A haphazard conglomeration of a savaged Order task force and a naval support squadron that turned its back on Liberty to aid them, the Nadir Reprisal Initiative is an autonomous secondary fleet unit centred on Apotheosis, an Osiris-class dreadnought, and her surviving escorts.

Specialists in guerrilla warfare, research, and reconnaissance, the NRI finds itself facing an interstellar threat on increasingly limited resources. Cut-off from the Overwatch’s intelligence network for its ties to the Liberty Navy, the NRI fights to protect humanity from a shadowy enemy that seeks nothing less than the extermination of the human race.

Struggling to come to terms with cracks in their capabilities and conflicts between Order and Naval members of the fleet, the commanders of the NRI fight to forge their patchwork fleet into a weapon capable of standing against the nomad threat and, whether by guile, knowledge, or brute strength, to slay that which slays us.

Task Force Apotheosis was created to monitor military and alien movements in the Alaska system in mid 819A.S. A chaotic mix of freshly commissioned warships and former wrecks dragged from their graves above Toledo and pressed into service, at its inception the task force consisted of little more than the dreadnought Apotheosis, a handful of fighters, and a trio of freighter-sized auxiliaries.

Both the strategic value of the Alaska system and its apparent hostility saw the Task Force steadily expand over the following years, growing from a reconnaissance picket to a combat-capable fleet. At the height of its strength, Task Force Apotheosis consisted of four capital ships and more than a dozen gunboat escorts and support craft. While individually far from a match for the nomad warships that frequented the star system, Apotheosis’ fleet provided an early warning network effective enough to avoid such powerful opponents until the task force’s full weight of fire could be bought to bear. These were not years of peace, but it was a time of stable, predictable hostilities for the task force, and it was during this period that, in 820A.S, the task force first extended its hand to the Liberty Navy.

Initial contact between the task force and the navy was fleeting, limited, and markedly cautious. A handful of task force ships bearing spoofed naval transponders screeched news of an incoming alien flotilla to naval listening stations, sent packets containing trajectories and positions, and vanished back into the silent void before their shocked witnesses had time to report the contact. Acting on information received from the unknown ships, a single tracking station belonging to the Navy’s External Security and Research Division (ESRD) broke from its prescribed mission, scanned the skies for the alien presence, and found it.

An alert was passed up the chain, and an alien cruiser was intercepted and engaged by the dreadnoughts Cloverfield and Durango, along with their attendant fleets, two weeks later. A creature that bathed in the heat of stars burned beneath the fire of a dozen naval guns. Human antimatter and alien flesh met in flashes of light that blinded nearby sensors, and left the nomad little more than a burst of radiation and a smear of plasma escaping Alaska at an appreciable fraction of light speed. The cruiser was six days out from Anchorage.

The pattern of anonymous early warning continued for twelve months; tip-offs from ships bearing naval transponders in regions of space no squadron was assigned to, unsigned transmissions containing strings of co-ordinates and vectors that, on closer observation, inevitably marked the site of some recent incursion. For a little over a year, Task Force Apotheosis settled into the routine of tracking nomad ships in-system, destroying those they could, and throwing those they couldn’t into the teeth of the Liberty Navy.

Then-assistant director of the ESRD and commander of naval intelligence in Alaska, Aisling Cenncroithi, was not the sort of woman to stand by and watch her people used as pawns. Aisling tasked personnel of her own with locating their unknown patrons, but dwindling political support for her superior, Vice Admiral Nicole Hayes, and the war in Gallia stretched naval intelligence thin, and Aisling’s personnel came back empty-handed. The one-way exchange of information continued.

Nemesis changed that.

July 821 in Alaska was marked by the arrival of a nomad cruiser. Codenamed Interloper A2173-8, the Irra was first detected by the recon cruiser Kebechet, stationed in high orbit over Anchorage. Sensors showed the nomad basking alone in a high orbit around Alaska’s cold sun. Several days burn from the bulk of the task force’s ships, and unwilling to pull the fleet out of position for a single distant cruiser, Fleet Commander Alyssa Siravane gave the order to notify the navy of the alien’s position.

By the time the familiar warnings crackled over naval frequencies, Aisling already knew. Interloper’s orbit had carried it easily within range of ESRD tracking stations and, as the alien hung silent and still in space, a fleet was assembling at Juneau. Only the ceaseless schedule of naval logistics remained unaffected, a steady trickle of transports and escorts travelling the long routes between facilities. All the while, intelligence analysts and software alike watched each new readout, every sensor return, waiting for some sign of intent from the alien. Interloper remained motionless, paying no more heed to distant rangefinders than a mountain did to a raindrop, the alien’s readouts rarely rising above a dull baseline.

