<b>Title: </b>The Star's Last Hope<br/><b>The Players: </b><a class="username" data-user-id="815" data-username="@Wendium" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" href="https://blackdahliaroleplaying.com/members/815/">@Wendium</a>&<a class="username" data-user-id="2051" data-username="@sleep-is-4-the-weak" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" href="https://blackdahliaroleplaying.com/members/2051/">@sleep-is-4-the-weak</a><br/><b>The Hook: </b>On a planet far from Earth and long before our time, two people become entangle in an adventure for the very survival of civilization as they know it.<br/><br/>Lieutenant Brennen Osric was, he liked to call himself, an Engineer. Alas, he didn't work on engines, not since he got here three months earlier.  Instead, the 30-odd-T-year old man from the Federation's capital world of Ankata was some 40,000 light years from home, deep in the bowels of a space station orbiting Orilla, a planet that 300 years ago was a pre-space backwater and now was the Federation's newest member world. It had become a trading post for a half dozen so-called "Fringe" civilizations -- diasporic worlds like every other known inhabited planet in the explore galaxy, who'd declined to join the Federation for, usually, ideological reasons.<br/><br/>And everyone one of them had goods to trade and every one of their freighters needed their cargo offloaded in a timely fashion. Thus, when the conveyor system connecting the docking gallery where the ship's own handlers unloaded to the customs inspection hall went down it was<i>his</i>job to fix it. Well, him and his army of robots.<br/><br/>Six hours of work and a horde of disgruntled loadmasters and captains later, the system of belts, gravity plates and robotic arms was back in operation, moving pallets, barrels and other assorted un-standardized bits of cargo in and out.<br/><br/>The sleeves of his Federal Fleet uniform rolled up, he made his report to the dockmaster, a thoroughly irate Lieutenant Commander, then went on to his next assignment.<br/><br/>A trouble ticket on the window hacked onto his left eye's feed by the nanite interface in his head read. Another "priority zero" to make his already long day longer.<br/><br/>A record number of ships were pouring into the system, more every day. So much so system traffic control was having trouble clearing the inbound arrival area, a sphere all of 100,000 klicks in radius at the planet's solar 'L5' point in which one of the six 'local Fringe' gates and eight 'core' gates could deposit a ship. There was talk of moving the outbound gate, located at the planet-solar L4, to another planet's orbit. Either way, somebody was going to complain.<br/><br/>And just as his shift ended the assignment du jour for tomorrow popped into his head. "Jumpgate thruster inspection." He shook his head. Just what he needed...<br/><br/>Physically, Brennen wasn't any more remarkable than the next guy, or so he figured. 1.8 meters tall with an olive complexion, dark hair (kept buzz-short) and eyes. He looked like the majority of the people from his world, right down to his square jaw and preference for a clean-shaved face. In other words, with the moderately-muscular figure that went with the mandatory physical training of all Fleet officers he looked like a walking recruitment poster for the Corp of Engineers.<br/><br/>The day done, he went to the station's expansive promenade and from there, his favorite bar. The watering hole serving stiff drinks favored the Fleet's staff officer corps, the engineers and logistics officers who kept the ships moving.<br/><br/>He sidled up to the bar and slid into his favorite seat, next to the short, dark-skinned Lieutenant he always sat next to who wore the insignia of the Logistics Supply Corps and the station's custom's office. Her eyes, and everyone elses's were fixed on the screens above the bar.<br/><br/>News reports from the core were getting more dire by the hour. Mass evacuations of neutral words, Fleet warships heading to the border between the Federation and the Triumvirate. Both sides had recently demonstrated they had the ability to obliterate entire planets and in some cases render entire star systems uninhabitable. The decades-long cold war was days away from a breaking point and all they could do, from this far away, is watch and wait for the situation back home to come to a head.<br/><br/>And, of course, deal with the merchant ships and evacuees who decided getting out of the core was in their best interests. As if the cargo bays were flooded the passenger queues to immigration were even worse.<br/><br/>"So how was your day?" he asked his companion as the barkeep slid his favorite brew in front of him.