Monroe-Chapter Four Hundred and Twenty-Eight. Colony.

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Kharvic grimaced, gingerly touching his side. He could feel the wetness as blood soaked through the bandage, and then his uniform.

Luckily, the uniform was a dark crimson in color, and his console hid all but his upper chest from view, unless someone were to actually lean over the console.

Refocusing his eyes back on his console, he surreptitiously wiped his hand on his trousers before using the ball on the console to navigate through the screen.

It only took a moment to find the next priority item that demanded his attention.

The Hurstall'kalwin, or the Hurry as she was affectionally referred to, wasn't exactly a new ship.

She'd been one of the earliest colony ships when the Empire had first begun to spread out from their solar system and had carried her precious cargo to colonize the second world around a different star. She'd then served as a space station during the early years of the colony, retiring from that duty after a century when a new, purpose-built station was completed. She was moved to orbit one of the gas giants in the System, where she served as a massive, unmanned sensor station for two centuries before the inevitable progression of time and micro asteroids had taken their toll, rendering most of her sensors inoperable, before something had taken out the last of her communication arrays. At this point, the Hustall'kalwin had been a relic from the distant past, and no one had noticed she'd stopped transmitting until a decade later, and that was only because of a bored engineering student. Left to orbit around the gas giant, she'd been left as an anachronistic relic.

No one cared until the Agrarian movement succeeded in obtaining authorization to colonize a world on the outermost fringes of the Empire.

Over a million souls, disgusted by the greed and corruption that had infected the empire, had sought to return to a simpler way of life. One where you could work for something more tangible than seeing the number of credits in your account rise and where you had more to look forward to than the once-per-decade trip to whatever resort world you could afford. Lovar, they had argued, were not meant to live massive towers of manufactured stone, stacked together so tightly that you had to fold your bed into the wall to use the toilet, forced to work two-thirds of the day to pay for the meager privilege of staying alive.

Of course, the Agrarian's were universally poor, so allowing them the hope of leaving cost the Empire nothing. After all, there was no way they could afford a colony ship. Even if they pooled their wealth and continued for centuries, they lacked the status to invest in any account or fund that would provide even the meanest of compound interest. It was something of a joke amongst the upper echelons of the Empire to ask if the Agro's had taken a vacation yet, as the members of the Agrarian movement became known for their miserly ways, scrimping and saving every credit possible, living without even the least of luxuries that made life amongst the lower rungs of society bearable.

A century later, nearly all of the movement's members had acted. They purchased a nearly derelict freighter and filled it with even older equipment, exhausting their collective wealth and leaving the vendors who had cleared out dozens of ancient warehouses delighted at finally ridding themselves of junk that had no actual value but which had been kept because the Empire wouldn't allow the value of anything to be reduced to nothing, a measure enacted a millennia earlier to combat graft.

No one had known what the Agro's were planning to do with the ship loaded with enough material to restore it to its former glory a hundred times over, and no one had cared. 𝒻𝓻𝑒ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝑛𝓸𝓿𝓮𝓁.𝑐𝘰𝓶

Until a sensor relay had reported that the freighter had docked with the Hurstall'kalwin.

The Empire was a massive bureaucracy spanning over a quarter of the galaxy, allowing each solar system within a very limited degree of autonomy. Even the most urgent of communications took a decade to be carried back to the central administration.

The Agrarians had used this to their advantage.

When the Empire had given them authorization to colonize a world independently, they had filed a simple salvage form for the Hustall'kalwin. They hadn't listed the ship's name, only the location and age of the derelict hulk. Given the age of the presumed wreck, the form had been rubberstamped by a clerk, filed in one hundred and sixty-eight separate databases, and approval had been sent back.

That process had taken four decades.

The administration of the local solar system were surprised when the Agro's had docked with the Hustall'kalwin, and incensed when they had refused to disengage, then infuriated when they discovered that the group had a perfectly legal claim to the ship, approved by the central administration no less.

It had taken the colonists six years to repair the Hurry.

By that time, the Empire had determined just exactly what had happened.