Intelligence drew the obvious conclusion. Interloper was wounded and had chosen Alaska to recuperate. Long-range sensors, hauling information across light-minutes, confirmed the observation. The flickering cloud of microorganisms, the biological equivalent to a shield, that was so common on nomad craft was absent from Interloper. The alien was, for now at least, unprotected.

Interloper did not react when the assault carrier Philadelphia arrived in system, strikecraft swarming around her like wasps alongside a hive. Nor did it react when Philadelphia was joined by the dreadnought Cloverfield, or when the battlecruiser Plymouth Rock entered formation alongside them. Even as the fleet accelerated towards an intercept, Interloper remained as motionless as stone.

Only when the fleet reached the midpoint of their journey, Philadelphia and her escorts streaking across Alaska at thousands of kilometres a second, did the alien show any sign of awareness. Interloper turned, and the nomad began to run. Philadelphia’s fleet altered their courses to match, and human steel and flame began to reel the wounded nomad in as it fled towards the system edge.

The Liberty Navy’s Alaska fleet hounded it mercilessly, closing the distance kilometre by kilometre. The fleet was more than a month from port when Nemesis arrived.

Nemesis A21727-1 was the first nomad battleship Kebechet’s crew had ever seen. It was also the last. Space twisted when the nomad arrived, a new jump point sliding into existence six days out from Anchorage and vanishing just as quickly. Kebechet might as well have been an ant trying to stop a landslide. Nemesis sent no message, touched no minds. But forty eight hours after the alien’s arrival, Kebechet and her escorts were so much scrap orbiting Anchorage, and Nemesis had altered course for the New York jumpgate, swatting unfortunate naval transports from the sky like flies en-route.

Nemesis was bound for New York, and Philadelphia and her fleet were too distant to do anything but watch. Task Force Apotheosis was capable of combating alien cruisers, at a stretch, but engaging a dreadnought in direct combat would have been little better than putting a gun to the heads of every operative in the fleet and asking the nomads to pull the trigger. Siravane saw little alternative. Engagement may have been suicidal, but giving the nomad access to New York was unacceptable.

Siravane ordered the task force’s ships loaded for combat. Apotheosis and the two remaining cruisers began stockpiling antimatter in quantities that, under any other circumstances, would have been unthinkable. Auxiliaries tied themselves alongside the warships as they accelerated towards an intercept, freighters straining to pump enough fuel to feed the ship’s hungry reactors.

As they rocketed towards an intercept the capital ships and their escorts flipped and began the deceleration burn. Siravane’s auxiliaries did not.

Eleven freighters sprinted towards Nemesis at a rate that would have ground a human to dust. Their controls hastily replaced with dumb autopilots, guidance systems salvaged from vandalised missiles, and their cargo bays little more than antimatter containment; the task force’s auxiliaries streaked towards the nomad in a haze of metal and exhaust vapour.

Nemesis jinked and altered course at a rate that would have torn a human ship in half, left three of the freighters drifting as their patchwork systems tried and failed to compensate, manoeuvres shearing engines from their frames and ripping systems from mountings. Impossibly accurate point defences lanced at the incoming freighters and bursts of energy that blinded sensors arced from alien flesh, reducing another five ships to memories and light.

Two freighters simply vanished as the biological cloud that served as the ship’s shield puffed into existence, tearing themselves apart in high-speed collisions with millions of microscopic creatures. Antimatter detonations lit the cloud like lightening in a storm, but the tiny organisms absorbed the worst of the blast. The final freighter followed in their wake, burning through the corridor the other ships had cleared and into the depths of Nemesis’ shields.

Apotheosis and her fleet, still two days away, saw a blast that lit the cloud like a miniature sun. Pain lanced through the human crew of the warships in time with the impact, a scream of agony that stretched across more spectrums than even the Order’s computers could monitor. A handful of half-hearted cheers drifted across the Osiris’ deck, but Siravane knew better.
When the cloud finally fell away, Nemesis was waiting.

The rear end of the dreadnought was gone, a bulbous, twisted section in its place that reminded Siravane of nothing so much as a week-old scab. Whatever the alien used for propulsion had been left damaged by the blast and the dreadnought was no longer accelerating. Nemesis was drifting, but still very much alive.

And it was healing. The cloud that had acted as the nomad’s shield was concentrated around its damaged tail, and brief glimpses through the cloud showed long tendrils of alien flesh slowly beginning to stretch back into shape, growing along a framework of countless millions of microorganisms.

