Meeting with the Upper Echelon lasted all of 26 seconds. Holograms. I let my background filters catch it and hold it in the buffers. Just in case. Meeting with the Reactivation Inspectorate took longer. They're either getting better at their jobs or my systems are becoming outmoded. Need to make a rendezvous outside the Canopy--no, now we call it the Outer Possessions, even though the Empire doesn't hold even half the structures out there. Infection of some sort seems to have run rampant. A lot of once crowded habitats are totally crashed. Flatlined or taken over by some sort of sleeper-cell terror-weapons left behind by the sporeheads. Scrubbers and Purge-teams are bogged down in an unwinnable war of attrition with the stuff. It has spread too far, too deep to get rid of it fast enough. It reproduces exponentially. Nobles still treat math as a social disease. A lot of time, effort and materiel is going to get wasted because some Noble can't cope with reality. As usual. Some things never change. At least it's not my problem. No. I'm getting fobbed-off on some crappy Podder transport that'll take me to my new command; a half-wrecked combat engineering scow called the Chernobyl Sunrise. My first assignment. We're going to some shithole called Beta Cygnus III.
