Deep Space, The Dead Zone
Aboard ISS Belfast Windfall

"It just doesn't make sense, skipper," explained lieutenant Mack Hereford. He was on the bridge. "If you look at the calculations---"

"No, it's okay, I see what you're getting at here." Biggs Hilsfar was looking at the map, not the numbers. He had an office aft of the bridge with a great window. Still, most of his time was spent at a bulky steel desk crammed into a corner or the bridge. When things were slow, he put his feet up on the desk and sharpened pencils. Now, however, he was engrossed. "You're right, it doesn't make sense." As an after thought, he added, "pull up a chair." Twenty thousand kilometers off the port side the Nebula storm whipped into a fury of purple lightning and gas. The navigation computer noted this. It determined that ISS Belfast Windfall would roll over ever so slightly to port in twenty minutes, eighteen seconds. A correction of three degrees would be necessary.

Excerpt
Planetary Colonization and Outposting Treaty of 4628
Ratified by Arth, The Thrynn Confederation, and the Veloxi Empire
Acknowledged by the Elowan

7b. An outpost shall not constitute [grz'khx] sole grounds for annexation. For purposes of this treaty, an 'augmented outpost' shall be the standard commitment necessary to warrant full colonial status. ('Outpost' shall denote unpopulated installations of any sort, mobile bivouac ships, exploration vessels, mining operations, fueling depots, orbital communications relays and any other temporary sites. (See 'Appendix III.')
 

Elan
Teshbulr City
Coreward Plowshares Suite

Halura looked out the window. The wreckage was impressive, considering Elowan architecture. There wasn't much left of what had been a large building. Of course, it hadn't been made of much to begin with-a few stones for ornament, some strategically placed titanium supports and an impressive water works. The rest was glass in various tints and thicknesses, the better to let the sunlight in. Now it was just an acre of slag across the street. Four months had passed since that particular Thrynn raid. Forty had been massacred by razored glass as it flew on the waves of a concussion bomblet. There were reports of a Thrynn force massing near the border. Then again, there were always reports. Just barely, he could see a few weeds struggling up through the rubble.

Appropriate, indeed, Halura realized as he turned back to his work, to grow again amid the ruins. For an eon, life had fled the galactic core in terror. Some had drowned in the rising tide of flaring stars while others had blindly thrashed outward. Nobody had looked back. Even now, two decades after the end of the threat, the Dead Zone was a forlorn backwater. A few explorers and archaeologists had probed into the silence, but not many. The Cloud Region was far more glamorous. Very little was happening coreward of Meridian 200. Pythagoras was the exception. The Humans were fixated on Earth. There was opportunity in that. So manifold is their influence, these wandering ones.

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Next: "Set Piece"

I really have to repeat the story about the black egg bomb and Elan. I've got to admit that I knocked the daylights out of the "Uhlek Brain World" which was mysteriously in Elowan Space. I was an unremarkable Starflight player and killing Elowan was just my way to get some satisfaction.

"Hilsfar & Company: Because I Disturb The Force"