Siravane did not give it the chance. Two days later, the task force was within effective range, and Apotheosis and her remaining escorts opened fire on Nemesis. The task force’s guns spoke like enraged gods, antimatter and plasma alike bursting against the now familiar cloud as it poured from the wounded nomad. An Osiris-class dreadnought and two cruisers pumped enough energy into the cloud to vaporize a city. Streams of plasma burst against the shield, boiling away house-sized clusters of organisms. Bombers danced around the deadly light of point defences like panicked insects, frantically tossing torpedoes into the breaches before Nemesis could pull the cloud closed again. Gunboats hugged the fleet, exchanging fire with swarms of alien fighters.

It wasn’t enough.

Heket was the first to go, a plasma lance burning through the cruiser’s shields and ripping through its primary battery in a wave of heat and light. The ship seemed to stagger a moment, hanging in space as its weapons fell silent. Another blast severed its comms array, and the cruiser’s signature dropped off the network.

The remaining ships redoubled their fire, but Serqet followed a heartbeat later, another lance slicing out of the cloud and chewing through the second cruiser’s hull like so much paper. The alarm didn’t have time to sound before the lance breached containment, and the ship’s antimatter store exploded in a blast that reduced Serqet to light.

Apotheosis was the last capital ship on the field. Waves of energy lashed against the Osiris’ shields, and Siravane’s crew could do little more than watch quadrants buckle under the load, the ship’s reactor unable to maintain the shields, much less generate the antimatter needed for the warship’s guns. A terrifying thrill of triumph that had nothing to do with the ship’s human crew drifted through her corridors, growing stronger with every bolt that fizzled against her shields. Nemesis took advantage of a downed shield generator, and another lance boiled away an exposed segment of the ship’s armour.

Abruptly, the bombardment ceased. Crew members paused in their prayers, frowned at their displays.

Heket was moving again. Her weapons hung useless in their mountings, and there were a dozen holes in her hull, but the battered cruiser limped to starboard to face Nemesis. She didn’t open fire. No fighters sprung from her tattered bay, and her rangefinders sat as dead and useless as the weapons they guided. But, on Apotheosis’ scanners, the cruiser’s engine glowed like the heart of the sun as it accelerated towards Nemesis.

Nemesis realised what was happening, and triumph was replaced with terror. Plasma fire tore through the incoming cruiser, ripping strips from the hull, burning armour to ash. Point defences tore their attention from the bombers and the vacuum glowed as burst after burst hammered into the cruiser’s mangled superstructure. Before Heket was more than halfway to the alien, the fire of its engine gutted and died. It didn’t matter. Plasma tore the ship to white-hot fragments as it closed with Nemesis, each impact scything another section from the hull, but a cruiser-sized mass of fragments was an impossible thing to stop. The debris that had been Heket bludgeoned through Nemesis’ shield like a hatchet through flesh, and burned into the creature behind it.

Nemesis and Heket vanished in a fireball that showed on the sensors of every naval listening station in Alaska.

Apotheosis had won, but it was Alyssa Siravane who had to pick up the pieces.

With the majority of the fleet’s auxiliaries little more than radiation and fragments, Siravane faced the very real possibility of immobility and capture. Damaged as Apotheosis and her fellow survivors were, and without the recovery and repair facilities of the auxiliaries, the task force’s ships were in no shape to survive the jump out, even if there had been enough fuel left in Apotheosis’ bunkers to attempt the journey. When the first of Aisling’s ships arrived a week later, no more than a contact and a range on Apotheosis’ failing systems, Siravane could do little besides order gunners to half-functional stations and open a communications channel.

Siravane’s hail was answered by the Liberty Logistics Ship Newfoundland, an ESRD mobile refinery and manufacturing facility. Moments later, a pair of heavy transports responded to the call for identification, followed by a squadron of rapidly-closing battlefield repair craft and attendant freighters, made sluggish and awkward by the supplementary tanks hastily spot-welded to their hulls.

Aisling had arrived.

A face-to-face negotiation was arranged, and the two commanders agreed to meet aboard Apotheosis. Siravane saw little choice in the matter. Her influence only extended to her now-crippled fleet, and Aisling was not only the director of an entire division of the Liberty Navy, but also had the potential of firepower that Task Force Apotheosis could not hope to match after the engagement with Nemesis. Regardless, the ESRD’s presence was limited to support vessels, and a few token escort fighters. It seemed unlikely that they would choose to use anything further. From Aisling’s arrival on the dreadnought, the first true negotiations between Task Force Apotheosis and the External Security and Research Division took place.

