Lieutenant Baric paced and fumed in his quarters, his mind in turmoil. He kept seeing the tableau of Admiral Stonefist and Assistant Kinnit, locked in an embrace, sharing a passionate kiss.

  He shuddered, trying to cast the image from his mind, with little success.

  It was wrong.

  The rules of the Imperium were simple, immutable. The rules were there for a reason. Lieutenant Baric believed that with all his heart.

  Relationships between citizens and Subject Species were against the law. Yet Admiral Stonefist and Kinnit were very clearly in a relationship. Of some kind.

  It hurt his heart to think of Admiral Stonefist, his idol, the hero of the Imperium, flaunting the very rules of what he swore to protect.

  Why? Why did it have to be him, of all people? Why would he succumb to a forbidden tryst?

  And Kinnit herself, whatever she said of her high ideals, daring to draw the Admiral into such a relationship.

  Sol frowned in thought.

  That was it. It was Kinnit. She'd drawn the Admiral in, seduced him into this illicit entanglement. No doubt she'd carefully positioned herself to take full advantage of the Admiral's weakness, establish herself in a high position. She was one of those greedy, grabbing SSes, manipulative and calculating, out to get what they could from the Imperium.

  He groaned and shook his head.

  That explanation didn't make any sense. He'd seen her service record. He'd worked with her. She'd helped him, comforted him on Erebus Base. He knew better. She was brave, and smart, and caring. She was a good person.

  The image of the two of them in a deep, enthusiastic kiss surfaced again and his mind disintegrated into turmoil.

  Sol sat heavily on the edge of his bunk and scrubbed his hands through his curly hair.

  So why? Why did she have to be so good at everything, when, in spite of all his effort, Sol was just mediocre? Wasn't it enough that she was everything Sol wished he could be? Why did she have to break the law, too?

  A gentle beep sounded from his door. His head came up. Reluctantly, he got up and opened the door.

  Admiral Stonefist stood in the door, his stern face looking down at Sol. The presence of the Admiral caused more upheaval in Sol's tumultuous thoughts.

  "Lieutenant," he said. "We should talk. Do you mind if I come in?"

  Lieutenant Baric's mouth twisted.

  "Do what you want. You will anyway, apparently."

  Admiral Stonefist stepped in and closed the door behind him. Sol resumed pacing.

  "Who are you?" Sol wailed, never slowing. Grimthorn stood at parade rest and watched Lieutenant Baric. "Why would you-- argh!" Sol pulled at his hair. He stopped and leveled a finger at Admiral Stonefist. "I should report you!"

  Grimthorn nodded slowly.

  "By the law, you should."

  They sat in awkward silence for a minute.

  "Well?" Sol burst out.

  "Well what?"

  "Are you going to tell me not to?" Sol wailed.

  "That's not my place to say," Grimthorn answered. "As the offender, naturally I wish that you would not."

  "What am I supposed to do? Just pretend I didn't see what happened?"

  Grimthorn sighed.

  "I'm not the right person to give you advice on this," he said. "Again, anything that I tell you, you have to understand that it could be-- is likely to be-- self-serving. But I'd ask you to remember our earlier conversation. Why does the Imperium have this designation? What make a Subject Species subject?"

  Lieutenant Baric's mouth twisted.

  "Usefulness," he said. "Subject Species aren't useful to the Imperium. Yet."

  "Yes. So ask yourself why, then, if that's the fundamental difference, why the Imperium would not want SSes and citizens to have a relationship."

  "You mean, besides that it's wrong?"

  "Think through it. What's the reasoning?"

  Sol's brow wrinkled in thought.

  "I... don't know. It just seems wrong."

  Grimthorn nodded.

  "I understand your feelings on the matter, but I'll still ask you to consider the reasons. As a clue, I'll say that the Imperium already has a lot of difficulty keeping up with SSes and their offspring. Lots of bookkeeping."

  Sol's eyes widened.

  "Because what if an SS and a citizen had kids?" he asked. "Is that what the problem is?"

  Grimthorn shrugged.

  "There are a few other considerations. But that's a primary one, yes."

  "Wait, can SSes and citizens have children?" Sol's face was stuck on a grimace as he struggled through the legal and social implications while trying to tamp down his feelings of revulsion at the thought.

  "Sometimes. Most sentient species are... compatible enough."

  Sol wrinkled his nose.

  "But if they had kids, would the children be citizens or SSes? Would they--" He stopped and looked at Grimthorn. Grimthorn merely nodded for him to go on. "Yeah, what would they be? They should be citizens because they came from a citizen, but if they're still not useful to the Imperium, could they really be citizens? You could have a process to figure out I guess...

