text: [Themes: Science Fiction, female protagonist]
  
  > look around
  Pod 19-Q (in Bunk C)
  You have been quarantined in Pod 19-Q. It's a narrow cylinder, big enough for one person to float in, with four bunks. You must have been shuttled in through the airlock on one end; the other end is taken up by a huge screen. The pod is quite warm, and warm enclosed spaces have a naturally soporific effect on you.
  
  Sen has withdrawn to Bunk D, now closed.
  
  Kadro looks on at you expectantly.
  
  > remove the straps
  (first taking the straps)
  That seems to be a part of Bunk C.
  
  > talk to Kadro
  "I'm very much still strapped to the bunk here Kadro," you say.
  
  "You bit that I can't just let you loose. It's not time for you to leave the can. Float tight, I'll go and see what Jimmy's snaffling. This may take a while."
  
  With that he floats over to the airlock, opening and closing it behind him. Much time passes and no one returns, and still it is warm in the pod.
  
  > Sleep
  You let the warm stale air of the pod overcome you and soon you drift into altconsciousness. Your internal world-creator is deprived of your full range of senses and draws on memories to fill in the gaps.
  
  The pink light of two of the three suns paints your bedroom pink, but the morning scene is hard to appreciate as you're covered in blood.
  
  > examine the blood
  Your jumpsuit is coated in blood. This must be part of the sickness for which you were quarantined. It's becoming very uncomfortable to wear the jumpsuit now.
  
  > remove the jumpsuit
  You pull your sodden jumpsuit off. Perhaps you had an external injury to have so much blood?
  
  > About yourself
  Looking at yourself now, you realise that you have no injury and you don't feel unwell. The blood can't be your own. The words 'do your duty' echo faintly and your bedroom fades into darkness.
  
  You're in a narrow backstreet, hunched over the dead body of the scientist, Dr. Andy Re's. He's supposed to have a folder on him. It was your duty to find it. To find it and forget. Except in dreams no one ever truly forgets.
  
  > examine scientist
  You rifle through Andy's pockets, his sticky blood coating your jumpsuit even more. But he has nothing on him. You know that this wasn't supposed to happen, but you can't recall who ever gave you the order to kill and search his body.
  
  "You really are luckier than you know," someone says behind you.
  
  > look at someone
  Sen has very angular features and is perhaps in her mid-forties, but it's hard to tell for sure. Although she is very thin, her cheeks are flush with colour and she doesn't seem to be displaying any outward signs of illness.
  
  > talk to Sen
  You turn to the woman before you.
  
  > 1
  "Answers?" Sen says, "I owe you many things, but answers are not one of them."
  
  Then, pondering for a moment, she says, "Actually, you'll be of more use to us if you're not completely in the dark. Do you know much about the ancients?"
  
  > 2
  "About two thousand years ago a great event wiped out part of our galaxy and our ancestors came to live in the mechanosatellites, long range orbitals floating around Monarch. I have arranged for our pod to be dislocated from Morbozzo and taken to the Mechanosatellites. The quarantine was, if you like, a ruse to get us all up there without certain someones finding out."
  
  > 3
  "We've been priming you for a long time to act as a sleeper assassin. The best killer is someone who doesn't know they are one. But it turns out that there might be another good use for you."
  
  > 1
  "You'll have to wait and see. You'll be quite instrumental when we get there."
  
  > 1
  "Why the other council members of course. After we had you knock off poor Dr. Re's, I was supposed to have you and the other sleeper agents killed too. Be glad that I had other plans."
  
  > 2
  "Yes," she says wryly, "I have access to records in the Phelios Fortress, and I have reason to believe that the end of the human race is afoot, and I rather like living. You three are useful towards that end."
  
  > 1
  "Haven't you figure it out yet?" I'm Sen Kulpa, one the masked Council of the Thirteen, and I have read all the bounds and known things beyond the ken of all others alive."
  
  > 1
  "When we arri..." and Sen is cut short by gravity suddenly emerging in the tiny pod. She lands roughly on her shoulder, and you're left dangling unceremoniously from your binds.
  
  "Here," she says, "let me get you down so you can do your duty."
  
  Sen leads you through the airlock into a series of narrow chambers. The gravity is not quite what you're used to on Monarch but is better than the weightlessness of the Morbozzo pod. Soon you reach the others.
  
  You are standing with the others in front of a vast window, through which you can see a tiny blue dot (half illuminated by Sehrn) in the distance of space: Monarch.
  
  The place is strewn with the detritus of past archaeological expeditions.
  
  "By Fat! Would you look at that view," says Kadro.
  
  > look at the view
  You once heard that space isn't really black, but a dark blue. Or was it beige? In any case it would be very black and forbodious beyond the window were it not for all the brilliant stars.
  
  "It's about to get more spectacular," says Sen Kulpa, peering out into the void.
  
  > Keep going
  You once heard that space isn't really black, but a dark blue. Or was it beige? In any case it would be very black and forbodious beyond the window were it not for all the brilliant stars.
  
  "It's going to lag hard if Monarch really does explode," little Jimmy says.
  
  > talk to Sen
  For now you can't get in a word edgeways as the others speak.
  
  "It will," says Sen, "the alpha radiation readings are unequivocal: there will be no Monarch soon enough. If my research is right, the ancients had put in place technology to harness the energy of an Event such as this. This must be how they travel from galaxy to galaxy."
  
  > examine Monarch
  Monarch, the planet of your birth, sixth in Andromeda's trinary system. Something looks wrong with it.
  
  Kadro is looking uncomfortable, as if the truth of it is starting to sink in. "Amato are you sure that this can we're in is the oh-one that'll zip us the next galaxy?"