Tension marked the beginning of the meeting, each party uncertain of the other’s intent. While in theory they shared a common cause, lurking doubt plagued them, whether the fear of abused hospitality or the threat of an impending fleet. As the discussion progressed, Siravane grew more at ease—without the ESRD’s intervention, after all, Apotheosis would have been left dead in the water. When the bridge reported that Philadelphia and her support fleet were returning to New York, the ice slowly melted, and they were free to speak without fear of crumbling stability.

Beyond talk of how best to address Apotheosis’ repairs and the remainder of Siravane’s fleet, the director of the ESRD displayed sympathy for the Order’s cause. The establishment of mutual rapport on a more formal level would be the first step in forming the Nadir Reprisal Initiative, but at that time, it was nothing more than two minds coming together in support of one another. Contact with Task Force Apotheosis would be classified, and the degree of the Order’s presence in Alaska would remain concealed.

As repairs on the dreadnought concluded, Aisling and Siravane parted ways. It would not be the last time the two spoke face-to-face.

Positive it may have been, but Siravane’s newfound ally was little consolation on her return to the Edge. While the victory over Nemesis had certainly been noteworthy, not everyone agreed that it justified the losses suffered—and, most importantly, many of those who shared that view lay higher on the chain of command than the fleet commander of the task force. A pyrrhic victory may have been sufferable at some other period in the Order’s existence, but Toledo was still an open wound, and one that had cut deep enough that leaning too much weight on it caused it to buckle. The destruction of three Reshephs was unacceptable, she was told, and the Hathors and strike craft lost twisted the knife further.

In the end, Siravane lost what remained of her fleet, though the bridge of Apotheosis remained hers. Operations on the borders of the Order’s influence, however, were no longer her responsibility.

Similar strife plagued Aisling in her role as the director of the ESRD. Her popularity had never been great, as the previous director of the division was notorious for working beneath the notice of others in his attempts to carry out more questionable research, and Aisling had been his direct supporter. Upon his removal, her new position was only secured by virtue of the former Vice Admiral Nicole Hayes, now a captain. On the books, Hayes was the formal head of the division, while Aisling held a role of advisory—but, in practice, Aisling maintained the power. Hayes simply collaborated with her and dealt with the rest of the Navy, keeping their eyes off Aisling and on herself.

Hayes had suffered several wounds in her duty to the Navy, mental and physical, which had led to her placement on the naval reserve in the past. When it came time that it happened again, Aisling suddenly lost her guardian angel. The barrier between her and the rest of the Navy’s scrutiny was unceremoniously lowered.

Without a true rank in the Navy, Aisling knew that her days in the division were numbered, and swiftly set about gathering as much data related to her research as she could. Reduction to a blank slate would have meant scrapping years’ worth of projects and, proud as she was, Aisling could not stand to see anyone proceed with them but herself.

It was in the chaos of all this that the nomads struck Hudson.

The alien threat loomed clearly now, and as the corpses of Cloverfield’s crew began the long journey home, concern crept into Aisling’s conscience. The greatest enemy humanity had ever known was once again active on a level that had not been witnessed since the Nomad War and Aisling was about to lose any opportunity she had to combat it.

She reached out to Siravane over a secure channel, and once more, the two spoke and collaborated.

Through her work in the ESRD, Aisling had become well-known and respected in the division, for her support to the researchers, her charisma, and her ruthless restructuring of the old, nightmarishly cryptic systems to make way for more efficiency. Aisling and Hayes had together hand-picked a squadron known as Strike Group Nadir, a collection of pilots that, until that point, had trained in covert operations and precision elimination, and that was nearing its time to be fielded. Her influence proved valuable in securing the basis of the new Nadir Reprisal Initiative—a new team of scientists, pilots, and logisticians that would continue the fight against the nomads.

Preparation was one thing, but bringing the Initiative into being was another altogether. Support in the ESRD for Aisling’s vision, while strong, was far from universal. Desertion in a time of war, as Aisling’s unsanctioned orders would inevitably be painted as by Naval brass, was treason and, in a division renowned for nigh-fanatical devotion to duty, bloodshed seemed inevitable. Here, however, the labyrinthine complexity of the ESRD’s security systems worked in Aisling’s favour. The same lockdown grids and authentication arrays that stood guard over the Navy’s most precious secrets now served to suppress whispers of desertion. Questions were asked on the dark, isolated decks of classified facilities but, in the cryptographic hive of ESRD central communications, they went unanswered.

