Well, wouldn't you guess it? We have yet another person who has risen through the ranks and earned the rank of Admiral. Stand proud, stand tall, hold your chin up high, for you are an Admiral the greatest Naval force Humanity has ever produced!

  May your fleet glide through the cosmos and show every maggot just how great Humanity is! Spread our name, spread our glory, and rise, Admiral Justin Victor! For it is an honor to have you amongst our ranks, and in your Honor, an additional chapter shall be published publicly, and I shall expedite Chapter 10 of Book 3 and write it in your honor.

  As your Fleet Admiral, I, Crimson_Reapr, welcome you, honor your commitment, and thank you for your service. May our power reach beyond the edges of charted space, and may ruin fall upon all who stand against humanity's strength.

  3rd Person POV

  Before he had even opened his eyes, a headache had already begun taking form. It was just a pain in the sense of a normal headache, but it felt like there was a geological event going on underneath his skull, where tectonic shifts of continental ptes behind his frontal lobe ground bone against nerve endings in a rhythm that matched the erratic, panicked pulsing of the blood in his ears.

  Director Victor Vance, the man who climbed the corporate dder using tooth and nail and every single ruthless and underhanded method known to man, currently held the leash of Starship Inter-Gactic Solutions. SIGS had quite the extensive history and had come to be known as one of the most powerful corporate entities in the known gaxy, so holding this beast's leash should have been a great achievement, but to Victor, it felt less like being a master of the universe and more like he had been bludgeoned by a hammer.

  He y buried in sheets made of synthesized silk derived from the spun fibers of Artaxian glow-worms, a material that shimmered with a faint, bioluminescent pulse and cost more per yard than the lifetime earnings of a heavy-world miner. He didn't move immediately, since, to him, moving would be equal to acknowledging the day, and to acknowledge the day was to acknowledge the catastrophe that had been unspooling for the past couple of days.

  The air in the penthouse suite was conditioned to a perfect, crisp sixty-eight degrees, scented with a hint of sandalwood and ionized rain, a chemically engineered scent designed to induce calm for the hyper-stressed elite of Celestine Prime. However, it was failing miserably.

  Victor cracked one eye open. The morning light of Celestine Prime was filtering through the porization gss of the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was a golden, artificial hue, filtered not by energy shields, since humanity had just barely cracked the code for stable energy barriers about a week ago. The ck of shielding technology had forced them to rely on thick psteel, reactive armor, and magnetic deflection, meaning that the light filtering through was coming from the massive, physical atmospheric domes that encased the elite districts of the pnet that humanity had once called Proxima Centauri B. The light was gentle, ensuring the ultraviolet radiation of the system's three suns didn't damage the pristine, gene-edited skin of the rich.

  He shifted, his hand brushing against warm, soft flesh that had been the source of his only stress relief from the night before. She was sleeping soundly, her breathing deep and rhythmic, blissfully unaware that the man beside her was currently calcuting the probability of his own execution. She was a beautiful woman, objectively so, selected from the pool of executive secretaries for her aesthetics as much as her competence. Her skin was the color of a cured olive, smooth and unblemished. Her hair, a cascade of naturally curly light brown ringlets, was fanned out across the obsidian-bck pillowcase.

  Victor looked at her with a cold, detached envy. She had no idea. To her, a bad day was a broken nail or a spilled coffee. To him, a bad day was the dissolution of a quadrillion-credit empire and the wrath of a god.

  His hand gripped her perfectly proportioned cheeks just below her hip, his hand trailing down as fingers dug into the soft flesh of her naked backside. He wasn't gentle, squeezing, spreading the cheek, a tactile manifestation of his aggression and his need to control something, anything, because, at this precise moment, the gaxy was slipping through his fingers like sand.

  She stirred, a soft moan escaping her lips, shifting away from the pressure, but she didn't wake.

  Victor sat up, the silk sheet pooling at his waist as he swung his legs over the side of the bed, his feet touching the cold, imported marble floor. He rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes aggressively until stars exploded behind his eyelids.

  "What a fucking failure," he said in a soft sigh.

  It had been a simple objective. A cleanup operation. But the location... god, the location is what made it worse. If it had been in some backwater station on the outer rim of IUC space, then it would've been alright. But Mechanicus Station wasn't some forgotten outpost or floating rust-bucket in the drift. It was one of the Twelve Titans orbiting Nova Celeste, the IUC's second crown jewel. The Novellus System was a gleaming ring of high-end commerce, strategic manufacturing, and orbital luxury. It was where senators docked their yachts and where admirals retrofitted their fgships. It was a pce of order.

