~He stands upon the bridge surveying the empty space about the aging warship. Standing upon the bridge of the Star Warden, a sleek ovoid of the immense Proselyter-class. It's aging hull spoke of the tender carress and kisses of dust and micrometeroids that were ubquitious in the Void. This warship, however, had lost none of its power and little of its impressiveness, due to the demanding repairs and maintenance the stern Captain required.

It was capable of bending the minds of an entire solar system full of worlds. The merchant vessels it accompanied like a intimidating older sibling had holds full of the valuable trade goods so necessary to gain a foothold in target societies. Then the Clerics followed, accompanied by Knights should hostilities arise anyway. Lastly . . If logic failed to persuade the infidel to join the Enlightened, it was comforting to know the Warden also possessed the might to pulverize entire planets, or gobble up enemy fleets like the candied Varsuva fruit favored by his 1st Officer.

Now, however, it was alone in this sector of space. Hard to make converts if no sentients are to be had, the Captain reflected. A large, bearish man of some fifty years (elven hundred if one added in the cryotank sleeps), he chewed on the end of a narcostick thrust into one corner of his expansive mouth.

Even the subspace communication bandwidths were silent, save for the constant static, pops, and whistles that spoke of nearby forming stellar formations and the background noise consisting of the cries of distant pulsars and birthing suns.

"It would appear that we alone survived, Captain. Your orders?

"Set course Alpha-Omega, Ensign. The course the astrophysics officer suggested". It was the most likely plot to find missing Hegemony ships . . and had the same chance of a snowball in hell of being successful, the Captain knew. Space was mindboggling in its dimensions, vast and frightening.

The captain tugged at his walrus mustache. An ancient affectation, it was not against regulations per se, but frowned upon by the politically correct amongst the Hegemony knights. He always enjoyed tweaking the sensitivities of the ship's political officer. An unbending scientist-cleric with a nervous tic, he was a constant gadly at the Captain's elbow. Thankfully, today, he was a the ship's vespers, and not plaguing the Captain with his weevil voice and shrewish manner.

The Captain turned to survey the passing solar system, noting with pleasure the presence of a comet. Water was often a hard resource to find and expensive to produce on their own. A small miner craft attached to his tiny fleet would no doubt be making a call to the stellar body, to shore up the ship's reserves of the precious liquid. He smiled, fresh coffee this week.

. and did his best to put aside his fears, not spoken of to the crew, that the mighty Empire of the Irrefutable had passed like so many before it . . . ~