'Yeah… and Reach still wants us to pump the breaks on the whole shutting-down SinoViet's shipbuilding and metallurgy-operations thing we've got going in the courts.' Said Sol's gal in the Navy's secretary seat, tapping a splodge of ash from her ciggo into the small, but custom-printed tray provided for by the frigate's officer's wardroom, which bore all the trapping of a country public-house.

And when her system had been all topped-up again with a fresh spoon of Mercurian tobacco, she continued: 'They're still building us seventeen more Hillsborough-hulls in Epsilon Eridani and their planetary government's already paid for the drydock overhauls and extensions – to say nothing of training new personnel to fix-over to the new Guandao-design. It'd be a blow to their economy and labour pool – and I just want it said on the record that we ought not to alienate them now that the decennial heads-of-government summit'll be on us in a few months with all of Reach's military contracts being…'

The secretary stopped, mid-poise for another drag on a Philip Morris smoke-stick between arguing her own dog in the government-and-supplier political game that so often was military-industrial contracting when she looked up from their work at the C-in-C of the armed forces.

Empire-ACTUAL – or rather this particular chassis of hundreds – hadn't actually made any attempt to physically stop the UNSCN's chief of policy, procurement and staff beyond rolling their eyes over to the door just behind the tall, uniformed Martian, but that was more than enough to get anyone's attention if you'd been staring unblinkingly at them for the last half-hour, hooked on every single word.

Both looked away from the orderly-spread of blank papers, centred only with a need-to-know only barcode read by both of their security-clearances on the great oak officer's table that'd patinaed to a lovely gloss under all that sloshed rum-splashes and coffee-rings in the ship's service decades gone-by – at the door that slid open with the well-oiled, whisper-quiet woosh.

Or at least Empire-ACTUAL knew they'd slip open after her aide had taken a moment to get his breath back on his usual mad-spring to make sure he was the first to break the news to the President before entering. They'd been given clearance to snoop-about through the shipboard cameras with the frigate's onboard security-system by the ship's Intelligence and they were nothing if not nosy.

They patiently waited; hands folded one over the other as the news came – which was that the frigate was approaching the destroyer Instrument of Government on a reverse-burn to bleed velocity and wrap a stable orbit about the anomaly and rendezvous would be achieved in fourteen minutes.

'I know.' Said the chieftain-executive of Earth and all Her Colonies with the tact of a dead fish while staring now at the aide with the same earnest blankness that came from such a powerful mind liberated from regulating bodily-functions, dealing with those bound to meat and brain-tissue rather than the digital world.

'Oh.' He said and looked about for a moment before meeting the eyes that never blinked. Looked about again, nodded and saw himself out so that fine-line balancing-act over the bankruptcy of not only one of the UEG's largest corporation, but also its main supplier of ships, hardware and maintenance could be continued.

'Carry on, please.' They said once the interruption was past and the part of the Intelligence's mind that was tied to the android's control watched the portly fellow retreat back down the hall from the cameras and the two of them could get back to the great matters of state – like the restructuring of the UEG's largest economic engine of not just shipbuilding and colonisation hardware and services, but also its leading-contributor to the military-industrial scene after ten years of losses and declared-bankruptcy.

Their guest cleared her throat and started-up again. 'Mars – on the other hand – wants to gut SinoViet's shipbuilding concerns for as much as it can get out of them – nationalise and choke what's left up to Reyes-McLees and a few other of their domestic-manufacturers instead of a restructuring. And since they're building our new battlecruisers in one of their orbitals over Deimos… I don't think we ought to antagonise Mars any more than we need. They mightn't be the greatest commercial bloc in Sol – but they can make life very unpleasant for us and future procurement. Venus is behind us on this… they want a restructure same as us. They think SinoViet's too important to just smother so they're backing the loans – bail them out with a majority-stake for the confederal government, divvied-up between the colonies as shareholders.'

She shrugged. 'The Jovian and Saturnian-system states are much like Venus, though some are riding the Martian-line pretty hard. Callisto, Io and Rhea – I think're all pretty gung-ho on this as well – similar reasons – SinoViet owns all their terraforming plants, so we can hardly fault them for wanting control over their own ecosphere. But pretty much the rest of the Inner System is toeing our court's ball, plus we've got the Asteroid Belt and its minor-planets on our side, too – the rest of Sol has lobbies that swing pretty down the middle-path, so that balances things over against Mars – though Venus might play silly bastards with us, yet.'

