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The Standardized Lupine Calendar System sets the length of a day to 25 hours, the approximate amount of time in which it takes Alurius to complete one full axial rotation. Each week is comprised of 5 days, each month of 5 weeks. Ten months to a year, with two additional weeks placed at the end of the 5th and 10th months serving as festival weeks; modern convention orders dates month, week, day separated by a dash followed by a year if not the current. All Lupine homeworld, naval, intersystem, and official records default to Standard Calendar; the colonies maintain localized time systems however always display the SLCS alongside local clocks.

*The clock upon which Lucian had his gaze fixed seemed to be in sync with so other system of metrics. Every tick of the seconds hand dragged out for a small eternity. At least it felt that way. *

Three days left of leave and Dev dragged me up here, to what sit and wait?

Throughout the trio of soldiers stay at the Iceheart manor, very little of note had occurred. Andros Iceheart spent long hours at Fleet Command Headquarters outside the city, some nights opting to stay on base. Trisha Iceheart maintained similar long hours, to and from her Senatorial District offices, home, and all around the city of Point Landing ears deep in budget meetings, appointments with officials and even the opening ceremony of a hospital. The sprawling estate felt just as lonesome as Lucian remembered it growing up.

T heir first week or so, Lucian entertained his companions by playing tourist, visiting historic sites and museums, art exhibits and even bar crawl night. The novelty quickly wore off however. Rorick found use of the estates gym facilities and Lucian tore through his beloved library once again, finally finishing out some of his reading list. Devius split time between the library and the fourth floor shrine. He apparently sought to research anything and everything he could in relation to the centuries old stain-glass windows. Lucian sat outside the shrine room now, patiently waiting for Dev to show him... whatever it was he had been researching for the last two months. The bastard had promised it would be ready in 10 minutes. That had been 3 hours ago.

*Lucian could see he was making little progress in besting the wall clock in a staring contest, and aside from falling asleep, he tosses around the idea of just getting up and leaving whatever presentation his friend had cooked up. Before Lucian could make a decision, the lights up and down the hall flickered out. *

Abruptly standing up and with just enough light coming in through the windows further down the hall, Lucian turned to the wall mounted control panel, to find it had also gone dark. Raising his wrist-com, the connection to the houses wireless system had also dropped.

The failure of this many systems without triggering redundancies; there's no way this is a normal blackout, not in the manor.

The door to the shrine swung open, and a disheveled Devius grabbed Lucians shoulder. Reacting on instinct rather than sight, Lucian grabbed his arm and had Dev pinned to the wall before identifying the "assailant".

"What the fuck Dev! Why did the power go out?"

"Hey! Let go! I'm sorry I had to cut the power to make this thing work, I couldn't touch it with the houses systems running. Took me forever to figure out how to shut it off." the black and white dog struggled against the pin.

Releasing him, Lucian gave Dev a stern glare, "What do you mean you couldn't touch it? Touch what? What is all this about Dev?"

"Come inside I'll show you!" Dev lead back through the shrine doorway. Inside, Lucian found the room exactly as he expected, glass window mural, prayer shrine, bench, curio cabinet, all normal. Dev went right to the window, and knelt in the bottom corner of the design. "Now with the power on, the shrines self contained barrier field gets projected on the glass, this makes it basically impact-proof, short of ramming an airspeeder into it. If the power goes out, the houses backup generator kicks in, fast enough that there no power lapse. Then, this being a priceless piece of art, the shield unit has a tertiary power cell that could probably last all week. I won't go into how much a yank of the tail disabling all three has been, but I got em."

"Why in Lupas name would you disable the shield projector, Dev? What the fuck is up with you and this damn window?"

"Alright, here, it's better if I show you", Dev put a paw on a small section of the mural, pushing up on the segment, it gave an audible click and then dev rotated the segment 120 degrees and it gave another firm click. "The mural is covered in movable panels, they all rotate or move around like a giant puzzle".

Kneeling in the bottom corner, Dev quickly repeated the motion of unlocking the small glass panels and turning them like dials to a combination lock, different amounts each time. After a dozen or so locking clicks, Lucian realized the corner of the mural, having before depicted a scene of the Lupine Chancery creation myth with the foreground imagery set in white frosted glass and the background set in assorted colored glass for what seemed to be filler, now wrote out lines of mathematical formula. The seemingly random colored glass pieces did not make a comprehensible message until they were all rotated, the frosted white now falling into the background and seemingly the filler displayed in the foreground.

