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The alarm sounds. The same one every time at the same time, at least according to Albert’s other half. It’s important to maintain a consistent sleep schedule while moving through space. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to keep track of passed time. Sitting up, he swipes off his alarm from the touchscreen beside his bed as he stands. Walking over to his personal treadmill in the corner, he starts the wakeup protocol and climbs on. Then, he begins to jog.

As he jogs, his NPC starts informing him of the goings on overnight. The details of conversations between different people aboard the ship, the gossip. Anything digital it could spot in its intrusions. Nothing significant, though plenty of exploitable details if it comes to it. Nina may still be keeping the mission secret in theory, but her most recent message with command makes it clear she knows he knows. Especially since they still aren’t on the best of terms.

Nothing else of note, though. Albert files the gossip away based on the people that would care about it. After thirty minutes, the treadmill slows to a stop. He steps off, and heads across into the private bathroom. Compact, but for someone of his rank, almost unheard of. Except no one would ever risk disrupting their ship’s function by forcing one of the monsters to use a public shower. He presses the controls, setting the shower to as hot as it can get. As he waits for the shower to heat up, he strips off his tight exercise clothes, which he generally wears under his uniform and sleeps in. There is a beep behind him. Shower’s ready. He climbs in. He stands in the center of the shower for a minute, letting the scalding water wash over his skin. Feeling the burning sensation. Feeling is important. After a minute of feeling the water wash over his skin, Albert starts showering in earnest. Thirteen minutes and change later, he presses the touchscreen button on the shower wall. The temperature of the water drops precipitously for thirty seconds, as he programmed it to do, then shuts off. Leaving Albert naked and dripping wet in the silence of a dark bathroom.

Stepping out, he wipes the condensation off the mirror. The bathroom does not have an independent dehydrator, which means he has to walk out and turn on the room humidity controls. His companion informs him that it is doing so. He looks at his pristine skin, still unaged from all those years ago. He can’t help but wonder if he can age. Then as he softens his focus, the scars reappear, only to his eyes. The echoes of their pain still linger, and when he doesn’t think about it, they return. Not literally, of course, the treatments covered it up so that enemy scientists couldn’t figure out any steps of the process of the monsters’ creation. But just because they aren’t physically there does not mean they’re gone. Scars don’t disappear, they just fade.

Albert steps out of his private bathroom, and starts to walk over towards the closet. He’s a few paces in when he notices the door is open. He looks around and sees one of Nina’s people, a Communications Lieutenant, staring at him. They always stare, he’s used to that by now. He smiles, not bothering to cover up. “What is it, Lieutenant,” his companion reminds him of this comms officer’s whole profile, “Phillips?” Lt. Margorie Phillips, longtime communication officer for Nina, since her second tour on the Iratus. Evidently, Nina likes her professionalism, else she would have been replaced by now. Lieutenant Phillips asked for the transfer, though. Curious, the monster muses.

The pause after his question is a moment too long. “Commodore Soler requests your presence in the Lounge, First Sergeant Spitz.”

“Just Spitz is fine,” Albert says, shaking his head. This recent promotion, entirely unearned and mostly meaningless, is still irritating. They’re PR moves, whenever people start to question the Service and its power, he gets another promotion just to remind the people that, unlike anyone else, they’ve got a monster still working for them. Technically, these promotions were pay bumps, but with his years of service, in which he never has had to pay for room or board, the extra pay does not matter that much. And it’s not like he can retire legally, anyways. Lifetime service is lifetime service. The dehydrator is starting to dry the air enough to wick water from his body.

She shakes her head. “I have work to do,” she states, still staring, “How long will it take for you to meet with the Commodore?”

Albert sighs, turning his back to head to the closet again. “Dehydration’s slower than ideal, so ten minutes to dry, a minute to leave, another couple minutes to make my way to the lounge. Round it up to a quarter hour. Is that acceptable, El Tee?”

Lt. Phillips looks at her tablet, touches it a couple times, and nods. “That will be adequate,” she states. Albert’s companion tells him that in fact she did nothing on her tablet during that time. It was just for effect. Albert reminds his internal computer that he can, in fact, tell when people are trying to play him. His NPC wonders whether that is in fact the case.

Shaking his head as he opens the closet, Albert says to the officer, “Then you can go back to your job.”

The officer lingers a bit longer than she probably should before leaving. Not closing the door behind her. His companion does for him, though. Should speed up the dehydration process slightly. He pulls out a random uniform, as well as a set of new exercise clothes. He brings them over and lays them out on the bed. What is this meeting about, Albert thinks. It’s a bit soon for operational details, unless there is some ulterior motive. Which there always is with Nina, but that’s beside the point. The other possibility is there is something else going on. He mutters, mostly to himself because his companion knows his thoughts, “I wonder if she thinks she’s up for a promotion.”

The NPC whirs, trying to figure out a problem without an answer. What is happening in Nina’s head isn’t easy to predict. Albert gives my partner some direction, that the likely reason would be success in this mission partnered with the embarrassment or the death of RA Timothy. Or the retirement of Admiral Jefferson. A few minutes pass before his other half chimes in once more. Jefferson isn’t retiring unless the upcoming assault is a massive surprise, in either direction. Bryon is unlikely to be embarrassed, unless this upcoming assault is proven to be based on faulty information. Albert frowns. That means Nina probably thinks this isn’t another Insurgency. He can’t help but think about what he might have missed.