Empire-ACTUAL stood slowly and started reassembling the leatherbound's contents again now that the imminent ship-to-ship rendezvous the current flagship of the Rift squadron was coming. But they did sigh a little. 'Do they push for restructuring because they are interested in the healthy-functioning of the economy that can kept by a sane government within the bounds of the law and general good morals for the public interest – or because that they – as the second-child of Earth and the most populated world besides – would be the second-greatest beneficiary of such a settlement apart from the Motherworld Herself?'

'The optimist in me says the first – the pessimist that's been shot at too many times back in my insurgency-service says the second. Harken wants that orbital ring funded before his term finishes next year so Venus can have the same as we've got. Anything you can do I can do better, I guess.'

Empire-ACTUAL – the real one in a data-centre far-away – felt the temperature spike by a hundredth of a Kelvin at the thought of Venus' loud-mouthed leader. 'And what a delightful fellow that he is. Truly, it seems that the standards of our elected officials have been dropping for the last few decades now… they always are.'

But the UEG's member states at large came back to the fore again. 'Alas, we can appease none fully, so we shall settle on slowing-down the speed at which we come to our decision on the matter until the summit comes and goes us by – irksome – I know. I wanted their shipbuilding-operations to continue at least until next year before our procurement schedule would be disrupted and it'll take a year or more to get it sorted all over again – especially now with that anomaly. My only hope is that Sol can provide at least somewhat of a united-front against the colonies when it does. The Minister-Presidents from Reach and Proxima-B are still underway?'

The President's naval advisor brightened a tad now they were talking about things that was no longer the Navy's concern, but that of the executive-branch and therefor – not hers. 'No, actually. Their liners came out of Slipspace just as we started the reverse-burn. Both've been docked to the Borneo Elevator, and I think that they should've disembarked by now.'

'Good, good. I should hope that the staff treats them well, or my data-centre shall have no rest from complaints that we snubbed our eldest interstellar colonies.' Said the President as they wound their way up the frigate's spine from the officer's quiet wardroom, up to amidships, where they ascended to the bridge superstructure where the telescoping umbilical dock would mate frigate and destroyer in a minute.

Both watched the huge, slab-side warmachine, bristling with guns, missiles and lasers drift across the porthole that gave the airlock-waiter a view of the procedure at hand. And what a smooth job the ship's crew had made of it with just three last puffs of RCS-thrusters slowing the ship to a perfect-halt alongside.

The umbilical connected, the two Intelligences on both ships gave the other a greeting card and bade the boarding-party enter.

Both made the trip across from one half-kilometre warship to another with little fuss and no attendants beyond the ever-present bodyguard the President kept, though no one particularly knew why the tall fellow called Sorrell with his small arsenal that packed enough to take entire villages to war was kept about, if the person you were trying to assassinate was buried tens of kilometres under the frozen-solid wastelands of Titan about Saturn, where entire continents of subterranean caverns, tunnels and bunkers had been carved in the centuries gone by to house Mankind's most powerful thinking-engines, so that heat-buildup should never hinder their operations for a pico-moment.

And over they went, taking in for a moment the peace and calm of the umbilical's overhead canopy that wrapped around the simple catwalk they trod. Up and down the two warships loomed the flanks in the glass about the thing so like a terminal of yore, before they were once again back to the grind of daily life in the civil-service and carried on over to the waiting party.

The ship's own skipper met them after the cry "Earth Arriving!" and the bell being sounded and whisked the small retinue away down into the ship's guts to Stanforth and his little command post for the time being until the slow machinery of armed forces bureaucracy released his old cruiser for service.

And he explained to them all in great, animated detail the ins and outs of his little scratch-force's blockade coming together about the anomaly. Minelayers here and patrolling corvettes there while invisible to all, except the scant few moments when one slid over the light of a far-off star, eclipsing it with the shape of a stealth ship doing its level best to blockade incoming transmissions from the general public, though doubtless some enterprising and well-meaning fellow somewhere would already have heard a German weather report for someplace called Leng, or the people of Buyan being stirred to overcome the obstacle of the godless, gutless atheists – the chocolate-rationing board of officials increasing the citizenry's allotment by two grams or something and very soon the government would once again be bogged-down by the public's more colourful shade screaming conspiracies and the planetary governments themselves demanding to know why they'd been left out of the loop. The Oort Cloud habitats and colonies alone would probably bring the complaints office to its knees.

