Mirem stares at the ceiling of her bedroom. Mornings are difficult these days, especially when she can’t sleep. Which is often.

  She’s learned that being upset over her intermittent insomnia only makes matters worse. She glances at the dial of her bedside clock. It reads 0432, which isn’t bad, especially compared to last week. Enough time to possibly fall back to sleep, but also not a total disaster if a new dream eludes her.

  So she does what she does best these days. She lies in bed, eyes unfocused, and lets her mind go where it will.

  The electrochromic glass of her bedroom’s tall windows is set to clear, and the glow of the metropolis outside, with its hundred-floor towers and the winking lights of shuttlecraft, unspools across her ceiling like rainfall. She far prefers these glimmers of the city to complete darkness, though she’s dutifully tested the hypothesis that she would sleep better with the windows set to opaque. She doesn’t, especially without Lanis. The lights of the city outside are a comforting reminder that, despite how she feels, she isn’t alone.

  Perhaps the apartment is to blame. It still feels slightly unfamiliar, even after more than two years of living here, as if her uncle lent her one of his sterile corporate penthouses and then forgot to return. She misses her old place and everything it stood for. Unfortunately, it simply didn’t have the necessary security precautions required for her new position in the world.

  The eighty-fifth floor of the Central Compound’s Planetary Administration tower—the “P.A.” as it’s colloquially known—does.

  Mirem sits up, her dark hair settling across her shoulders, and glances again at her bedside clock. 0437. She gently rolls her head, and then rubs her left shoulder, trying to massage out the tenseness of some undoubtedly stressful dream. She can tell that she won’t be getting more sleep, just like she knows the root cause of her insomnia.

  Might as well get up then, she thinks, sighing as she slips out of bed and walks across the heated floor to one of the bedroom’s massive built-in closets. She presses a panel and the doors slide open with a hush. This is so incredibly excessive, she thinks, at least for the hundredth time, as she steps inside the closet and is greeted by two rows of freshly pressed Planetary Administration suits, pale white and flawless, their surfaces faintly lustrous, as if polished rather than woven. She runs her hand over one of the immaculate sleeves, her fingers feeling rough across the ultrafine fabric. How would I even begin to use all of these? As it is, it seems that the moment she wears one it’s instantly replaced, as if by some sleight of hand from the apartment itself.

  Instead she grabs the robe that she’s casually thrown on the floor of the closet, a small gesture of defiance within the sterile grandeur of the place. Her footsteps echo softly across the bedroom and down a long hall, out to a kitchen that would more appropriately belong in a CEO’s villa. With each step recessed lights flicker to life, soft, amber lines that announce her lonely arrival.

  She grabs some fruit from the fridge, steaming coffee from the overly complicated dispenser, and settles into the kitchen’s nook, eating a blueberry while gazing upward through a floor-to-ceiling window. The night sky’s stars are covered in clouds—otherwise she might be able to see the orbital docks, depending on their current point of traversal. Their reconstruction is nowhere near complete, but it’s already monumental. Together with the constant flow of low-orbit shuttles, it always lights up the night sky as it drifts past, like some constellation freshly hammered into the sky.

  Finally she takes a deep breath, and connects to her apartment’s AI.

  An ethereal, feminine voice floats into the empty space of the kitchen.

  “Good morning, Member Seto.”

  “Good morning P.,” Mirem answers, using her nickname for Planetary Administration’s AI. She pops another blueberry into her mouth, scanning the morning’s news feeds. “No news on the Home Fleet then, I suppose?” It’s a silly question, of course. She would have been woken by P. if there had been any update.

  “Not as of yet, Member. Though I might remind you, Warp dilation to Scoria and back generally means a Terra-standard day of travel, in either direction. It is still twenty hours until the earliest conceivable return, which would also imply—”

  “Yes, ok, got it,” Mirem replies, grimacing. It’s not like she doesn’t have those numbers etched into her memory, but she felt compelled to ask anyway. She glances upward again, to the city-lit clouds. It’s so strange to know that the rebuilt Terra Home Fleet is out there, reestablishing contact with the colonies.

