Captain Jane Seymour stood behind her desk and looked out at the universe.

Stars shimmered in the great void, made tiny by distance. And yet each one was like the sun that lay in this sky, a great burning sphere of unimaginable mass.

Much closer, the polygonal distortion of the Spacegate flickered open as a Qr’var trading convoy entered local space, with a cargo of exotic sea salts, sexual statuary, and coffee grown in the shades of Mars.

Almost one hundred eighty degrees away, the great orb of the planet curved away in shades of brown and green. Kāne lay closer to its sun than Earth, near the inner perimeter of the habitable zone, and much of its water was either a thin vapor or sequestered in pressurized, underground aquifers. The first great feat of engineering among the Kāneans was the creation of vast, vertical irrigation systems, with a depth challenged only by the height of the spacescrapers that dotted the planet like the uneven hairs on an adolescent chin.

Speaking of Kāneans… ever since the uneasy peace forged by the Interplanetary Alliance, she’d been working side-by-side with them. But that didn’t mean she trusted them. She remembered all too well their terrorist activity of the last few decades against the Khargom occupational goverment. They were a side of their own, and their interests didn’t necessarily align with those of the Alliance.

Her assignment here was hypothetically a great honor, and yet she couldn’t help but feel she was being sidelined. Sent all the way out to Quadrant Omega-4, while a war with the Hive raged in the galactic west. But she was nothing if not a woman of duty, so she would do her best to serve.