But oblivious to all of the Unified Earth Government's complicated, multi-layered and often nonsensical web of confederate politics, commerce and fragile peace as it existed in the more uncouth areas that stretched hundreds of lightyears all-around – and with the innocence of purpose shared by icebergs lurking in international maritime-commerce lanes was something else that the Revolutionary Government on Heimat – who had only to worry about who to send to the gulags in such matters of who spilled the beans – had lost.

Coming towards the UNSC blockading squadron, hard at work preparing the mother-system's many layers of defence from potential interdimensional-invaders, was another ship – another arrowheaded wedge puttering its way through the forever-night of interstellar space that was the Oort Cloud on the other side – the one where Earth was a flooded, irradiated wasteland called Vineta and jeans were a punishable offense under Revolutionary Law.

At the head of ship where the canopy bubbled out into the vacuum, the dim lights of incandescent bulbs on their last legs kept the cockpit's sole occupant from at least total-darkness.

Through the glass, taped-off to free scraps of instrument panels, or just over nonfunctional dials and controls that no longer answered to the helm, where dozens of photographs that the flight officer had developed over the years, using storage as a personal darkroom.

Faces of a duo fresh from the academy/foundry that had gone from grim and professional to merry and relaxed, to tired and worn-out over the years.

The crew of the 128thPenrose-type vessel.

'Ca- you br-ng the -elm up to twen-?' Asked the scratched and battered, cheap, Navy-issue, two-way radio with the thick-as-molasses Vinetan lingo to the Navigation Officer through the splutter-slurp of static, who gently eased his throttle levers from 14.7% up to 21.9%, exactly as the radio had asked not to do because the machinist who'd cut the engine-controls had been a fucking idiot high off his tits on a pint of paint-thinner when he'd blundered into work that day.

Still, it was the thought and spirit of the thing that mattered, if not necessarily the actual letter.

Lieven tapped his worn boots on the stiff pedals – that like the levers – had been made poorly on a day when the quality-control people looked about and said: "who, me?"

It wore the sole down, truly it did – to see such brack-crap coming out of the factories these days… the years… okay, maybe decades… anyway someone needed to have their knees nailed to their ears when the radio chimed him up to twenty-five and got near-thirty.

Lieven shot his arm up into the air, palm-up and fingers out-wide before a snap of the wrist flicked the hand down at the cockpit's grade-ẞ flight controls to put the bad juju of his ancestors upon the horrible machine and cranked the lever back down to as close as he could get it.

And then the power went out across the board.

Third time that day.

He curled himself back into his chair like a roly-poly, blowing-out a long and sizzling sigh before bucking-out and about on his chair's rails, 'till it thunked to a stop and a quick kick of legs that hadn't gotten any thicker these past few years brought him back to his feet.

It was still possible to steer the machine without juice in the cockpit, since it ran the engines, reactor and thrusters all off cables and valves that ran the back-and-forth length of the One-Twenty-Eight – (luckiest Penrose of them all don't'cha know?) but you'd be running as blind as a rat's bunghole with the gyroscope and instrument monitors as dead as a brass doorknob.

So, like all good Penrose skippers, he decided to take it up with middle-(and coincidentally the only one not in upper)-management and manhandled the door feebly for a moment or three to stick his head out into the dark hall and drew in a breath that played a xylophone tune against his ribcage and barked: 'Elster!' And waited a moment before a pair of red dots leaned out from the next two doors down.

But LSTR-128 had to wait a moment on hold as Lieven folded-up like a deckchair with bad smoking habits, down with a fit of strained breathing that brought the tang of iron and strawberries over the back of his tongue. Grunting, he held a hand for a pause on the whole conversation business until his battered lungs had stopped turning themselves inside-out.

She wasn't entirely sure Gestalt chests were supposed to go thwack! like a rubber band when you smacked them, but eventually the one-man drummer-band stopped, and he straightened another few degrees back into the upright-position most people ought to have been in when talking to colleagues and friends.

'Pow… 'scuse me... Sorry – powers- power's down in here.' The Gestalt managed to cough. 'So, I can't see what anything's doing anymore…'

Both dots blinked. 'What were you doing?' An LSTR asked from somewhere between them.