The Agrarians had purchased that old, outdated equipment because it was what they needed to repair the Hurry, as well as what they would need to manufacture the equipment to build a primitive colony. The only purchases that weren't for centuries-old technology had been medical equipment, and that had been decades behind the latest equipment.

In a clever turn, the Empire had celebrated the Agrarians. Documentaries had been filmed and distributed, showcasing the hardworking members of the movement as the saved their credits to pursue their impossible dream, one realized with the aid of the Empire as they generously donated a beloved relic of the Empire's founding, lamenting the loss of such a precious historical artifact, but waxing poetic about allowing the Hustall'kalwin to continue it's purpose of spreading the Lovar amongst the stars.

It was a brilliant bit of propaganda.

Kharvic had no idea what had happened after the colonists had left, but he suspected that the head of the local administration for that solar system had done rather well for himself.

The colonists, seven hundred and fifty thousand in total, had taken the Hurry to the edge of the solar system, repairing the systems that they'd discovered weren't working correctly along the way. There, all but five thousand of them had lain down in the ancient cryo-beds that their great, great, great grandparents had used and embarked on their own adventure.

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Few records mentioned the betting pool that had existed amongst the colonists, but Kharvic was certain that someone had won big.

Eighteen centuries later, the Hurstall'kalwin arrived at their destination with all of the colonists alive. She was tired, her reactors down to less than twenty percent, but she'd faithfully delivered her precious cargo to the edge of the known galaxy.

The cryo-beds started to gradually fail as the journey reached its end, which meant that the five-year shifts needed to be extended, but no one lost more than an extra decade.

The planet was everything the colonists had been promised and more. Over two millennia had passed since the survey ship mapped out the solar system, and it had been a cursory inspection. It noted atmosphere, temperature, land mass to water ratio, and vegetation before noting that it likely lacked any valuable materials and stamping it as 'habitable.' It had been christened 'Guartuin' by the colonists.

The colonists had already identified their most likely landing site, and after the information on the planet had been confirmed, they'd begun ferrying equipment down to their new home, emptying the vast holds that comprised the bulk of the Hurry. As the equipment was fired up and repaired as necessary, more and more people had been woken from the cryo-beds, and in a matter of only six months, the ship had been emptied, and the automated systems had been activated as the Hurry once again returned to duty as a space station and sensor platform.

In their rush, the colonists had made the same mistake as the survey ship. They had certain criteria, and focused on them.

That was how seven hundred and fifty thousand Lovar missed the presence of the Dharlings.

Kharvic was pulled from his thoughts as his console beeped at him.

He blinked, his vision swimming.

Moving his hand to his side again, he discovered that the wet patch on his jacket had expanded.

His thoughts might not be wandering so much as he might be lightheaded from blood loss. He'd refused healing, directing the medics to the more badly injured, stapling shut the gash in his side and bandaging it himself, but he was now forced to admit that he might have underestimated the severity of the wound.

Raising his hand he snapped his fingers to gain the attention of the ensign assigned to him. The young woman rushed to his side, eager to help.

"Ensign Corrial, I may have misjudged my wounds," he began, giving her a gentle smile as her eyes widened in panic. "I'm not in any danger of passing, but I should be attended to by a medic."

Ensign Corrial nodded rapidly, her auburn hair tucked up in a ponytail, bouncing in turn before she turned and rushed off.

Kharvic winced as he turned his attention back to the report that had demanded his attention.

Another incursion. No lives were lost, but half a dozen hurt badly enough to require more attention than the medics could quickly provide. More importantly, they'd been driven out of an engineering space that housed part of one of the water reclamation systems. The only reason they'd been there had been to enact repairs, which meant that the system was still not operational, although, as a silver lining, the wastewater was being vented inside the engineering space rather than outside the ship. While cleaning up the mess would be a disgusting job, it was much better than losing the fluids to the void of space. Or whatever was outside the ship.

That didn't make it any less of a priority, so Kharvic issued an order to retake the space, warning of the environmental hazards, and indicating the numbers and disposition of the incursion.