  Sol set his fists on his hips as he stared at the floor, working things out. Grimthorn stayed silent, letting him cogitate.

  "Could you have 'half-citizens?'" Sol said, half to himself. "What would that look like? But then what if they had kids," he continued. "That would get hard to figure out and keep track of--"

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Sol's eyes widened as a thought occurred to him.

  "Wait, is that what it's all about? Paperwork? The whole law is there just to make the paperwork easier?"

  Grimthorn smiled a little.

  "I haven't heard it put that way before, but you're more or less right."

  "It's all to do with paperwork?" Sol asked, still not quite believing.

  Grimthorn let out a little sigh of relief. At least now Sol was thinking again.

  "So what will you do now, Lieutenant?"

  Sol chewed his lip.

  "I... I don't know."

  "Well, then. I'll leave you alone to think about it."

  Grimthorn laid a fatherly hand on Sol's shoulder.

  "The only thing I'll ask, selfishly for myself and Kinnit, is that you let me know one way or the other before you do anything."

  "Huh? Oh... sure."

  Grimthorn quietly withdrew, and paneled the door closed on Lieutenant Baric and his tumultuous thoughts.

  Grimthorn stood in the hallway outside Lieutenant Baric's quarters, breathing heavily through his nose. His hands flexed into fists.

  Too close. That had been too close.

  It was fortunate that Lieutenant Baric was a contemplative rationalist. Grimthorn didn't think Lieutenant Baric would report him. He hoped he wouldn't. But Grimthorn and Kinnit couldn't just keep things going like this. It was too risky.

  They had to figure something out.

  Kinnit sighed with deep satisfaction. She was on the sofa in their nook, comfortably snuggled under Grimthorn's arm. She had a novel open on her scanner. Grimthorn's other hand held his prized physical copy of Origin of the Imperium.

  They had a lot to catch up on. They'd been talking over a lot of things, but they were also taking a little time right now to enjoy each others' presence. Reading together in the evening was their special time.

  She nestled deeper into his body.

  "I love you," she murmured.

  "I love you, too," he said, breaking his focus from his book. He smiled at her and laid his book aside.

  "Oh! I didn't mean to make you stop reading!" she said.

  "It's fine. I've had about as much of Origin as I can take for one evening."

  She giggled a little.

  "I've tried a few times to get through it," she said. "It is a hard read. I can't get more than a couple chapters into it. It's so obscure and twisted and hard to follow."

  Grimthorn frowned.

  "It's an important academic work that was completed early in the history of the Imperium," he said. "Completed by unknown scholars who wanted to record what they knew of how the Imperium began."

  "I think those unknown scholars could have used an editor."

  Grimthorn chuckled.

  "You're not wrong," Grimthorn admitted. "It's almost like it's written to prevent people from reading it. I try to read it because I know it's important. I feel like I catch extra bits and pieces of history every time I read it."

  Kinnit rolled over and lay on her stomach on the sofa.

  "So you've read the whole thing?"

  "A few times, yes."

  "So you know the history of the whole Imperium?"

  Grimthorn wagged his hand back and forth.

  "Kind of. Origin is comprehensive, but not very digestible."

  She smiled at him.

  "Tell me the story, then."

  "Of the Imperium? Oh, there are better books for that. Many authors have taken Origin and condensed it to make it more accessible and readable--"

  "No. I want to hear you tell it to me."

  Grimthorn quirked an eyebrow, then smiled back at her.

  "All right. I'm no Imperial Scholar, but I'll do my best." He thought for a long moment, then began.

  "Many, many years ago, there was a planet called Old Terra. The Terrans at the time had a different name for it, of course, it wasn't 'old' for them, yet. But they lived there and built a great society."

  "I want to see Old Terra someday. I hear it's beautiful."

  "It is. But it's also carefully preserved. Not many people are allowed to go downplanet any more. Mostly just scientists. But maybe we can do a flyby one of these days."

  Kinnit smiled contentedly and snuggled back into Grimthorn's arms.

  "I'd like that."

  "The Old Terrans were wise and powerful, but technologically limited. At one time they'd been a technologically advanced society, but there was a terrible catastrophe, and they were thrown back to a pre-space level of technology. They were trapped on Old Terra."

  "What happened to them? What was the catastrophe?"