  And Aliastar Thorne had turned it into a sughterhouse.

  Just thinking the idiot's name made Victor's blood pressure spike. Aliastar Thorne, the Regional Director of the Novellus System. A man Victor himself had appointed because he seemed ambitious enough to be useful but stupid enough to be controlble. Well, as it turns out, he was wrong. Thorne was a pompous, incompetent, self-aggrandizing leech who had managed to turn a prestigious posting into a corporate catastrophe.

  And then there was the source of it all. The one and only Mark Shephard.

  Victor stood up, ignoring the dizziness that swayed him, and walked to the wall. With a thought, his cybernetic corneal impnts synced with the room's local mesh. A stream of stock data overid his vision, and translucent red numbers hung in the air.

  SIGS (Starship Inter-Gactic Solutions): -32.2%

  Victor stared at the number and could only sigh. Mark Shephard was a nobody. If the information gathered by his agents was true, which it always was, Mark had been a former grunt, a spec-ops soldier at most, with a pusibly deniable identity that cimed he was from a colony that had been attacked two decades ago and lost over a third of its records because the fuckers didn't back shit up. Hell, ignoring all of that, Mark was just a man who ran a small outfit called Shepherd Orbital Works out of a rented shipyard. And yet, this nobody, this grease-monkey, had managed to design a thermal flow vent that outperformed SIGS's proprietary Mark IV and their newly developed Mark V series by an efficiency margin of nearly twenty percent.

  It shouldn't have mattered. In the grand scale of the market, it was a rounding error. SIGS was an omni-corporation. They built the massive fusion-powered engines for the Navy's dreadnoughts. They had a hand in the manufacturing of reactive armor pting that helped hulls st longer against railgun fire. They designed the terraforming macro-processors that made worlds habitable within 20 years! Thermal vents were, at best, a sizeable 8, maybe 9% of their total portfolio.

  Sure, they had sunk trillions of credits into the R&D for the Mark V. Sure, the sunk cost falcy was itching at the back of the board's mind. But SIGS had money to burn, and the strategy was always the same. They would let the competitor enjoy their brief moment in the sun, wait for them to run out of capital, because they always did, and then buy them for pennies on the credit. Or, simply wait ten years. The estimated earnings of SIGS's vast empire would swallow the temporary loss of the thermal sector without a hiccup.

  But no. Thorne couldn't wait. Thorne had to py warlord in one of the most visible, high-security sectors of the gaxy.

  Thorne had sent a kill squad. A sloppy, unsanctioned, amateurish kill squad of SIGS's own security, and he had failed. And then, to compound the idiocy, Thorne had gone himself. He had taken a stealth SIGS shuttle and gotten himself personally involved in the job, getting himself captured in the process.

  But what was truly paining Victor wasn't just the failure of the hit, but what had caused it.

  "Kenjiro Takagi," Victor said softly as he began pacing the room, his naked form reflected in the dark gss of the inactive wall-screens. "Fuckign sleezebag."

  Kenjiro was supposed to be loyal, after all, he was the Lead Thermal Dynamics Engineer for SIGS's Novellus System. Hell, Victor himself had been the one to scout him and buy him out of a shitty upstart. He lived in a penthouse provided by the company, three floors down from this very suite on Station Elyse. He ate food grown in private gardens, free of the hydroponic tang of the lower parts of society. He had a sary that rivaled pnetary governors.

  And he had thrown it all away to go py in the dirt with Shephard.

  "A cushy life," Victor muttered to the empty room, his voice raspy with sleep and rage. "I gave you a kingdom of equations, Kenjiro. I gave you the best bs, the best fucking assistants. And you left it to tighten bolts with a fucking nobody."

  The betrayal gnawed at him. Kenjiro's departure validated Shephard's technology in a way no marketing campaign could counter. It told the market that one of the geniuses behind SIGS's thermal division believed the fresh out the womb competitor was better. That was the damaging narrative.

  And so, Victor had been forced to intervene. He had done what a Director does when a subordinate makes a mess. He had escated. He had unlocked the Vault and sent in some of the more sane assets from the Revenant program. Four Css-A Simucrums.