He refused to call them monsters, although he was rapidly becoming a minority in that regard.

It had been three years since Guartuin had been wracked with sudden and inexplicable seismic activity, existing volcanos erupting, and new ones arising. The loss of life was staggering, as generations of progress were wiped out only a few short days.

Kharvic had blessed the wisdom of the colony's founders, as they had not neglected the Hustall'kalwin, maintaining a steady rotation of young men and women who learned the ship's systems as they maintained her.

Evacuating Guartuin had been a nightmare. They'd been fortunate that the Academy hadn't been destroyed, as that was where the two shuttles used to move teams to and from the Hurry had been stored. The other shuttles were kept in cold storage aboard the Hurry, brought out every decade to help train pilots and engineers, but the shuttles could only designed to carry forty passengers. Removing the seating and packing people in had increased that to a hundred, but it wasn't enough. The old freighter had ended up being their salvation, as the valiant old ship had braved the caustic ash and the heat of the atmosphere again and again, bringing twenty thousand or more souls back to the Hurstall'kalwin with each trip.

It spoke to the steadfast resolve his people that they didn't even consider the capacity of the colony ship as they desperately raced to evacuate Guartuin.

Ultimately, they'd lost eight of their twenty shuttles and had brought one million, eight hundred and sixty-two thousand, four hundred and twenty-eight Lovar aboard the Hurry. Of those, another two thousand and sixty-one had died due to damage from the toxic ash.

They had also saved eight hundred and seventy-six thousand, nine hundred and eighty-three Dharlings.

He could see two of them from his command console.

Things might have gone differently when the Lovar had discovered the Dharlings, had it not been for the fact that they were, to Lovar sensibilities, ADORABLE.

They stood three feet tall, in comparison to the six to seven feet of the Lovar, and very much resembled some of the art in storybooks, looking nothing so much as an anthropomorphized combination of feline and Lovar. With cute furry ears atop their heads, and long, flexible tails that were dead giveaways when it came to determining their moods, they boasted a light coat of fur on their limbs, which disappeared at their torso, which was also Lovar in form and function.

The Dharlings hadn't been noticed by the survey ship, or the colonists and until nearly a year had passed. They lived in a vast system of caverns, coming out to hunt only at night.

A survey team had been checking the mountain range the Dharlings' had called home, expecting to find iron deposits, when a curious Dharling hunting party had approached the camp they'd established around the ship.

The head of the survey team, Ishtal Juresh, who had long wished for a feline pet, had nearly swooned when she saw the four cat-like Dharlings, dressed in simple leather tunics and pants, carrying spears.

Ishtal had knelt, sitting back on her heels to bring herself to the Dharlings level, and beckoned toward them, mimicking their expressions as best she could.

The entire encounter had been recorded by the ship's cameras and was shown to everyone when they first attended school. It was part of the program to ensure that the Dharlings were treated as equals, although everyone acknowledged that as a polite fiction, including the Dharlings. They were quick learners, but they weren't very creative. They'd learned to speak Lovar well enough, although they had difficulties with hard consonants.

The Dharlings had an oral history that spanned several millennia, and the colonists were careful to ensure that the tradition wasn't interrupted, going so far as to record all of the elders as they went through thousands of hours of storytelling.

That was necessary because the Darlings had embraced the advancements the Lovar had brought to Guartuin with the curiosity and enthusiasm that became the hallmark of their species. They moved into the Lovar settlements, often arriving unexpectedly, making themselves at home, and then making themselves useful. While they seemed to lack the creative spark that had carried the Lovar to the stars, they turned out to be excellent when it came to repairing mechanical systems, as well as organic ones.

Kharvic smiled as he saw the Dharling moving towards him in a rush. Her crimson uniform complimented her onyx fur nicely, and the three white stripes on her sleeve marked her as one of the highest-level healers on the Hurry.

"Lily," he murmured as she laid her hand on his, her retractable claws flexing in irritation. "I got hurt again," he slurred, his vision fading as the warm yellow light of her magic filled his vision.