By the time the rumours filtered back to Fort Bragg most of the Sixth Support Flotilla and two fighter squadrons – now collectively operating as Strike Group Nadir - were solidly under Aisling’s control. Those who disagreed were quietly rotated to ever more distant postings and rapidly found themselves powerless to do anything more than throw messages into a communications network so heavily restricted that it may as well have not existed at all. Isolated and alone, those few who realised Aisling’s intentions were imprisoned by the same protocols that they had trusted to ensure the safety of their projects, and left with little option but to trust to glacially slow inter-system supply ships to carry warning to their superiors. Aisling did not wait for them to act.

Transports and auxiliaries took on fuel alongside half a dozen concealed refuelling stations and, suspended in the silence of the Alaskan sky, the massive fabricators of a mobile refinery hummed to life. Naval living quarters and ammunition stores were ripped out and replaced with ever larger fuel tanks, heavier radiation shielding and expanded life support; luxury giving way to the cold realities of survival beyond the edge of civilised space. The last of Aisling’s retrofits were completed two days before word of her coup arrived in New York with the Bison Fort Wayne.

Naval command’s response was as swift as it was useless. The battlecruiser Challenger Point, her crew on leave from the Rheinland front, was shaken from her moorings at Norfolk shipyard and thrown on a hasty course to relieve the wayward director of command, a trio of Defiant-class gunboats scrambling in her wake like hornets. Ultimately, it was a matter of too little, too late. By the time the battlecruiser’s reactor stuttered to life, Strike Group Nadir had left Zone 21 behind and vanished in to New York’s Badlands.

The collapse of the Omicron Minor jumphole in early 822 layered another complication atop Aisling’s already precarious plans for a rendezvous. Now actively pursued by the Liberty Navy, Strike Group Nadir found itself facing the long journey from the core worlds to Liberty’s border and the waiting Apotheosis with precious few friends and an abundance of enemies. Rumours of a resurgent Hellfire Legion, now calling itself the Commonwealth of Liberty, did little to foster support for Aisling’s actions on the homefront.


Deprived of the haven offered by the jump network, the strike group’s lumbering auxiliaries became as much a burden as they were an asset. Every day dredged supplies from the dwindling stores of the fleet's two bisons, and the threat of attack – by both the Navy and opportunists for whom an under escorted mobile refinery offered the score of a lifetime – hung over the group like a shroud. Escort pilots flew day-long patrols, pushing the strike group’s stimulants and their own bodies to the limits.

Ultimately, it was not enough. The grizzly Little Rock, equipped with a long-range sensor array to guide the rest of the fleet, was the first to come under attack as it exited the jump point to Galileo. Little Rock, made cumbersome by her payload, was torn apart in the seconds before her accompanying fighters arrived. The strike group’s fighters broke formation as they entered the system, splitting on a dozen different trajectories to avoid the newly-formed debris cloud.

Santa Clara was less fortunate. The bison smashed in to the wreck of Little Rock in the instant it emerged from the jumphole. Shields down and functionally blinded by the jaunt through jumpspace, Santa Clara’s fate was a function of mass and inertia, and the bridge of the bison crumpled beneath the blow even as the impact bludgeoned both ships clear of the jump point. The handful of torpedoes thrown at Santa Clara by the attacking fighters was little more than an afterthought. The attacking fighters were forced to withdraw as the rest of Aisling’s strike group arrived, careful barrages of fire swatting incoming torpedoes from the sky, but by then the damage was already done. In a single frenzied minute, the fleet’s supplies had been cut in half and her most valuable scout was nothing but dead metal. The attacking ships were never identified.

Strike Group Nadir rendezvoused with Apotheosis on the edges of Galileo shortly after, following a set of co-ordinates sent before Aisling’s fleet departed Alaska. A little less than half of Siravane’s surviving command had chosen to join Apotheosis on her long journey from the Omicrons, and only three Hathors flew where once there had been a dozen. That three; however, combined with Apotheosis, was more than enough to stretch the newly-formed Initiative’s limited supplies to breaking point.

Perhaps, without the additional burden of Siravane’s warships, the Initiative could have made the journey to the Omicrons with the stores aboard the fleet’s remaining bison. Could have cut rations and plotted longer, more efficient courses. Could have dropped excess mass to stretch limited supplies further still. Could have cut their escorts loose and hoped for the best. Perhaps somewhere else Newfoundland’s drones could have pulled fuel from the skies of gas giants, but Galileo offered only empty space and a long, lonely trade route.

Instead, the first fleet action conducted by the Nadir Reprisal Initiative was an act of piracy.