Dev continued along a full meter of the walls length, Lucian could already identify several scientific formula, the equation to gauge the resistance of electricity in a conductor, the function of energy to mass and the speed of light, radiation leakage from the event horizon of a black hole, and an equation that looks surprisingly like the modern Super-Luminous Transitional Theorem.

What the bleeding fuck is the mathematical equation for traveling faster than the speed of light doing on a mural that's almost 500 years old? There's not a chance any of the Paragons gave my ancestors this information. Or did they? Did they know what this all meant? Why hide the equations so elaborately? Which Paragon spilled the FTL secrets?

Too many questions came to Lucians mind at that instant.

Thankfully Dev spoke before Lucian had an aneurysm.

"So I've come to the conclusion that one of the Paragons must have been damaged somehow, probably in transit, moving it between cities. I dug into the providence of the house and the mural, turns out Athinius herself was here in Point Landing at the time, her benevolence was supposed to be just passing through the city on her way back to Lupa City, but for some totally undocumented reason, her and her entourage stayed here for over a year, canceling all viewings to the Paragon. Basically no record whatsoever of what happened, but I bet they broke one of our divine messengers, probably got a ton of data lobbed at them accidentally, wrote it down and realized they needed to hide it. Your dozen or so greats grandfather was the cities High Priest of Lupis at the time, city records show this manor was still being rebuilt after the first burned down, and an oddly high sum of Chancery money was thrown at the finishing the job in just a few months. The Chancery payout was dated shortly after the Paragons entourage began their extended stay. I'm guessing so that the mural could be built and hidden. Pretty great way to hide a secret construction bill is in another construction bill."

"So, what, the Chancery retrieved information we clearly weren't ready, let alone capable of using, from Athinius, encoded it in a window, and just forgot it was all here?"

"Well you got to imagine that once Athinius had herself repaired, she wouldn't have been happy to know these secrets, and who knows what else, got leaked. They knew this stuff had to be super important, so destroying it and pretending it didn't happen was off the table. So they sat on it, hopefully until no one, mainly the Paragons, would be able to discern exactly when the leak happened. If you steal someone's wallet, but they don't realize they don't have it for a whole week, it gets really hard to pinpoint when it was stolen and therefore who the thief was. Anyhow, they must have sat on it too long, cause the fact this mural had advanced mathematics in it got lost to time. We ultimately got all this science anyway, in proper order. Hehe. Imaging getting nukes before democracy?"

"If this is the first time ever the mural has been solved like this, then how did you figure out what it was? You've been all over this thing since you first saw it!"

Dev gave a shrug "meh, I saw a bunch of the tiles lined up if they could turn, took me a long time to figure out which pieces turned and how far, I worked that backwards from what patterns would make images. Seeing that there was a pattern to the mess was all I really needed to know something else was there. I figured out all these turns here before I brought the power down, you know. I did make sure it all worked like I thought it did before I made it vulnerable like this."

"Well, thank you for the consideration and thoroughness, Dev. Wait, you mean you already cracked it before you could touch it?"

"Yeah, last week. Took me all this week to get the damn power grid figured out. What did you think I did that just today? Even I'm not THAT good to beat this crazy defense system your house has got, not that quickly at least." Dev scoffed.

** ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ **

Leaving Alurius that week had to be among the most bittersweet moments of Lucians life. He was saying goodbye to his parents, his family, his home once again, this time for an undoubtedly longer tour. The training at the ASML Center would last several months, then if he and his companions did well, they'd be pressed to active posting with the Praetorian Guard. The mix of excitement and anxiety intensified with each passing moment, the cramped quarters of the military barracks transport cruiser didn't help either. Alphate Rexius had mentioned that final recruitment decisions were up to him, but failing out in one of the most prestigious training courses the military had to offer would ruin any consideration. The pressure to succeed met its match at the thought of actually joining the Guard.

Its got to be the dream of every pup at some point, being the best warrior our people have

Arct Kyber may be a core world of the Republic, but it is one of the most remote systems, the only real beacon of habitation in the Southern Verge cluster. The barracks cruiser traveled over week past space devoid of stars, entering the meagerly populated cluster in a system specialized in refueling. Large orbital complexes spun around a pair of gas giants in the system, syphoning hydrogen and helium in vast quantities for conversion to fuel. A dim red star and a few lifeless rocks of little mineral note rounded out the system.

Pretty typical of frontier clusters. Mine, refine, or leave behind.