'Uh-y-uh… nothing… I just had the lights on in here and that was it… that and the flight instruments. I dunno… that was it. Maybe one of us left some lights on down the hall?'

'Possibly. Do you know if the microwave was on?'

'No. At least I don't think so…'

A click and a flash of helder-white came to life left him stunned for a moment when Elster's shoulder-mount lamp got the go-ahead click and a moment of respite as she lowered her arm back down over the beam, before she turned to keep him clear.

In the dim light washing back over her, he could make out the orange EVA-suit worn by the Penrose-programme's Replika engineers – a small effort to fight-off the rad-pissing reactor that was killing them both and the Replika's mug wasn't looking any better under the flipped-up plastic visor.

'Do you want me to take-ov-' He began their weekly, reactor-maintenance dialogue-exchange.

And Elster finished it with a hard: 'No, I don't.'

And Lieven smiled sadly as he always did and tried to prop himself nonchalantly against the wall. 'For the Re… look… can we just take a break from all this just for two damned minutes? Just siddown listen to some music – like we used to? El, there's nothing at all out here – not for millions of kilometres all-around.'

He tried to pout lovingly. 'I'll get my old Pachelbel cassette out?'

Somewhere from deep inside that Replika's stoney shell, an old, lopsided smile he hadn't seen in a while crept its way out. 'Two minutes.'

But in truth, neither of the duo was much interested in just a two-minute breather and left the dead flight controls behind as they pulled-up a few pillows around the little emergency gas-burner the ship came kitted-out with and lit a hob for a stew of powdered hardtack, chopped tinned-sausage, diced carrots and an onion with a potato cooked in a base of the ubiquitous pea-sausage concentrate.

Which is probably why the accident happened in the first place, with the 128's dead instruments.

For unbeknownst to either the UNSC ad hoc scattering of ships prowling between the minefield that was still coming together or the now off-duty crew of the Penrose-128, a Pelican was banking just over the anomaly's event horizon on easy-burning for a rendezvous of its own with the corvette that had launched it on loan to the minelayer Firework Merchant for supply-runs between itself and the munitions ship Chalk Outline.

Loathe had the corvette been to dole out its only Pelican – especially one that the ship's engineers and Intelligence had worked so hard to fit into the hangar built for much smaller shuttles – but India-419 had been the only such specimen out in the Oort that had itself a cargo-extension pod and so it was surrendered to the whims of the almighty chain-of-command.

And the runs had been uneventful enough as one is often wanting to find when shuttling over a dozen nuclear mines for the better part of an hour.

Now unladen of its litter of enough megatonnage to level small countries, the co-pilot had only just plugged his vintage ABBA 8-track into the player tacked-down to the dashboard when the mothership's AI made them aware of the anomaly playing-up. Back off by a bit, she'd advised the crew of 419.

So, they gave their bird a couple of lazy bursts of thrust from the down-facing nozzles to get them another ten-thousand kilometres away from the Rift as the local personnel had started to call it, before handing control back to the onboard AI that handled the autopilot and thought no more of it as the old-timey machine went through its stored album from one track to another, until it finally reached the guitar-opening of Mamma Mia – where it had to contest the ship's onboard sensory-equipment for mastery of the available ear-space that had for a while been trying to tell the dozy pair in the cockpit that they really ought to pay attention to their screens now that it reckoned the cameras were picking something up in the void.

But neither man heeded – or at least neither could be bothered to until the two-note collision alarm wailed itself to life.

Then both pilots shot-up like the waking-dead, scrambling to take-over control from the onboard-Intelligence that shouted words of barely-heard and wholly-ignored warnings over a gaggle of Swedes doing their best in centuries-past to create the first interstellar flight-accident caused by a Europop chart-topper.

Just one look and I can hear a bell ring!

'Jesus, Howy!' The pilot barked with a smack that missed the player and walloped his co-pilot alongside the head. 'Turn that shit off!'

One more look and I forget everything, woah!

'I'm tryi- the fuck!' His buddy jabbered, with one hand working the chrome-plate pause-button as his other buttoned-on his oxygen mask as out and looming, came doom in space: the Penrose-128 right on dead-centre B-line for the Pelican that even now, wasn't going to get clear in time.