It was almost laughably easy. Law enforcement in the border worlds was uncertain at the best of times, and the lack of dedicated installations in Galileo only complicated an already expensive patrol route. Aisling’s ships were flagged as rogue in Libertonian space, but beyond the Reppu Bend the Kusari-owned tradelanes extended them the same mechanical courtesy they did any military unit. ‘Patrol Delta Six’ confiscated several tonnes of raw materials from bewildered transport captains before the resulting identification requests made it back from Rio Grande. By then Aisling’s ships were long gone, returned to the Reppu cloud and Apotheosis. The Initiative managed the same trick twice more over the subsequent week before the first response patrol arrived in-system, a pair of Defiant-class gunboats slipping from the Colorado jumpgate like the first pebbles of a landslide. The Initiative left Galileo behind two days later.

Weeks rolled into months as the Initiative crept through Kusari, crawling its way across the sector on a haphazard network of jump points long since superseded in civilised space by the trade network. Without the Nomad War-era survey data aboard Apotheosis the Initiative would have quickly been reduced to a drifting mess, countless miles from home. Instead, they followed a trail long abandoned by law-abiding citizens and house governments alike, threading a careful path between pirate strongholds and long-haul smuggling routes. The journey was long, but the supplies the fleet had scavenged in Galileo held, and the Initiative slipped from Kusari in to the lawless Edge Worlds in mid 822.

The reception was not all Siravane and Aisling might have hoped for. For an organisation composed almost exclusively of foreign nationals, the Order had little tolerance for disloyalty. Individual captains may have been allowed a large degree of leeway in how they conducted their missions, but Siravane’s apparent dedication to members of an organisation with which the Order often found itself in open conflict were enough to raise eyebrows in the distant stations of Omicron-100.

The Overwatch did not go so far as to order Apotheosis shot from the sky, but Siravane and her erstwhile fleet was quietly locked out of the Overwatch’s intelligence network. Docking permits were revoked and requests for resupply met with icy silence. To the Order, Aisling’s ESRD flotilla represented an intelligence leak that could undermine what remained of the organisation, and granting them access to the hard-won information that kept their stations functioning would have been the height of folly.

Once again, the Nadir Reprisal Initiative found itself bereft of allies. With the resources of Omicorn-100 lost to them, the fleet instead turned its attention to the closer goal of Omicron Eta. The fleet arrived in orbit around the gas giant Catania in September 822, and Newfoundland’s scoop drones dropped from the ship’s belly into the planet’s thick atmosphere. Catania had little enough of value that it had evaded any serious mining efforts over the years but, given time, there was enough for a desperate flotilla to survive.


As of September 822, the Initiative remains in orbit over Catania, slowly gathering its strength.

The NRI is not a military unit and, consequently, maintains a far more fluid chain of command than its contemporaries in house armed forces. Authority is divided by appointment and specialisation, rather than rank. For instance, an operative assigned to lead a xenobiology research study would have authority over matters relating to their particular team and field second only to the Fleet Director, but no standing rank outside that speciality.

Informally; however, some segments of the Initiative derived from the Liberty Navy have resisted the transition to the Order’s independent structure in favour of retaining the system of officer ranks and ratings utilised by the First Fleet. This tendency is most common among fleet support elements, where the naval presence is strongest. Therefore, while the captain of a Bison-class auxiliary may be referred to by his crew and naval colleagues as ‘Lieutenant Commander Jones,’ his formal place in the command structure is that of an operative appointed to a commanding officer position.

Some common appointments have been listed below; however, the list is far from exhaustive, and appointments may be created or removed as fleet requirements dictate.

Shouldering accountability for hundreds of lives, the Fleet Director is responsible for the ongoing external operations of the NRI, and the survival of Apotheosis and her attendant fleet. They assign missions, determine appointments, and, when battle is inevitable, the Fleet Director chooses the slain with a spoken order and a keystroke.

Though technically no more significant than any other command appointment, the captain of Apotheosis nonetheless wields significant influence in the fleet. Responsible for the operations of fleet flagship, the Commanding Officer of Apotheosis dictates the day to day operations and missions of the largest asset available to the NRI. While the Fleet Director may task the flagship with the destruction a particular threat, it falls to Apotheosis’ CO to decide the best means to carry out those orders, whether it be by stealth, direct engagement or, more likely, the assignment of other fleet assets. As aboard any multi-crew starship, the CO is also formally responsible for shipboard matters such as security, morale, and discipline; however, these internal tasks are usually assigned to an appointed Executive Officer.

