Captain Jane Hartman may as well have been planetside. Carefully seeded grass folded beneath her boots, trees rose from the dirt before her stretching wooden limbs up towards an inky black sky. Save for the honeycomb of beams that hung above her, bracing the Lone Dome's tiny bubble of atmosphere against the void, the illusion was almost perfect. Or it would have been perfect if she hadn't needed to climb three flights of stairs through life support machinery to get here. Oh, it looked like a planetside forest, sure enough, but like everything else in orbit it existed only by the grace and ceaseless labors of humanity's machines. After two days crammed aboard Triton, Hartman had been glad of the walk. She was less fond of the biodome itself. It was an illusion, a luxury sustained purely for the sake of it, and provided nothing that could not have been replicated by hydroponics beds for a fraction of the cost. The whole thing seemed vaguely dishonest to her.

Then again, if she had a problem with dishonesty she was in entirely the wrong place.

Ellington was waiting at a table, engaged in conversation with a red-haired woman wearing a uniform that Hartman had seen once before. The Order. Outstanding. Hartman had never before encountered an organisation that seemed to take such perverse pride in their own machinations. Terrorists. Or the last hope of humanity, if you were foolish enough to believe that dark uniforms and double meanings made you the good guys. Special Operations and spooks. Outstanding.

Hartman swallowed her distaste and made her way across the bar.

"Commander Ellington. Making friends already, I see."

"Thank you Commander, but I think I'll stand."

Hartman stood, palms resting neatly behind her, listened, and did her utmost not to betray the growing sense of disorientation nestling in her gut as the two spoke. Valhalla-1? Gamma 7? It was just noise to her. Code-names and cryptics, and she didn't have the cipher. This was Lewis' territory, through and through. She was a Logistics Officer. A glorified supply clerk, when you got down under the ribbons. Oh, she'd been a marine once, been a warship commander. But Lewis had been right. The years and the desk job had made her soft. An assignment with the First Fleet didn't change that, no matter how she twisted it in her mind. She was horribly, crushingly, out of her depth.

Still, she knew enough not to show her ignorance. That was one of the first thing she'd learned at West Point, and perhaps the most valuable of the lot. Confidence. Bluster. No-one ever knew what they were doing, but it was an exceptionally poor officer indeed who let on to the fact. A faint smile. A nod, as though she knew exactly what Ellington was referring to. As though she'd been briefed on the flight in instead of frantically hovering over transport records, trying to patch trivial security holes. No lapses. Not here. Don't show weakness. Not in front of the Order. Not in front of a subordinate.

I hope you know what you're doing, Commander. Hartman raked her eye over the dome looming beyond the bar, the silhouette of Pine Ridge jutting across the horizon like a mad architect's mountain. And I sure as hell hope you plan to tell the rest of us.