Let's turn back half a day.
The fleets commanded by Lieutenant Generals Rowenthor and Niali arrived in the Ellanway System shortly after 3:00 a.m. on October 25, Galactic Standard Time. They had even arrived a little ahead of schedule.
It was the golden-and-silver-eyed female general's first time here in person, and she was naturally struck—though not too hard—by the space city suspended in orbit around the third planet.
It was an elliptical space structure, four hundred kilometers in diameter.
Symmetrical bands of armor were evenly distributed across its surface, making the outer shell of the fortress look like the carapace of an aging turtle. In places, the radiation-resistant coating had cracked and peeled away, exposing the dark silver composite alloy beneath. These alloy structures, which supported the fortress as a whole, lay hidden beneath the translucent blades of its dome, like a gigantic skeleton holding up the fortress itself.
It was, of course, a fortress with a good few years behind it. Lack of upkeep had left mottled traces of wear in many places. Even so, thanks to the Empire's superb engineering, the structure as a whole had remained sound.
With the Empire's capabilities, bringing the entire fortress up to wartime standards suitable for stationing a large fleet would take no more than half a year.
What surprised Olivia Rowenthor wasn't that the space city had any particularly ingenious design.
It was a very typical Imperial military stronghold, unremarkable in both function and appearance, with nothing that stood out. Even a high-resolution close-up would be fit for, at best, a second- or third-rate military magazine. It wouldn't even make the cover.
But it had been built five hundred years ago, in a remote star sector tucked into a nebula—and funded by a single feudal lord.
Its appearance and function were