The rank and file of the NRI, operatives generally hold varying degrees of authority appropriate to their specialisation (‘mustering’ among the ex-military members of the fleet) and appointment, whether it be as a fighter pilot, squadron leader, surgeon, or any of the countless other specialists a fleet requires on a daily basis. It is not uncommon for a single operative to fill multiple appointments. Pilots, for instance, often spend the majority of their time on-ship engaged in ‘primary duties’, which may vary from administration to mechanical work, flying only when the fleet requires them to do so. Individuals not assigned an appointment are exceptionally rare. The fleet does not have excess resources to squander on dead weight.

While the specifics of the title can vary with the origin of the ship and crew, appointments among the fleet tend to fall into the same general fields. Some possible appointments are listed below:

> Pilot
> Logistician
> Engineer (Propulsion)
> Xenoarchaeologist
> Commanding Officer (Multi-crew starships only.)
> Cryptographer
> Medical Staff
> Marine
> Astrogator
> Team Leader
> Gunner

> Observation and disruption of nomad activities throughout the sector.
> Facilitate and encourage attacks on minor nomad units and facilities.
> Discovery and elimination of alien intelligence assets including incubi, willing collaborators, and mindnodes.
> Development of effective counternomad technologies and doctrine.
> Analysis and appropriation of biological, psionic, and technological nomad processes.

> Source sufficient resources to maintain operations.
> Gain access to facilities capable of repairing larger fleet assets and auxiliaries.
> Equipment and personnel are nigh irreplaceable. Minimise losses.
> Manage friction between disparate fleet elements.
> Regain access to Order intelligence network.

Step in to the ocean and compare yourself to a shark.

A predator, sleek and hydrodynamic. Shaped by millions of years of evolution, every gram accounted for, every sense honed to the bleeding edge in pursuit of the simple maxims of survival and dominance. Time and trial have shaped them into the undisputed masters of the waves, red in tooth and claw. Next to a shark, a human diver is little more than a poorly-formed bag of flesh, blood, and bone, hopelessly dependent on technological aid to so much as breathe.

Now imagine a predator shaped not by the blind madness of evolution but selective, scientific process. Free of the genetic junk, the natural, random idiosyncrasies and failings that have plagued biological life since the first cells drifted across the vast oceans of old Earth. Imagine a perfect, undisputed apex predator, engineered for dominance down to the last base pair. Imagine an organism with mastery of energies capable of boiling away a planet’s atmosphere literally etched upon its DNA. Then, perhaps, you begin to understand the alien race known as the nomads.

As organisms, the nomads outclass space-borne humanity in every significant way. They are the sharks, and we shared the stellar ocean with them only for so long as we remained insignificant enough to escape notice. A state of happy ignorance that changed permanently with the outbreak of the Nomad War. As the sector teetered on the brink of the bloodiest war in human history, the Order stepped up and tore the veil from the nomad’s machinations. In so doing, they declared the human race a lasting and vehement enemy of the aliens.

Suddenly, we were swimming with the sharks.

Individually, nomad morphs are more than a match for humanity’s makeshift steel equivalents. Where the link between a human pilot and his fighter is a lengthy, faulty conglomeration of electronic and sensory inputs, the flaws of biology heaped atop those of machinery, every alien craft; from the smallest shielding microbe to dreadnoughts that can snuff out stars, possesses an instant, intuitive understanding of their position and capabilities. A nomad has no need for a damage readout. It feels the microbes in its shields dying beneath the fire of guns. Trajectories and courses that take hours of work for a human navigator are simply, immediately obvious to a nomad morph.

A nomad performs complex orbital calculations the same way a human being might catch a ball on reflex. For an individual craft, there is no chain of sensory input to thought to action. There is simply input and immediate, certain, action. Consciousness is a burden for others to carry. Alien fighters can see a threat, engage, and reduce it to scrap before a human pilot finishes arming his torpedoes.


Brute force is but one road among many; however, and the nomad’s mastery of war extends far beyond mere firepower. Given time, a mindnode can reduce even the most determined individual to a delusional maniac, intent on sabotaging the very cause she once fought for. Such subversion is usually slow and subtle, save the immediate mind-wrenching effects of incubus implantation, and a targeted individual may not realise the foreign source of their rage until they find themselves standing over the body of their commanding officer, months after the first whispers of his disregard, blood soaking their hands. Mercifully, fine manipulation is difficult among crowds, and NRI teams maintain a deep distrust of solitary operators for this very reason. Larger nomads display increasingly prominent abilities, and rumours persist of the oldest and largest alien dreadnoughts trapping a fleet of attackers in a mindless stupor while smaller craft rip their way through the airlocks.