After a while, he’s dry enough to start pulling on his clothes. His mind is still on the Ortuum mission. What didn’t he notice? Dressed in uniform, he resets the humidifier in the room and heads out into the halls.

The SSS Nightingale is the command ship of a number of fighters that are comparable to a small fleet. Meaning, despite its size, much of the space is landing bays, so the halls are still tight. And for Albert, that means he has to watch his head whenever there are key pipes and vents and such crisscrossing the ceiling. Which isn’t uncommon, so that the ship systems can have a level of redundancy. When she managed to finagle her promotion into a hunter flotilla commodore rather than a patrol one, she chose the Nightingale. The fighter-based flotilla was a huge gamble. On the one hand, it gave her extreme mobility and sneakiness, for her hunting jobs. On the other hand, with open war on the horizon, she basically had no chance of earning glory in it. At least, not as much as a standard flotilla could earn. Which brings Albert to the present, he muses walking through the slightly too small door to the Lounge.

Sitting on one of the observation chairs, staring out into the void, is Commodore Nina Soler. “Commodore,” Albert says, taking a seat himself.

“Albert,” Nina replies. “You’re early.”

“She was staring. I rounded.”

“You were naked.”

“She interrupted my morning routine,” he begins, then corrects himself, “Well, I guess you interrupted my morning routine.”

Nina shakes her head. “I waited until after your shower should have been over. She’s just too fast. Or you didn’t dry off.”

“My room doesn’t have an independent dehydration unit in the bathroom.”

Nina sighs. “Of course not, you know how inefficient dehydration units are. I don’t even have one anymore. You’re lucky you even have a bathroom.”

“WE both know, there would be far too many accidental third degree burns if I didn’t,” he counters.

Nina shakes her head. “In any case,” she admits, “I wanted to speak with you.”

“I guessed as much when you sent a lackey. What is it?”

She pauses. “In the name of full transparency, I wanted to talk to you about the mission. Both the stuff that you definitely don’t know because that would be illegal wink-wink, and also more importantly, the stuff you actually don’t know.”

Albert furrows his brow. What stuff he doesn’t know, he thinks. Is that whatever she believes is going to embarrass or kill Timothy, or cause Jennings to retire? He nods. “Okay, Commodore Soler. What are these details? Let’s go over the stuff I could have figured out first, so we can be honest.”

Nina nods. “Some analysts tracked the weapons of the Portus Ortuum attack to a Marauder Production facility, which has been known to provide arms to many sorts. We’re headed there for a standard BEDD op.” Blockade Eliminate Download Destroy. The simplest of hunter operations. Blockade to prevent information or individuals from escaping, inserting an elimination team, likely Albert followed by her marine contingent, download any scrap of information a base or ship has, then destroy the base and or ship to prevent anyone else from gaining access.

“So, why are we putting this base to Bedd?” the sergeant asks, “Why not just a flat burn? It would send a more effective message.”

“It would. According to the official records, I believe that the base may hold information on the Marauder holdout bases around Freespace,” Nina explains, “And they approved the mission to streamline the elimination process.”

“Makes sense,” Albert says, nodding. That is what the reports said, and it made sense, up until the point he thought she was gunning for a promotion. “But that will just make Timothy look even better, and we both know you would never dare do that.”

Nina can’t help but chuckle. “Shut up,” she jokes, shaking her head. “But you aren’t wrong.” she presses a button, and the Lounge door seals, the windows all become opaque, and a pulse that his NPC does not appreciate radiates from her observation chair. “But there is another thing that has kept with me. The marauders are under attack from the FDC, and have been for some time.”

“And all the marauders who could organize an Insurgence would know better than to have a two-front war,” Albert finishes her thought. “So do you suspect the Freeports, one of the other corps, or a new player?”

“Some one has been hitting outposts, gathering information. Mostly ours, Hadrian’s outliers, and Lux’s. Freeports get information the old fashioned way easily enough, so it isn’t them. Which means either Astro is up to something, or we have a new player. The data should tell us which.”

Albert nods. “Which means we’re about to get into a fight with the Freeports over nothing.”

“Based mostly on you and Xander’s report of facts, followed by the assurances of several officers on outside intel, including one Byron Timothy.” She’s grinning. She only does that when she’s sure, not just suspects. “What do you have that makes you so certain?” he asks.

“A first hand source on the Marauders," she states. Wheeling around her tablet, she pulls up a feed of a Luxury apartment on one of our science worlds. A gilded cage, for a man wearing a marauder jacket. Facial recognition says it’s Viktor Morrsen. It also says he has been dead for several months.

Albert looks up at her, smirking. “So that’s how you found all those places,” he jokes.

She shrugs. “We all have our ways of getting information. I find giving people what they want works quite nicely.”

“And yet you still refuse to get me a dehydration unit,” Albert only half-jokingly complains.