Crackling with electric fire arcing off the hull into the new-void the Penrose-128 had been brought into, it grew bigger, bigger and bigger until it filled the Pelican's own canopy entirely and the co-pilot thought he spied for a moment before impact, old polaroids of long-ago joy captured in plastic and between them another crew hauling the airlock inside closed before the Pelican and Penrose became intimately familiar with each other's structural-integrity.

The pilots cursed spluttered as the fabric weaves of their suits hardened-tight on-command to keep the vacuum of space out as the Pelican's own canopy tended its resignation letters in and power died across the board for the split-in-half craft dropping between the assembly of naval firepower.

And Empire-ACTUAL had only just stepped inside the destroyer's own Combat Information Centre at the very beating heart of the ship's nervous-system of operations to pester their man on the scene for a progress-report before the alarms cut any more of the friendly preamble short and they were whisked-over to the centre of the room, between all the desks and consoles, tables, screens and machines that kept everything within a million kilometres on the "potential threats list" which found itself scrambled as the newly-arrived Penrose found itself within a hundred-thousand of the squadron's temporary flagship-destroyer.

The government's highest official watched interestedly through both the destroyer's hull-cameras and the chassis' own eyes as the scout ran the Pelican down like a tanker crushing a tug under-hull, flinging it up, over the cockpit whose canopy smashed to splinters under the Pelican's stubby wing, scattering a dazzling spiral of debris as the pair smashed each other to atoms, with the Penrose barrelling onward and now completely out of control, while the decapitated Pelican was dropping into the anomaly.

While onward the interstellar-scout sped, on and on through the last remaining watts of power still flowing from the reactor's paired turbines into the engines on a rocky course between nuclear mines that would've started the chase with their own onboard powerplants if the minelayers themselves hadn't of had such .

Neither Lieven nor Elster had managed to don emergency-suits in the moments leading-up to the crash. Instead, they just threw the doors leading to the cockpit shut and grabbed hold of both each other and what little handholds as there were when impact came.

And when it did both felt in their very bones, thrashing them both hard about, first against the loose steel deck-panels and then against the walls, ceilings and floor when they both lost their grip and banged hither and thither against the bulkheads and each other like meaty pinballs while along the ride, they heard the fuselage shredding, splintering and ripping itself to pieces as the decapitated Pelican tumbled over and away, with the backhanded blow of being doused in the radioactive baffles of the Penrose's engines and knocked to a new course – which was downward relative to the anomaly the 128 had just come from.

India-419 was hammered-along its dead-drop orbit by a shower of atomically-propelled debris in two sections, gutted along the midships – pilots in one end and the stunned crew chief in the other.

Both better-halves of what was once a very happy union between the Pelican and itself were tracked by the corvette-mothership that'd turned side-one for easier recovery with its double-ended hangar, giving its small bridge-crew of a dozen the best seats in the theatre for the unfolding shit-show.

Amongst them, in the premium-booking chair, was the Commander – who hunched impudently over the holographic display-table behind the swivelling-chair, scowling at the lost minor inconvenience of losing about seventy-million UN Credits of taxpayers wonga. Adding to the frustration was the expanding cloud of shrapnel peeling off the speeding Penrose and disembowelled dropship.

While the Pelican and Penrose both went cartwheeling through space cluttered by nuclear naval mines with a full cloud of debris going with them for a much wider spread to catch any of those mines, the corvette that was only a minute ago, closing its own orbit tighter around the anomaly for an easier recover, had received its own share of holes poked through it by the smashed-loose chunks of both vessels coming down like a steel rain.

The UNSC Saturday Night Special felt like it was being turned into a titanium tambourine, which was a positive-downgrade from being a colonial enforcer of the peace and gunboat diplomat to the interstellar community.

The damage was minimal in the ship's overall survivability, but the reports flooding-in from the neural-network that bound the ship's crew together over the corvette's localised-cloud-system.

'Ah, fuck… debris poked a hole through our hangar.'

'…losing pressure in compartments two and three…'

'…active thermal control's down. Radiator one's got a hole in it…'

'…hangar's had its portside door smashed in…'

'…got drones out now…'

Oh well, always make a fun time of an otherwise shitty moment, her mother always used to say.

Tilden clapped her calloused hands together and gave them a rub that sounded like dry parchment crackling. Oh, this was so much more fun than dreary, dreary patrol work. Skipped-over for promotion, eh? Ha!

'Sapper!' Called the Commander, both through her throat and through the miniature supercomputer all the Navy's ship-chiefs had drilled into the back of their skulls. 'Sapper!'

