Forging the Sword of Empire with Blood

Terran Imperial Territory, Beca Ro Autonomous Region.

At the first glimmer of dawn, a layer of gold gradually spread across the thick velvet-blue blanket covering the sky. In the town Beca Ro's earliest pioneers had called Freeport, thousands of red-tiled, gabled buildings of varying heights lay bathed in golden-red morning light, while a white highway running straight east along the streets vanished into the distant horizon.

Octavia Bren drove the family's newly purchased combine harvester rumbling along the road through the fields toward town, leaving the fading starlight behind her.

Whenever she happened to look back at the vast fields divided into neat plots, and at the gleaming silver lightning towers and processing towers rising among them, she always felt as though an age had passed.

Summer had arrived. The trees by the fields were covered in white apple blossoms, and their fragrance washed over her, refreshing and sweet, as if she were surrounded by a sea of flowers.

Who would have thought that Beca Ro, once so harsh and barren that it could not spare any land for cash crops, would one day bloom with such profusion? In the past, Octavia had believed that worlds of lush green trees and riotous flowers existed only in old data-books and disks. She had never imagined that this planet, which had brought her ancestors so much hardship and suffering, could become what it was now.

Whenever she thought of those uncertain days when they could barely keep themselves fed, their lives today seemed like heaven.

Unlike rich and prosperous planets such as Agria, Halsen, and Haven, Beca Ro had originally been nothing more than an unremarkable rotten rock in space. Yet perhaps even the most barren soil could eventually produce beautiful flowers, however fleeting that beauty might be.

It had been exactly