If a system this far out lacked mineral wealth or gas giants worth fuel refining, they were almost universally deserted. Aside from acting as a pirate haven, such systems were worthless compared to one bearing a habitable world. Arct Kyber proved to be the Southern Verges sole habitable planet, and it only partially qualified as "habitable".

The Arct title was bestowed upon any world that could prove safe conditions, outside of breathing apparatus or pressure controls, to a Lupis on its surface. Underground or underwater habitation did not qualify, nor did any world with sapient life of its own garner the title. The latter issue had been affirmed to keep diplomatic relations with the Equin of Equis Eradini positive. The small Lupis colonies allowed on the surface of Equis Eradini made a petition for Arct status some decades ago. The FLR, fearing such a declaration being viewed as hostile claims of the Equin world, blocked the petition wholly. There are officially 92 different names for Equis Eradini in the native Equin languages, at least of those Lupis scholars have bothered to translate.

They really wouldn't give a shit about what WE call their planet, they haven't cared about anything else we've done there. We've been extremely courteous there and they don't really bother for much. Sometimes I wish us Lupis could be a bit more... simplistic like that.

From what Lucian knew about Equis Eradini, the Federal Republic used more landmass there in the limited polar colonies than the entire development of Arct Kyber combined. Not for a lack of trying, Arct Kyber just had the problem of being tidally locked with its parent star, posing the real estate nightmare that is a world lacking axial rotation. Searing wastelands on one hemisphere, and frozen wastelands on the other. The day and night sides broken by a thin band of perpetual twilight, just warm enough to keep water from freezing solid, cold enough for it to not all boil off. Less than 10% of the planets surface existed in this stretch of happy medium. This "Temperate Zone" extended some kilometers past the equatorial, and while technically you could survive for a short distance in either extreme, it wasn't recommended. The handful of cities built on Arct Kyber covered the whole width of the zone, framed on either side by desolate terrain.

Arct Kyber was another day of deep void travel off. Besides the tidally locked Arct, 4 other terrestrial planets and a single gas giant spun around the orange-hued star. Refinery complexes similar to the last system filled Kybers' sole gaseous sibling, and a litany of mining facilities gouged into the fourth, and palladium rich, world. Unlike the idyllic Arct Pallintine, Arct Kyber served more industrial concerns. Its cities were factory dense, and while not overtly eco-unfriendly, there were fewer protections in place. Rather than demanding industrial cargo be unloaded at a space elevator and ferried planetside, large cargo haulers made the decent themselves. Most space worthy craft have minimal environmental impact, it is however the crash of a ship carrying dangerous cargo that pose ecological threat on most worlds. Here, it's most likely to crash, or can have a controlled crash, on either of the barren sides of the planet with no catastrophic disaster.

So what if a swath of the planet we can't use in the first place becomes highly irradiated?

Lucian could see from his small cabin window the odd linear fashion in which the world had been developed. From his vantage he could see a small ocean, where blue waters met solid ice on one side and where it boiled off on the other, only to pour down furiously as a perpetual hurricane back at the equator. Arct Kyber had no reputation for prime beaches, sadly.

The single most outstanding structure on the surface was the Kyber Advanced Science and Military Logistical Center. To call the ASML a structure would be inadequate. To call it a complex of structures would also be inadequate. Like the few cities of Arct Kyber, the facility spanned the entire width of the worlds twilight zone, a massive line of science colleges and tech labs housed in towers, that when viewed from above blend into the appearance of a single wall rising from the surface. A second unnatural mountain range of civilian labs, lecture halls, military training facilities and research/development labs rose 100 kilometers further down the twilight band. Between them, the single largest testbed of terrains in the Republic. The extreme temperature variance over such a short distance proved to be an ideal place to create dozens of radically different microbiomes, sandblasted mountains and deserts bleeding over to arid savannas with rare watering holes, that bled to vibrant grasslands, spilling into lush tropical forests, then into temperate glades and marshes to snow capped mountains across to the barren ice plains of the night side. Every discipline from ecology to botany to terraforming had a proverbial garden with plots to test in. The military had every sort of planetary biome conceivable with which to train elite forces in. Or to test weapons. Supposedly, amongst the skunkworks and military blacklist labs operating on Arct Kyber, weapons like mass defoliant bombs and lasers designed for melting through sand to obliterate bunkers are born, tested and built. This may be true, or just bluster to have the Leonians merely think the FLR have weapons custom tailored to their worlds. Either way, Arct Kyber housed the single largest science center in the known galaxy.