  These weren't the psychotic simucrums they would use for the easier prey, nor were they the mindless droids used for hazardous bor or the clunky combat mechs the Marines used during pnetary warfare. These were elite infiltrator units composed of hyper-alloy endoskeletons and with the brains of the universe's best Special Forces killers in the form of algorithms. The neural inhibitors that made them fearless, painless, and relentless. They were the cleaners he had sent with the purpose of erasing Thorne, Shephard, Kenjiro, and the problem with surgical precision.

  And they, too, failed.

  Victor stopped pacing in front of the window, looking out at the sprawling metropolis of Celestine Prime.

  The report had come in two days ago. All signals had been lost, and the Simucrums were offline. And worse, the IUC had sniffed it out, the media was swirling, and there were rumors of "hit squads" and "corporate warfare" happening right on the doorstep of Nova Celeste.

  Victor had been forced to authorize a humiliating press release ciming that SIGS had suffered a "malware incursion" in its robotics division, causing several units to malfunction and go rogue. A hacking. A lie. A desperate, transparent lie to cover up the fact that a junkyard engineer had somehow dismantled four of the deadliest assassins money could buy.

  His G-Comm, resting on the bedside table, buzzed, forcing Victor to freeze. Only a handful of people had that encryption key. The Board. The Pnetary Governor. And...

  He walked back to the bed, ignoring the sleeping woman, and picked up the slim device. The screen was bck, save for a single blinking icon: a stylized 'V' enclosed in a urel wreath.

  Victor felt his throat go dry, as if he had swallowed a handful of sand. He tapped the icon.

  "Director Vance." The voice on the other end was female, cool, crisp, and devoid of any human warmth. It wasn't his secretary, or any secretary he employed. It was The Secretary. The voice of the Spire.

  "I'm here," Victor said, his voice sounding smaller than he intended, cracking slightly on the first sylble. He cleared his throat, trying to regain the baritone of command. "I am here."

  "He wants to see you," the voice said. It wasn't a request. "Now."

  "I... I have a meeting with the manufacturing heads at 0900," Victor tried, a pathetic attempt to stall the inevitable. "I need an hour to-"

  "Now, Director," the woman said before the line clicked dead.

  Victor stared at the device for a moment, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. The headache was gone, now repced by a cold, sliding sensation of dread in his gut.

  He turned to the bed where the woman, the beautiful olive-skinned distraction, was beginning to wake up. She stretched, her back arching, a cat-like movement that usually would have drawn Victor back under the sheets. She opened her eyes, smiling zily at him.

  "Victor?" she purred, her voice husky with sleep. "Is everything okay? You're pacing." She patted the empty space beside her. "Come back to bed. You have time."

  Victor looked at her and didn't see a lover or a person. Instead, he felt like he was staring at a liability, at wasted time, at a corpse, and for a terrifying second, he saw his own face on it.

  "Get out," he said, his voice ft.

  She blinked in confusion, her smile faltering. "What? Victor, it's barely-"

  "Get out," he snapped, the violence in his voice making her flinch. "Now. Leave the building and do not speak with anyone or look at anyone. If you are still in this suite in five minutes, security will remove you, and they will not be gentle."

  She scrambled out of bed, grabbing her clothes, the fear in her eyes genuine. Victor didn't watch her leave, turning to walk into the expansive walk-in wardrobe. After a few seconds of deliberation, he selected a charcoal suit cut from Nebur-Weave. It was a fabric that resisted wrinkles and stains, yes, but more importantly, it possessed a mild kinetic dampening weave, enough to stop a low-velocity projectile or a knife. Not that it would help him where he was going.

  He fastened his cufflinks, ptinum, inid with slivers of bck hole matter that warped the light around his wrists. He pulled on his custom-made real-leather shoes, polished to a mirror shine.

  He looked in the mirror. He saw a man in his prime, fifty-five years old, sharp-jawed, with eyes that could cut gss. He looked powerful, like the Director of SIGS should look. He practiced a smile, a predatory, confident, and, in his eyes, perfect smile.

  But inside, he was screaming.

  He left the penthouse, stepping out into the private corridor. The thick carpet beneath his feet softly muffled his steps. As he reached the private elevator, the doors slid open, revealing a young junior executive, likely coming to deliver reports to some other exec down the hall.

  The young man froze, his eyes widening as he saw the Director. He immediately pressed himself against the wall, bowing his head in reverence.

  "Director Vance!" the young man stammered, awe and fear warring in his voice. "An honor, sir! I... I didn't expect to see you."