  Or not, a thought intrudes. Maybe the fleet has already ceased to exist, gone forever, torn apart in the Warp or shattered by alien weaponry. They’d never hear back, would they? Just, silence, forever guessing, never knowing what happened, just like—

  Stop it, Mirem thinks firmly to herself, popping a whole handful of blueberries into her mouth in an attempt to distract herself, chewing them rapidly. She wonders whether P. can sense her distress. If so, the AI has never commented; anyway, it’s not like she’s ever truly interfaced with the AI, a step above the connection-level she’s currently at, and its privacy settings are set to ultra-high. Lanis made sure of that, with some additional due diligence from Ether. Mirem would have liked to have seen that conversation.

  “Administrative Directorate meeting is still on for 1000 hours then, I assume?” Mirem finally asks, once she’s sure that her voice will be level.

  “Yes, Member,” the AI’s voice glides back.

  Mirem takes a final sip of coffee, glancing at her clock. 0448. She supposes it’s time to get to work, then; anything to distract her mind. “Give me the day’s briefing. Priority to my uncle’s reports, and Admiral Ren’s.”

  Reports begin to glide across Mirem’s retinas, seemingly hovering in front of her, a collection of memos, assessments, and intelligence briefings collected and curated by the best human and artificial minds on Terra. At the top of each one is a single line: “Restricted: Directorate Member Access Only.”

  She still finds it a bit jarring each morning to read that line, and realize that it refers to her. A Member. As in, one of the fifteen Members of the Executive Directorate, Planetary Administration’s highest decision-making body.

  Mirem once heard her uncle sneeringly refer to P.A., and the Executive Directorate specifically, as Terra’s “benevolent referees.” Rarely did the Directorate fully exercise its vested power, instead operating in an equilibrium with the fiefdom-like power of Terra’s Zaibatsu megacorps. After all, nearly half of the Directorate’s Members were themselves ex-corporate executives, though of the slightly less rapaciously ambitious sort. Which meant that when the Directorate did make a firm ruling, the corps were generally willing to go along with its decision. And if a corp chose not to, no matter how powerful… Well, there was Fleet, like a hawk’s shadow over field mice, ready to swoop in and settle the odd intractable dispute: with overwhelming firepower, if necessary.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Those rare events weren’t exactly public knowledge. But Mirem isn’t the public anymore.

  However, the massacre of Terra Fleet and Kaisho-Renalis’ Anomaly-induced rebellion have dramatically changed the role of Planetary Administration and the makeup of the Directorate. Firstly, eleven of the fifteen members were killed outright by Kaisho operatives through a series of decapitation strikes and assassinations in the early hours of the Crisis. Planetary Administration’s Central Compound may no longer bear the physical scars of the running battles between P.A.’s special-sec units and KR’s aug-human kill teams, but the memory is still fresh, and the obelisk memorial to the fallen in the central plaza is barely a year old.

  Second, Fleet no longer exists as it once did. To be sure, there was the dead Agni and its consort cruisers, along with the four rump ships of Mars Fleet, but for the first time in over a hundred years it was Terra and its megacorps, not Fleet, who held supremacy—if not in outright destructive capability, then at least in authority. Which brings Mirem to the third overriding force behind the change in the Directorate’s makeup and purpose: Terra’s megacorps. Specifically, Murkata-Heisen, who demanded a rebalancing of the Directorate to better reflect the new dynamics of power.

  Of course, none of those changes was the reason why Mirem, technically a mid-level Versk employee, newly incorporated into Murkata-Heisen, found herself elevated to one of the fifteen Members of Terra’s highest decision-making body. She owes that appointment to one person.

  Lanis.

  If only she knew how much power she has, Mirem has often thought. Lanis thinks she understands, and she’s confided in Mirem that even that amount terrifies her. But it’s much worse than she presumes.

  Each side had wanted Lanis on the Executive Directorate, for different reasons; Fleet, because, well, she was Fleet. Murkata because she was technically Murkata. And Admin because they could almost instantly recognize that she was allergic to the very power that she would wield.

  Lanis, predictably, declined. Anyway, it was an impossibility, even with a vote-by-proxy; she had the Dwellers to deal with, and after that, entire cohorts of Navigators to train at Fleet Academy. As Mirem has ruefully experienced first-hand, there needed to be at least four Lanises to accomplish all that was demanded of her. It simply didn’t make any sense.

  Step in, Mirem.

  She often wonders if it was her uncle’s subtle doing as much as Lanis’ sway, his whispered suggestions placed in the right ears at the right time. Again, she was an outsider, an unknown neophyte who might be easily swayed, and each side saw in her something to like, or at least not enough to dislike to veto her ascension.