The barracks vessel meandered into a stable orbit above the segment of the temperate zone occupied by the ASML Center. Lucian sat up from his deep pondering on the small seat against the porthole, just as his wrist com paged for him. Quickly reviewing the message, he mentally prepped himself for his first ASML muster. Finding Dev and Rorick in the hall, Lucian was relieved at the familiar faces. The earlier tinge of homesickness weighed him down a little less while in their company.

"Good! I'm glad you two are ready. Would hate to miss our first muster call here."

Rorick moved in close and whispered in a low voice, "Rumor is the whole ASML class is already on the transport, and we're getting to meet the instructor here". the Trio navigated amongst a growing crowd of junior officers in the corridor, all seeming to be heading to the same muster call.

"I heard the first part of that rumor but not the second. Why would we have the class muster up here? The Academy is planetside." Lucian folded his ears, worried that something was amiss with the facility on the surface.

Dev pointed out the hall markers on the bulkheads, "Well the where we're meeting the class instructor seems to be the rear hanger, we'll have to wait for the why."

The group of soldiers entered the anterior chamber to the rear hanger, a sort of ready room adjacent to the deployable area. The rooms occupants numbered 50 by the time the last trickled in, all in their ship casualwear as instructed. The orders had been "report as you are". Three present had apparently been their skivvies and followed orders appropriately.

An aged male at the front of the room, the only one present in dress uniform, gave a growl, ordering all present to stand at attention. He wore the rank of Colonel on his shoulders.

With zero introduction and little in the way of formality, the gruff dog addressed the gathered class, "Listen up mongrels, I've been told you're among the best and brightest our race has to offer. Act like it and you might make it to the academy alive. Computer, seal the door, begin the 'Orientation'".

The door behind them, pressurized and armored, sealed just before a pair of sergeants turned the corridor, late for muster. Howls of panic sounded from the other side before the pressure seals fully engaged.

"And our first flunkies from the ASML for the term. Fantastic. Shaping up to be a great class. Get your tails on straight, mutts, failing the rest of this might cost you more than a week's pay and career opportunities."

The emergency klaxon roared to life within the ready room, startling most of the soldiers inside. The Colonel just smiled.

"EMERGENCY ALERT: CATASTROPHIC ENGINE FAILURE DETECTED! EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY, THIS IS NOT A DRILL", blared between earsplitting rings of the alarms.

Lucian could hear a few fellows trying at the door they came through, to no avail, the only other door out being to the hanger compartment. Realizing this was the intention of the their first test, Lucian and others filed quickly and orderly into the secondary hanger.

The hanger compartment, as with most Republic vessels, utilized cross compatible, interchangeable modules, to accommodate bomber or fighter squadrons, shuttlecraft, drones, or in this particular case: Single Occupant Drop-pods. A catwalk ran from one end of the room to the other, with 4 perpendicular side paths. Each catwalk was lined with dozens of coffin-like SODs, all suspended above the atmospheric shield along the transports lower hull. The black of space and the haze of Arct Kybers' atmosphere beyond that.

"Sun of Lupa, this is seriously how they want us to get planetside?" Dev questioned incredulously over the sound of the alarm.

Strapping into pods adjacent his friends, Lucian looked for the silver lining. "Hey at least we were mostly dressed. Crash landings aren't fun, even less so in your skivvies, I'm sure. If you don't get picked up quickly, you could die of exposure. I hear it's a shitty way to go." Lucian gave a smug grin and wave to the soldier strapping in the pod across from him, who unfortunately was among the least prepared. The all brown male scowled hatefully back as all the SODs began closing up. Lucians smile widened at him through the small transparent viewport on his SOD.

Less than 45 seconds after the alarm began, the first of the pods separated from its dockings with a small air release, falling through the shield in the floor, and plummeting towards the surface of Arct Kyber, small bursts of compressed gas gently redirecting them as they went.

Despite the speed of their deployment, Lucian knew this merely marked the start to tests. Everything they did from here on out would be documented and aggregate towards their final assessment scores. The pods drifted away from the transport, and unlike a true engine failure, the vessel did not explode or otherwise look to be harmed. The SODs however behaved as if it were still going to blow, adding excessive thrust after clearing the shield, in order to escape the blast radius.

Wincing at the increased Gs, Lucian watched as his and the other pods descended into the planet atmosphere. If the SODs continued to behave as if they were live-fired, he feared how many of the pods would impact in hostile biomes; they weren't known for landing in tight groupings. Hitting a safe spot on the tidally locked world below could be like flipping a coin and praying it lands upright on the edge.