  Victor didn't stop or slow down for a second. His practiced mask slid into pce in an instant, and he fshed the young man a brief, tight smile, the kind that bestowed favor without promising anything.

  "No need to be so tense around me, son," Victor said, his voice smooth as silk. "I don't bite... I guess the industry never sleeps, does it?"

  "N-no, sir!" The young man stammered out. "Absolutely not, sir!"

  "That's what I like to hear," Victor said, stepping into the elevator. "You keep up the good work, and who knows, maybe you'll climb the dder just like I did."

  As the doors closed, hiding the beaming face of the junior executive, Victor's face colpsed back into a mask of terror. He slumped against the elevator wall, taking a ragged breath. They looked at him like a god. If only they knew he was on his way to meet the Devil himself.

  Victor took his private lift down to the garage. His driver was waiting by the suspended grav-limo, a sleek, bck teardrop of a vehicle with armored pting thick enough to withstand most kinetic rounds of reasonable caliber.

  "To the Citadel?" the driver asked, opening the rear door.

  "No," Victor said, sliding into the back seat. "I have to go to the Spire."

  The driver stiffened, his gloved hand paused on the door handle for a fraction of a second as if the mention of the spire put him in danger as well. "To the Spire... Yes, sir..."

  The vehicle hummed to life, the anti-grav generators whining softly as they merged into the skynes of Celestine Prime.

  The city was a testament to excess and paranoia. Buildings didn't just scrape the sky, they pierced right through it, as if they were defiant fingers thrusting into the atmosphere. Because humanity cked energy shields, the architecture was reminiscent of that on Earth, just much heavier and more brutalist to the core, though it was gilded in gold and silver. Every tower was a fortress, reinforced with structural dampeners and abtive coating to survive orbital bombardment. Crystalline structures floated on magnetic tethers, connected by transparent tubes of hyper-gss that ferried the ultra-rich between their ivory towers.

  Below, in the shadows of the miles-high structures, y the lower districts, the smog, the noise, and the people who actually built the things Victor sold. But up here, in the stratosphere, everything was light and power.

  Victor stared out the window, his fingers drumming nervously on his knee as it rapidly bobbed up and down. As they banked around the central district, the skyline was dominated by two structures that dwarfed all others.

  The first was the Helix Intergactic Bank complex. It was a monstrosity of wealth, a testament to House Helior's monetary wealth and prowess. It wasn't one building, but six ginormous, six-hundred-and-fifty-story towers arranged in a hexagonal pattern. They were interconnected by massive skybridges at hundred-story intervals, creating the shape of a colossal, three-dimensional star. It was the rgest structure on the pnet, a city within a city, housing the financial heart of the IUC. It made sense, though, since House Helior were the bankers of the gaxy, the hoarders of gold, the keepers of debts, and the ones who financed just about every single business venture since they loaned money to the other predatory banks.

  And then, in its shadow, but still titanic, was the Vonti Spire. It was a single, monolithic structure and the Major Headquarters of House Vonti and the brain of SIGS. Four hundred and fifty floors of bck psteel and mirrored gss. It looked like a bde thrust into the heart of the pnet. It was huge, imposing, and aggressive. But every time Victor looked at it, he was reminded that it was two hundred floors shorter than the Helix.

  And he knew He was reminded of it every day, too.

  The limo docked at the executive nding pad on the 400th floor. Victor stepped out. The wind up here was fierce, whipping his coat around his legs, but the aerodynamic shielding of the building diverted the worst of it.

  Security was non-existent in the traditional sense. There were no guards patrolling the area, no checkpoints to get past, no biometric scanners that he could see.

  But Victor knew better. As he walked toward the bst-gss doors, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He was being painted by a thousand invisible targeting sers from point-defense turrets, concealed in the sleek architecture. They were tracking his heartbeat, his thermal signature, the dition of his pupils. If he were unauthorized, he wouldn't be arrested. He would simply cease to exist, vaporized by a grid of rail-fletchettes before his next step nded.

  The doors slid open with a soft chime, and he walked through.

  Book 2 has wrapped up at Chapter 50, which is a short 13,400 words, and Book 3 has hit the ground running with new chapters! That means that you can read up to 27 Advanced Chapters on my Patreon at https:///cw/Crimson_Reapr

  But listen closely now. I will now be writing and editing Chapters 9 and 10, so that number will naturally increase to 27 by the end of the day, maybe 28 if I manage to go into flow state.

  Crimson_Reapr is the name, and writing Sci-fi is the way.