Epilogue — After the Fall
At Central Relief, the departure transmission entered the registry automatically. The next required check-in did not.
At first the delay was marked as a communications fault. Other channels were failing across Farseek, and relief traffic was being rerouted faster than exhausted operators could track it. A second check-in window passed. Then a third.
The three vessels were not declared destroyed. No wreckage had been found. No verified distress call had been received. No one knew enough to turn uncertainty into fact.
Their shared status changed by one line:
UNACCOUNTED FOR — CONTACT PENDING.
And there it remained.
***
By the time the first returning dreadnoughts finally broke into Farseek orbit, the fires over Wasaytu had burned low enough for smoke to hang in layers instead of columns.
No one at Central Relief tried to reduce the interval to a neat number of days.
Time had become relief rotations, failed check-ins, burial shifts, repaired relays, and lists that changed every hour.
Commander General Zared Maktu came home to names.
Admiral Garvan Degatu stood beside him at the consolidated registry while exhausted civilian clerks and provisional officers explained what had happened in the absence of the main Brigade force.
The categories remained deliberately separate—confirmed alive, wounded, dead, missing, probable capture, unaccounted transport—because a registrar from Wasaytu had refused to let uncertainty become administrative convenience.
"Who built this?" Maktu asked.
The records coordinator touched the first protocol header. "Maelis Torren. Agricultural Exchange registrar. Captain Kaiven Daratu helped get the system adopted across the relief network."
"Where are they?" Degatu asked.
The coordinator opened the relief-detachment record: three vessels, eight hundred and twelve people, one last verified departure from Farseek, repeated missed check-ins, and no confirmed wreckage.
UNACCOUNTED FOR — CONTACT PENDING.
Maktu read the line without speaking. Then he moved to the larger list—the people confirmed taken by Sargan transports before the returning fleet could reach home.
"How many?" he asked.
"Thousands confirmed," the coordinator said. "More are still being reconciled. Some districts have not restored full records."
A signals officer placed another file beside the registry.
"There is something else. Distress traffic was being delayed before the first strike.
Some civilian messages were diverted through Consortium priority architecture.
We preserved the raw routing headers exactly as provisional command ordered. "
Degatu's face went still. "Do not summarize that evidence. Do not clean it. I want every original packet, every timestamp, every failed handshake."
"Already archived," the officer said.
Maktu looked again at the names. His world had not waited intact for him to return.
Families had been killed, scattered, hidden, and carried into slavery while the Brigade fought elsewhere under an alliance that might have known more than it had admitted.
There would be time to determine the full shape of that betrayal.
The missing could not wait for certainty.
"Every transport trail," he said. "Every sale route. Every prison world, labor camp, shipyard, auction house, and holding station we can identify. We find out where they took our people."
Degatu looked at him. "And then?"
Maktu turned from the registry toward the scarred dreadnoughts visible beyond the relief-center windows. "Then we bring them home."
They did not call themselves mercenaries that day. Not yet. But the mission that would make them the Farseek Mercenaries had already begun—with a ruined world, a fleet coming home too late, and names that refused to disappear.