The Galaxy's Almanac

(Dimension) A Kingdom's Call

The Kingdom of Taryia.

It was a blessing and a curse, living in the Kingdom. On the one hand, it had avoided the worst of the Great Famine, isolating itself from the horror and carnage that humanity had wrought across Paragon.

On the other hand, the girl thought, stooping under a pressurized blast of superheated gasses - well, needless to say, there were some significant problems.

Her steel thermosuit, caked in rust and crudely painted white, only just permitted work in the titanic mega-foundries of Taryia Primus. Layers of heat-resistant composite scales fought scorching temperatures as the girl strolled across a thin girder, less than five inches wide, swinging over massive carbon-carbon vats of molten titanium. She no longer felt fear executing her duties - whether it was her experience or merely the fact that she barely had anything to live for anymore, she couldn't tell.

The duke spent the first thirty minutes of every shift emphasizing and reemphasizing the honor of her occupation. The titanium she watched over would go on to form the hulls of great ships of war, he would say, serving proudly in the Taryian Royal Navy, battling the foes of the Kingdom. And yet the girl never felt any pride in her work - after all, she would never see these warships with her own eyes. She would never watch one fire a salvo of particle lances, and she would never serve on one, not so much as a janitor and certainly never as a deck officer.

As long as she got paid, she didn't care.

Except when it came to him.

<--<--<-->-->-->

The system of Arrin Pao.

Once the heart of the Kingdom's corporate authority, Arrin Pao was now the front line of a sweeping conflict, the epicenter of the Artrayia War. Every week, a dozen fleets of the Kingdom's finest would surge forth, struggling through a hundred rings of defensive fortifications, inching ahead to reclaim the Kingdom's rightful territory. Every week, the Kingdom's forces were hurled back, battered and beaten, to be sheltered in the great anchorage of Arrin Sia, repaired and rearmed only to be thrust back into the breach.

The boy knew his mission would be his death.

Mrras'karrta would be targeted. It was responsible for commanding the bomber drones of Taryian carriers, and, as such, would be the most lethal starcraft within a hundred lightyears. The railguns of the Coalition battleships would single Mrras'karrta out, hammering it with tungsten-Teflon slugs until its shields collapsed and its armor gave out.

The boy was sprawled on his bunk, daydreaming. Imagining. He had enlisted out of necessity, but he often envisioned what life would be like if he had stayed behind, scratching a living with her in the foundries of the Kingdom's homeworld.

Not that there was anything left for him in the core apart from her. His parents were in a better place, wherever that might be, killed in a mine explosion six years ago. His sister was on her death bed, terminally ill and without the income to afford life-extending treatment. Even his voice - even that was gone, stolen from him in the same catastrophe that had taken the lives of his mother and father.

<--<--<-->-->-->

She was a restless girl, cast from her royal house in disgrace. Banished from the upper levels, forbidden from ever again seeing the light of day, on pain of capital punishment.

She was prohibited from serving, but she would've followed him, even unto death.

Ultimately, she found work in the foundries. She had found him in the foundries as well, broken and guarded, a vagrant in the eyes of the law.

It wouldn't be long before she offered him a place in her own pitiful home. It was far too small to house two, but she didn't mind. He quickly became the only entity that made life tolerable anymore, and if sharing her claustrophobic, hundred-square-foot windowless apartment was the only price... well then, so be it.

Sometimes he wouldn't come home, electing instead to spend the night under the artificially-projected stars. For that, she despised him. She often had nightmares of waking to a world that he was no longer a part of.

<--<--<-->-->-->

He was a mute, wandering boy, without any inheritance to his name, without any family willing to accept him, and without any support from the upper echelons of the Kingdom's royalty.

If he could laugh, he would have. It was pathetic.

He was pathetic.

Only the foundries would accept his application. They didn't care that he was mute, or that he was starving, or hopeless. As long as he worked, they would pay him what he deserved.

He had met her there. She was an odd case, born out of royalty but far more accepting of him than anyone else had ever been. Whether she worked in the depths of Taryia Primus because she was disowned, or abandoned, or just out of some deluded sense of longing to live as the disowned and abandoned did, she never said.

In the end, he enlisted for a number of reasons. Part of him was still desperate to provide for his sister's treatment. Some reckless share was consumed by an overpowering desire to escape the monotony of his life.

The boy had begged her to follow, but she had refused.

And so the next day he was gone. Shipped off to some distant naval mustering ground, now just another nameless soldier among the masses. The girl had found a note left on her bed, written by him, and with shaking hands, she had endeavored to read the entire thing. "Thank you," the note ended, "for everything."

She read it again. And again, and again, and again, until she had memorized every word and could recite it on command. She did recite it, every night, reacclimating to tolerate life in Lower without him in it.

Her mundane occupation abruptly held new meaning, now that he served. Every carbon-carbon vat of molten titanium she attended would adorn the superstructure of a new warship,

"but every warship is a grave for a hundred souls." Such was the saying in the navy, one that the boy had become rapidly accustomed to.

He checked, double-checked, triple-checked the power readout for the drone control station. All systems nominal.

"Initiate warp jump

in fifteen seconds."

The girl clutched a remote tightly in her hands, empty save for a single red button. Tank One's heating cycle had terminated, and the ore was now wholly molten, waiting to be molded into enormous titanium cylinders. One press of the button would

initiate the drone control sequence, attack pattern Alpha-Nine-Nine. The exalted spaceframe of a Trra'qarrtirr-class dreadnought eclipsed Mrras'karrta, shielding the drone controller with six kilometers of titanium hull.

"Jump sequence initiated."

A flash of blue and the guns of the Trra'qarrtirr-class were already singing, unleashing beams of crackling energy.

<--<--<-->-->-->

The girl never told him. She never told him why she couldn't follow him. She never told him why the daughter of a royal house was laboring in the foundries of Taryia Primus, because she was terrified. Terrified about what he might do if he ever uncovered her disgraced past.

The boy realized he had never told her that he loved her.