Cenerea, 3rd planet from the star Letria. Regalius, The Homeland, Central Region,

Just Outside Of The Capitol City, The Arcturan Estate,

Forty-Two Cenerean Years Ago

"Mother, NO! I...I swear to you, it wasn't all me!" Lily screeched.

Jinah covered her mouth with her hand attempting to mask the smirk beneath it.

"You have to know it was that little bitch, Jinah and that hacker she's been screwing! Somehow..."

"Silence! I do not believe you, Lilith!" Mother Arcturis Doltanna shouted loudly, her voice echoing through the large marble throne room. "I have several slaves confessing to their participation in your heinous deed and even more as witnesses. They have sworn to me of their involvement in exchange for their lives," the woman hissed. "You have always hated your brother, so jealous of my Gilford, and this hatred has now set all of our plans to regain our empire back to zero. My life's work is now gone along with my precious son in one fiery moment!"

The matriarch paused and looked away, attempting to maintain her composure. "I took you in, Lilith, when your mother died during childbirth. Gave you a home and treated you like you were my own flesh and blood..." Doltanna returned her gaze to her adopted daughter, one filled with rage. "Well, you selfish little bitch, as I am sure you are aware by now, I never had designs on you becoming the next Mother Arcturis. Gilford was to be the next in line, the first King of Arcturius in millennia with his impending marriage to that Scientist General, Wendy Powell. The two of them were not only to regain our rule over Arcturius, but over the entire Confederation. Now..." the woman stammered. "Now, I will have to bury my dream and two of my three children in less than a month. Take her away!" she commanded, waving her hand toward the door.

"B-b-but, Mother, I..."

Two large slaves in formal white Central Region Defense Forces (CRDF) uniforms snatched Lilith Arcturis from the shiny marble floor to drag her out of the room.

"Wait!" Doltanna shouted. She leaned forward from her throne.

Lily raised her eyebrows hoping her mother might have decided to take pity on her. She looked up at the woman with pleading eyes.

"Boys, before you put a bullet in her head, feel free to take her down to the dungeon and do anything you want to her, just please make it something memorable, will you?" The Arcturan paused and waived her hand, "...oh, and there's no time limit."

"Ma'am," one of them acknowledged with a grin, tipping his cap with his fingers, and the two men dragged the beautiful Arcturan from the room.

"MOTHER!!!"

As the heavy doors to the throne room slammed shut silencing Lily's pleadings, Mother Arcturis turned her eyes toward the nineteen-year-old Jinah, the girl's smile now completely dissipated, replaced by tears and a decent amount of remorse. The matriarch's expression softened. "Jinah, honey."

"Yes, mother?" the young woman sniffed.

"Shut that shit off!" she said forcefully. "I know full well, that what happened to my Gilford was due to Lilith's scheming, but I do find it troubling that she implicated you and some unknown hacker in her confession. Why would she do such a thing?"

The girl shrugged, "I don't know. Maybe she was desperate?"

"Right," the woman said, peering at her remaining daughter, probing her face for a tell. "Let me put it this way, my pretty one, if I do find out you did have anything to do with this, I can promise you a fate far worse than what Lily will experience. I am all out of time and forgiveness; do I make myself clear, honey?"

Jinah swallowed hard and with a nod, replied, "Yes ma'am. You are very clear, but believe me mother, I can barely even work a terminal and I don't know any of those hacker people or whatever they are." Jinah produced a youthful, innocent expression on her face, "I loved Gilford, and you know that. He was my big brother after all."

"Very well, but just to let you know, I have enlisted the help of some of the slaves inside of the CRDF labs to see if they can locate the person responsible for all of this. When I find him or her..." Doltanna's face saddened and she lowered it to a hand propped on the arm of her throne. "...my poor Gilford...my precious boy, you died so horribly," she said with a shudder.

"Can I get you anything...?"

"Please leave, Jinah, I just need to be alone..."

"Yes, mother," the youthful Arcturan replied and scurried from the room. She did not have to be told twice. As she walked back to her room, she tried thinking of ways to warn Harold that her mother was looking for him, then an idea hit her...a brilliant idea.

...

"Harold? Yes, it's me. Look I'm sor...wait. Listen for a..." The comm clicked. "Asshole," Jinah muttered as she dialed the former hacktivist's comm once more.

Buzzzz Harold looked at the vibrating device sliding across the smooth surface of his workbench. He could see the unknown number indicator on its screen. "Leave me alone, Jinah!" he thought.

"Pick up, you stupid bastard!"

