Character
Tags:
Marlon Sularen
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Selrik Lorcas
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Her
Location: Low Orbit, Anzat
The cavernous central hangar of the INV Executrix thrummed with restrained purpose, its void-dark hull concealed from Anzat's sky below. Allegiant General Domaric Mordane stood alone beneath the towering blast doors, his greatcoat brushing the polished durasteel, watching the layers of Imperial labor unfold before him. Though the battle ship ran dark, activity within the vessel pulsed with methodical energy. The Executrix was no longer merely a ship of war; she had become a crucible in orbit, a forge of doctrine and discipline suspended above a neutral world. And Mordane, architect of its order, waited with hands clasped behind his back as the children of his machine prepared to greet history.To his left, a platoon of raw Crucible cadets—boys and girls not long removed from the storm of Cademimu and other reclamation worlds—suffered in the front leaning rest, faces thankfully averted under the heat of a Drill Instructor's withering glare. "You're not soldiers," the sergeant barked, striding between them like a wolf among lambs. "You're oxygen thieves in plastoid costumes! But we'll chisel something Imperial from your meat." The older cadets, between fifteen and nineteen, responded with instinctive flinches and barely stifled shame. Remarkably, they all kept their form. Mordane observed without interruption; correction, after all, was the core of reform.
Farther down the hangar, synchronized thunder echoed as a company of Crucible stormtrooper cadets launched themselves through magnetic drop tunnels—orbital deployment drills timed to the millisecond. Their bodies, clad in black-plated vacuum gear, vanished through blast doors one after another like ordinance fired with intent. In the viewing gantries above, Crucible instructors analyzed vector telemetry, voice command latency, and zero-G stabilization metrics. Every soldier would be forged by fire—if not in atmosphere, then in vacuum, where breath and precision mattered more than instinct. For Mordane, it was the rhythm of renewal, not war: discipline before destruction.
Beyond them, near the rear of the hangar, engineers clustered around disassembled TIE chassis. Sparks arced from fusion cutters while diagnostic drones scanned repulsor arrays. Nearby, a squad of pilot cadets engaged a simulated sortie inside open-canopy cockpits, their heads twitching beneath neuro-visor helms as they flew through a virtual combat net projected from the hangar's ceiling. Rounds of virtual fire lit up the surrounding haze, dogfighting drills against legacy X-wings, atmospheric skimmers, and pirate cutters. The air buzzed with layered audio: instructors' sharp corrections, AI feedback loops, and the low churn of hangar servos cycling readiness protocols.
Amid it all, Mordane remained still. The Executrix was alive beneath his boots—steel, sweat, and software bending to imperial will. Here, Imperialism was not a political theory but a lived machine, regenerating itself in orbit, above a neutral world too old and too dangerous to be tamed by force. Yet today would not be about strength of arms. It would be about control—of memory, hierarchy, and purpose.
Anakae's voice ghosted into the space beside him, a flicker of blue light forming into the AI's wraithlike visage. "Allegiant General," she intoned with smooth solemnity, "The emissaries from the Imperial Confederation have entered the system." Mordane's jaw tightened slightly—just a fractional tick of the muscle—as he turned away from the roaring drills and walked toward the reception corridor. History was arriving through his gates, and this time, it would find a fortress, not a fleet.
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