  So in the end, the makeup of the fifteen seats, the fifteen Members of the Executive Directorate, was thus: four seats for the surviving members of Planetary Administration. Five for the officers of Fleet. Five for Murkata-Heisen and its subsidiary conglomerates.

  And one for her.

  Mirem spends the next several hours reviewing reports, prepping for the 10 AM meeting of the Directorate. The new, expanded cohort of final-year Fleet academy students is coming along as well as can be expected, although their AI integration levels are a step below their more elite pre-Crisis peers. Progress on the orbital docks is shockingly ahead of schedule, along with the half-built carrier Shoryu and cruisers Vayu and Surya. But here the purely good news ends.

  Mirem had no idea of the sort of internal threats that the P.A. dealt with on a daily basis, and while only the most pressing issues make it up to the Directorate Member briefing level, she often can’t help but follow a particular bullet-point down a rabbit hole of worrisome implications before tracing it back to its bleak point of origination.

  Take the religious fanatics. A certain subset of Terra’s citizenry has embraced the idea that the presence of the Anomaly signals the beginnings of the end times, or some version of the apocalypse depending on the group’s prior religious affiliation. Organized religion has been steadily outgrown by various versions of spiritual-anarchism and atheism over the past hundred and sixty years since the end of the Unification Wars and the formation of Fleet, but the crisis of the Anomaly has breathed new life into a number of doomsday prophecies. A crippled P.A. wasn’t able to suppress the vids of Kaisho-Renalis employees who had been corrupted by the Anomaly spouting promises of salvation and ruination, nor the blood-stained rituals that accompanied the spreading of the Anomaly’s corruption from one person to the next. Now a tiny but extremely worrisome subset of the population is actually worshiping the Anomaly, without even needing its malign influence to ensure their devotion.

  On a perhaps more positive note, but no less unnerving from Mirem’s perspective, is the newly formed Order of the Navigator. Mirem supposes it was inevitable, especially when Fleet started plastering Lanis’ face on every piece of Fleet-recruitment propaganda they could find and beaming it out to Terra’s fearful billions. A not-insignificant portion of the population now views Lanis as the literal savior of their souls. If she isn't God's newest offspring, then she's at least a higher saint or some kind of angel, replete with iconography and an entire line of insane incense holders, candles and good luck charms.

  Then there are the more prosaic problems. The normal low-grade political dissent against P.A.’s technocratic regime has come roaring back after the initial months of Terra’s crisis-bred solidarity. It's not just the dissolution of Fleet’s veneer of invulnerability that has given new strength to the Coalition for a Universal Republic and the National Restoration Front, along with a host of more extreme movements, but also Terra's newfound economic fragility. The recent public works programs have made near-universal employment a reality, but Terra’s isolation from its colonies has necessitated massive shifts in the world’s economy. Plus, the injection of capital required to rebuild the orbital docks and Fleet is simply staggering. Inflation, the spark of so many revolutions, is gaining ground.

  And, of course, Murkata-Heisen. Mirem purses her lips as she reads an industrial-analysis report forwarded to her by her uncle, Peter. Murkata-Heisen can’t really control more than sixty percent of heavy weapons and cybernetic manufacturing… can they? Those numbers are nowhere near the agreed-upon forty-nine percent that the Murkata Members have repeatedly presented to the Directorate.

  Mirem rubs her forehead. Her uncle is constantly sending her encrypted updates like this, produced by his own team of analysts within Planetary Admin. She wishes, not for the first time, that he had a Member seat, not her. Unfortunately for both of them, Murkata-Heisen vetoed any chance of that. Despite Peter’s role in dismantling Kaisho-Renalis’ corporate holdings after the Crisis and his brief employment within Murkata-Heisen, they never forgot he was a poison-toothed viper through and through. Mirem supposes that thirty-odd years of antagonistic corporate espionage will do that. Peter is now a P.A. Deputy Secretary of Information, a role that Murkata did their best to prevent. Unsuccessfully.

  Mirem glances again at the clock. 0835. She supposes it’s time to take a shower and get ready. Despite the insomnia, and the lump of dread that she often feels when reviewing the never-ending cascade of reports, she does find it all vaguely fascinating. At least, when it isn’t simply terrifying.

  “That will be all, P.,” she says, and the stream of reports dissipates from before her retinas. She leans back, looking upward through the window again. The night has lifted, but the clouds remain.

  She wishes Lanis were here.