Harold snatched the communication unit up, stormed out of the lab and into the hall. He answered in a sharp low voice, "What the fuck? Are you stupid, Jinah? I said..."

"They're searching for the hacker that took out Gil's fightercraft, Harold," she shot back.

"Who is?"

"The CRDF. Mother has them looking for who did it!"

"Fuck!" he said, moving around the corner to avoid being seen by any cameras, just in case Geneticus was watching. "What happened? Obviously my script worked, but did something else go wrong? It was designed to run from any terminal. Everything was full auto and collapsible, no one could have possibly known where it came from unless...who ran their mouth?" he asked, leaning his shoulder against the wall and attempting to appear calm.

"That dumbass Lily. Who else? You have to be the smartest idiot I know."

"Shit. I just can't...Hang on!" Harold paused, placing his hand over the comm. "Hey, how are you...Great. Have a good day," he said, acknowledging a pair of pretty scientists walking by him through the concrete corridor. One of them waved as they passed. He returned the smile and then lifted the comm back to his ear. "Okay, this is not a good time, I am at work," he said through gritted teeth.

"There's never going to be a good time, sweetie."

"Don't call me that, Jinah, I am not falling for your crap anymore."

"Well, I don't know about you, but I want to live, so, it looks as if we will have to work together at least once more. I'll even make it worth your while..." she sang.

"Nah, I'll pass, just keep me updated and I'll keep my eyes open around here." Harold lowered the device to disconnect the call when he heard Jinah shout from the earpiece.

"Hey!" said the tiny, brittle voice.

"What?" he asked, once again lifting the comm to his ear.

"You might want to keep a close watch on that Wendy lady."

"Why?" Harold asked.

"Mother seems to think that she was trying to get to the Arcturan throne through Gil. That's something else Lily told her, that little bitch," Jinah said with a grin. She could almost see Harold's expression as she said the line.

"That's not even close to right! I swear, you goddamn Arcturans are really a messed up bunch, I wish I would have never dealt with you people."

"That's so sad to hear..."

Click! Harold hung up, closed his eyes, and leaned his head up against the wall. "Fuck!" he said sharply, suddenly noticing the same two scientists walking back the other way. Their expressions were different now. "Sorry, relationship troubles," he said shrugging his shoulders, wearing a lop-sided smirk.

The women rolled their eyes and kept walking.

Harold sighed, realizing he was going to have to stick close to Wendy and constantly keep an eye on her from this day forward. It wasn't that he despised the idea, he didn't, but he also knew that he couldn't be that obvious about it, either. It was too close on the heels of Gil's passing, so he would have to find another way.

...

"Hah!" Jinah exclaimed as Harold hung up on her. "One down, one to go," she said. "Once I implicate Gil's slave, Wendy, in all of this, no one is going to look my way," Jinah thought to herself. "I know, I should celebrate my success." Jinah jumped from her bed and strode out into the hall, wearing only a sheer, open robe. She spotted a male slave meandering by. "You!" she shouted.

"Ma'am?"

"Yes, you, come here," she said grabbing the very slim, muscular young man by the hand and pulling him into her room. "On your knees, slave," she commanded as she shut the door.

He did as told.

The redhead narrowed her green eyes as she approached him. Jinah stopped in front of the kneeling man, opened her robe, then reached down and grabbed him on each side of his chiseled face, lifting it to look at her. With a smile, she examined his lust-filled expression. She propped her left leg up on the edge of her bed and felt his strong hands slide under her silken robe, making their way to her hips. The Arcturan inhaled sharply as she pulled his face into her. "Good boy!" she said breathlessly.

...

Harold spent time planting a multitude of dead-end breadcrumbs in the Central Region lab servers for any potential investigators poking around into Gil's death. He only had a couple of opportunities to pull it off, those times when Geneticus was updating. He also located the reports and footage from the crash on the 8th's servers. "That's odd," he thought to himself. It looked as if the black box data had been tampered with along with cockpit video that appeared to be heavily edited. The modification done to the recording was very good, just not good enough. Harold was able to locate the original recording rather easily since the data was poorly hidden, stored in a Confederation online storage server along with several other interesting tidbits of information. Documents he decided he should pack away on his personal data backup stick along with the rest of the information he had been collecting, just in case. Harold then deleted the folder and the data permanently from the servers, erasing any possibility of his or Jinah's involvement in the incident. To the ex-hacktivist, it really did appear Jinah already had a rather profound influence and several loyal followers willing to stick their neck out for her. Regardless, it was his neck he was worried about, not hers, as he did not have her luxury of friends. Unfortunately, if their involvement were discovered, they would both collectively hang by them, together... irrespective of her sway.