  "Nobody really knows. It was severe enough that the Old Terrans themselves weren't able to record it for posterity. They were too busy trying to survive, rebuild their society. Over thousands of years, they just... forgot, I suppose.

  "In any case, they'd stabilized, as a species. They'd begun exploring space again, but they were very limited. They could barely even get out of their own system."

  "It sounds lonely."

  "It was. What's more, as far as they knew, there wasn't much of anything to leave their system for. From what they could tell at the time, they were the only sentient species in existence. Many of them thought they were all alone in the universe."

  "That's so sad."

  "At any rate, they were exploring their system. They'd started doing research on another planet of their system, their War planet."

  "Why did they call it that? Did they fight over it?"

  Grimthorn shrugged.

  "We don't know. It never had a military base, as far as we've been able to tell. But the Old Terrans had strange names for things. They had the War planet, the Communication planet, the Sea planet (which does not have a sea on it), the Devil planet, the... well, some other planets." Grimthorn cleared his throat. "They even named their own planet the Dirt planet. It makes you wonder what kind of weird stuff they got up to on Old Terra."

  Kinnit giggled.

  "You're joking."

  "No, honestly."

  "I'm going to look that up later, see if you're lying to me."

  "Go right ahead." Grimthorn smiled. "Well, on one of their expeditions to the War planet, they ran across some ruins. This was very exciting for them, of course. It could help unravel the mystery of the great catastrophe that had befallen them. While they were searching, they uncovered a room that had been sealed for many thousands of years. Sealed from before the catastrophe."

  "So of course they opened it," Kinnit said.

  "Who wouldn't? Even though many of the expedition didn't want to. They had a terrible foreboding about it. But curiosity overrode common sense. What do you think they found in there?"

  Kinnit thought for a moment.

  "Some new technology, maybe?"

  "Kind of, indirectly. What they actually found was a round room with a low, round table. The table had thirteen seats. Twelve of the seats held tall, mysterious beings in dark robes. The expedition was shocked when the beings began speaking to them."

  "Cryptographers!" Kinnit said.

  "That's right." Grimthorn nodded. "That was the first recorded meeting between Terrans and Cryptographers. Obviously there had been earlier meetings, before the catastrophe. The twelve Cryptographers were sealed in an ancient Terran ruin, after all."

  "What were they doing there?"

  "Waiting, they say. Apparently, before the catastrophe, they just allowed themselves to be sealed in. And they sat there for thousands of years, waiting for the Old Terrans to show back up."

  "That's... kind of creepy," Kinnit said, wrinkling her nose.

  Grimthorn shrugged.

  "That's Cryptographers for you. After they were released, they went to Old Terra. Some Old Terrans tried to fight them, but that didn't go well."

  "I bet."

  "Once things settled down, the Cryptographers gave the Old Terrans two gifts. Firstly, they showed the Old Terrans the one thing they'd been missing in their own system."

  "Which was?"

  "The first jumphole. It was a natural jumphole in the Old Terran system that led to a jumphole nexus. It had been there all along, but without the scanner technology to detect it, how would we have ever known? Once the Old Terrans discovered that, we began expanding out into the galaxy. We discovered other planets and species, figured out how to open new jumpholes, and began building what we know today as the jumphole network."

  "What about the second gift?" Kinnit asked.

  "I'm getting there. Secondly, they chose the Emperor for us."

  "Ooh."

  "He was selected from among the Old Terrans. He established the Imperium. The Cryptographers never said why they chose him, specifically. Many Old Terrans disagreed, some even warred over it. Those who stood against the Emperor were left on Old Terra, never allowed into space. Eventually they all died off."

  "Who was the Emperor before he was the Emperor? I mean, what kind of man was he?"

  "Nobody knows. The Cryptographers were very cagey about it all. They never said who he was, or why they chose him. We don't know what they did to him to make him live so long, either." Grimthorn shrugged. "Maybe he was going to live that long anyway, and that's why they chose him."

  "Well, that doesn't help. I want to know more!"

  "Feel free to ask the Cryptographers. They're the only ones with that information."

  "Well... maybe I don't want to know that badly."

  Grimthorn laughed and hugged her close.

  "Anyway, everything after that is what species we found, how we brought them into the Imperium, and the first hundred years or so of Imperial expansion. Pretty dry administrative stuff, mostly."

  Kinnit sighed in contentment, her eyelids getting heavy.

  "Thank you, Grimthorn."

  "Of course."

  He watched her eyes drift closed, and her breathing even out. He held her as she slept. He turned to watch the stars shine on them through the long portal in their low nook, content with their quiet evening.