. “Yes, a god. Because do you know what, Director Seto?” he says, drawing out her last name as if it tastes of something unpleasantly sour before lowering his voice to a hiss. “We’ve already encountered one of those. The fucking Rot. Would you care to explain to me the difference between a god and that? Because a substantial portion of the population isn’t too discerning.”

  He sweeps his reptilian gaze over the other Directors. “People need to believe in something. For more than three-hundred years, science has overtaken religion, and that which we couldn’t explain we bloody-well hid. Hid the nature of how our ships went from point A to point B. Hid how tenuous our position was among the stars. Hid the reality of war. But now people know, and if you don’t give them a how or a why, then they’ll invent their own reasons.” His lips curl. “Terra, my fellow Directors, is a tinderbox. The people need something to believe in. Fleet has been proven fallible. So, who else but our Navigator savior?”

  “And what exactly do you want her to do?” Mirem cuts in. She feels out of breath, like she’s just been slapped. She wonders how much her uncle knew of this. Not damn enough, or his warning would have been more explicit.

  Vin’s gaze flickers back to the Fleet colonel. The woman looks even more grim than before, and Mirem notes that she hasn’t met her eyes once.

  The Fleet Director says, “As my fellow Directors are aware, Fleet Navigators are the rarest breed of Fleet officer. This is because they must possess two attributes.” The officer raises one finger, followed by another. “One: their ability to integrate with a ship-level AI system. Two: the psychic ability to imagine another dimension, tearing the fabric of space through sheer force of will. Fleet had always prioritized the first of these two abilities in its planet-side screening exams. The thinking went that a recruit with a high integration score could always be used in a different Fleet capacity. However, our encounter with the Anomaly, and Admiral Osgell’s experience with the Dwellers, has undercut this hypothesis.”

  Finally the Fleet colonel does meet Mirem’s eyes, as if she’s speaking only to her. “Certainly, Admiral Osgell’s integration scores were always superb—she would never have made it to command-track training otherwise—but it was her innate psychic ability, beyond even the usual Navigation threshold, that we suspect allowed her to resist her initial encounter with the Anomaly.” The colonel sweeps her gaze back across the other Directors. “Which brings us to Fleet’s Lumen Project. Classification level Apollo-Black.”

  There are mutters of surprise. Only General Matthis and First Director Vin seem nonplussed among the non-Fleet Directors, and even several of the Fleet members flinch at the mention of the program, eyes darting between their fellow members. Did Admiral Ren know about this? Mirem wonders, thinking of the grey-haired woman. Surely she would have. Not for the first time, Mirem desperately wishes that the admiral was a member of the Directorate instead of overseeing Fleet’s reconstruction, if only so she could read her reaction.

  “This program has, for the past two years, undertaken a screening of all candidates who showed a degree of latent psychic ability similar to those expressed by Navigators, but without the requisite AI integration scores. We identified one hundred and twenty-three such individuals. The Lumen Project, headed by Navigator Bennu, has sought to fortify their minds and develop their skill sets.”

  “To what purpose?” growls one of the woman’s fellow Fleet Directors, an older man who was clearly unaware of the project’s existence until a moment ago. Mirem imagines that there will be some intense discussions regarding clearance levels when this meeting is done.

  “Understand that the program is still in an experimental phase,” the Fleet colonel replies. “However, it was concluded that the appearance of the Rot’s corruption provided a compelling case-study in the use of these Lumen Project individuals. Observe.”

  The holo-cast in front of Mirem switches to a prison cell; somewhere, she imagines, deep within Special Sec’s subterranean headquarters. A disheveled, shirtless man is bound to a chair with metal straps, purple bruises and gashes spread across his arms and face.

  “This is the only one we retrieved alive from Complex C,” the Fleet officer says, as if by explanation.

  Four people enter the room. Two are massive Special Sec officers. The third is a woman in a Fleet officer’s uniform. Navigator Bennu, Mirem realizes, recognizing the tall, dark-skinned Mars Fleet Navigator.

  Beside Bennu is a young, gangly man. Even through the ‘cast, there is an unnerving intensity about the man’s movements. He and Bennu slowly circle the bound prisoner, quietly conversing with each other. Then without warning, the Lumen trainee seizes the prisoner’s head between his hands.

  Mirem is thankful there isn’t sound; judging by the prisoner’s bulging eyes and writhing features, the screaming inside the room would have been deafening. It only lasts a few seconds— then the prisoner’s face goes slack, his head lolling before dropping to his chest.

  “Whatever had gripped that man, the Lumen trainee was able to expel,” the Fleet officer explains, glancing at General Matthis. “Mental function returned in less than an hour, and we were able to debrief the prisoner. He denied any memory of the last two days. This process was repeated with the other captured prisoners. Only one died in the process.”

  It is rare that a majority of the Directors are rendered truly speechless, if momentarily, but this statement has that effect. “What did he do? Some kind of…” the Admin Director to Mirem’s right says, waving her hand; “exorcism?”

  The Fleet Director shrugs. “Call it what you will. Cleary, though, the project has moved beyond the experimental phase. Navigator Bennu is confident that the other Lumen Project candidates have a similar ability to both expunge the Rot’s influence over susceptible individuals, and to sense concentrations of so-called corruption.”

  The woman nods to General Matthis, who takes over. “Before the Home Fleet returns, Internal Security recommends deploying a Lumen Program trainee to every cult concentration on the planet, attaching them to a Special Sec brigade, and giving them extra-extrajudicial authority under the dual purview of Fleet and Planetary Administration Internal Security.” It doesn’t sound like General Matthis is asking permission, but rather simply stating a fact.

  Before any protest can begin, Vin cuts in. “Might I remind my fellow Members of the Executive Directorate that this body has always acted in unity, especially in times of emergency, as we find ourselves in now. I believe I speak for the whole Directorate when I give my wholehearted support to General Matthis and Fleet Command in utilizing the Lumen Program trainees, granting them thirty-days of extra-judicial authority under the Planetary Administration Emergency Defense Code. Do I hear a dissent?”

  The room is quiet.

  “Good,” Vin says with satisfaction.“In addition, Admin will undertake a more formalized approach to the Order of the Navigator in a dual attempt to suppress the spread of these Rot cults, especially in preparation of the home Fleet’s return. Depending on the Lumen trainees’ effectiveness, and the Rot’s continued presence on Terra, there must be some discussion as to whether Admiral Osgell may be more needed on Terra than with the Fleet. Of course, everything depends on the Home Fleet’s return.”

  The First Director smiles at Mirem. “Regardless, I am sure that Admiral Osgell and her fellow Navigators will be gratified to find themselves so revered.”