And in a flash of the UNSC-patent blue-light that was so much cheaper than a full-colour pallet, the ship's Intelligence brought her hologram to life on the little drum built-into the end of her chair's arm; a stocky, short woman in the crude kit of Napoleon's sappers, bearing a face of pre-calculated dread for her Human partner's benefit, though any semblance of physical emotion-showing was a wholly-pointless endeavour.

Both Man and Machine were bonded, with the unseen roots of the Commander's brain reaching all the way into the ship's hidden and cooled to absolute-zero server-racks and data-centres that housed the massive thinking engine and vice-versa. Tilden needn't peruse through the intimate-access the Intelligence had long-ago granted her to go into her code and see the line-by-line confusion was genuine.

'Oh… heady days!' Cried the Commander. 'This is fun! Sapper, get yourself and Mister Abebe crunching me a manoeuvre, please! We have lost out Pelican to the anomaly and I have every intention that we waste-not valuable government resources! Reverse-burn, cut velocity, prune our orbit through the anomaly and get us through that damned thing!'

She brought both hands down, palm-first onto her chair's arms. 'Onward!'

A fifteen-year shared stint together on the same old warship hadn't prepared the AI for this. Her code was in a bungle on what to do, hanging before it carried out any further orders and not a hundred-percent sure on where driving a quarter-kilometre ship through uncharted space-time anomalies fell on the "we're not really allowed to do that"-list.

Claim insanity of the commanding officer? Chuck command over to someone who hopefully wouldn't order them through a wormhole through wherever the fuck they'd be heading for, be it another timeline were Morris-dancing was socially-acceptable or just plain spaghettification down to the last atom?

Tilden felt the hesitation – felt their linked synapse and command line and scowled, then thumped the chair's arm with a whammy of a blow that sputtered the holographic pedestal for but a moment while she bellowed: 'I'm Commander of this boat, so you do as I say! Forward!'

And the Intelligence's command codes came possibly the closest a dumb-AI ever had to giving a Human shrug and passed along the order.

And up fired the engines!

With such force that Tilden was squashed into her chair from the G-forces and the ship shuddered as it gutted speed in reverse, bringing its orbit further and further down until it went through the very heart of the anomaly, rear-ending the thing.

'Tell the ship's crew to brace themselves!' Cheered Tilden, through rattling teeth and hammering the arms of her seat cheerily, despite being shaken about her chair as the corvette closed-in and then through in a flash of cosmic-something – leaving behind a stricken Penrose-128 who'd had her engines shot away by single round from a nearby destroyer's coilgun battery before it could escape from an interstellar hit-and-run and was about to be recovered.

Overall, the chaos hadn't really lasted more than sixty seconds at most, but it had still left those who'd been watching stunned. Not even Stanforth found any wit to snark at his boss.

There was a general silence from the destroyer's CIC as all of this happened and it was like watching a fat man slip on a banana peel, tread his foot into a comically-small bucket of whitewash and tip over backwards toward the waiting stairs only the fat man was a thirteen-billion Credit UNSC warship capable of pummelling small and flourishing civilisations back into the stone-age and the banana peel was what seemed to Empire-ACTUAL – a ticking, leaking atomic-fission bomb – tens-of-thousands of tons of hurtling Nagasaki 2: Electric Boogaloo that almost earned itself the honour of being the first ship belonging to a foreign state to run into a naval mine in the Sol-system since the 22nd-century.

The President watched the comedy of interstellar errors with placid interest as the Penrose debris-scattering became the Oort Cloud's latest addition of solar-dust that'd one day form into yet another one of the many trillions of space rocks Mankind had long ago strip-mined for both resources and real-estate.

Then they gave one of the rare smiles they handed-out like precious trinkets while the Admiral just stared with slightly-ajar mouth and wide-eyes goggling. It wasn't really the smile of someone enjoying themselves or having a chortle to a good thigh-slapper told about the water-cooler, but the smile of someone, who – in solving one problem now – has found and even bigger, juicier problem to deal with tomorrow.

They turned to face the Navy's chief of policy and procurement, speaking in the Presidential-patent dull monotone. 'Pray tell me, do – what is the unit-cost of perhaps not a new corvette, but a rebuild and how happy would Mars be to be on the receiving end for a total-overhaul of a potentially severely-damaged corvette?'