Human strength was cited in the past as the key factor determining a direct attack by the aliens. That was not strictly true. Individually a human being, even with all the advantages granted by nearly a millennia of spacefaring civilisation, poses no more threat to the nomads than an earthworm does an elephant. While attractive, the illusion of defence by raw might was and is just that. An illusion.

Humanity’s greatest defence against the aliens remains that of herd animals faced with a wolf. Nothing more or less than cold, dumb, numbers. No predator, no matter how well adapted, can hope to exterminate a prey population the size of interstellar humanity alone.

Instead the nomads seek to turn human nature against us. War, politicking, and infighting are their tools, wielded by a shadowy army of puppets, collaborators, and catspaws. Popular media smugly claims that the Nomad War ended with Orillion and Edison Trent. It is a tantalising falsehood, but a falsehood nonetheless. What a jubilant humanity blindly termed victory was just one failed strategy among hundreds. A major strategy, perhaps, but far from a solitary one. The alien machinery of war yet grinds on, and the colonies of Sirius pit their strength against one another.

Liberty, Bretonia, and Gallia struggle to drive the knife into one another’s throats. In Rheinland and Kusari brother turns on brother. Even the Order, once a bastion of purpose, finds its foundations battered by the ceaseless tide of the Core’s ambitions, resources already stretched thin by the Toledo massacre squandered fighting human enemies. Only a handful remain watchful for the true foe.

The battle was won but the campaign continues, and the NRI stands lonely vigil over a human race tearing itself apart at the seams.

Self-sufficient fleets have been fixtures in human history since the sleeper ships departed Sol more than eight hundred years ago. Modern Sirius; however, has come to regard the notion with a sort of amused contempt. Equipped with an abundance of orbital stations and burgeoning colonies, and locked away from further expansion by the benevolent tyranny of the jump network, the notion of self-sustaining starships has become nothing more than an interesting historical titbit for most, an archaic lifestyle retained only by a handful of backward Zoner populations on the raggedy edges of human space.

Locked away from the facilities they once called home, the NRI has found itself forced to rediscover that ancient art, and a swarm of hastily retrofitted auxiliaries flies alongside the battle-scarred warships of the Initiative. Fabricators hide in the bellies of everything larger than a freighter, most capable of producing nothing more complex than a hull patch, a circuit board, or one of a hundred synthpaste analogues.

The largest and most powerful systems, such as those aboard Newfoundland, are capable of manufacturing certain strikecraft weapons, dreadnought-grade munitions, and more complex ship systems. Given an excess of time and resources, and a number of pre-assembled components, the largest fabricators possess the capability to manufacture dreadnought hulls in their entirety. For the NRI; however, excess on such a scale is purely theoretical next to the fleet’s ravenous need for fuel, repairs, and the simplest requirements of life.

The NRI’s available ships are carefully rationed, each functionally irreplaceable. Each ship is rostered, assigned, and accounted for. Each is a vital cog in a life support system so distant from help that a distress signal serves as little more than a casualty notification.

The list below discusses spacecraft availability. Detailed information on major ships and strikecraft squadrons is available from the Fleet Register.

Osiris-class Dreadnought

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Hathor-class Gunboat

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Onuris-class Interceptor

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Executioner-class Fighter

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Bastet-class Fighter

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Avenger-class Fighter

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Guardian-class Fighter

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Nephthys-class Fighter

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Sekhmet-class Bomber

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Hegemon-class Mobile Refinery

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Bison-class Transport

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Longhorn-class Repair Ship

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Dromedary-class Freighter

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Voyager-class Freighter

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Rhino-class Freighter

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Before the fall of Toledo, the Order’s homeworld was a wonderland of technological advancement. The fruits of a dozen cutting-edge projects poured in from distant facilities and, for the average citizen, quality of life rivalled that of the poorer core worlds - a level of luxury almost unheard of amid the savagery of the edge.

Civil development began to degenerate as the conflict with the Core dragged focus from civil works to military production, but Toledo never devolved to the brutal survivalist philosophy seen on humanity’s most distant outposts. While Cape Hope’s burgeoning civilian population ruled out high-risk research on Toledo’s surface, the steady tide of prototype equipment and schematics that fed the planet’s ever-growing factories owed its existence to that research, conducted a star system away.

The Order had always been an organisation that defied national borders, and nowhere was that more apparent than the research labs of Omicron-100. Propulsion specialists from Cambridge worked alongside Kusarian nanomedical teams even as their home nations turned to war. Engineered plagues, grav-shear weapons, artificial general intelligence; little was off-limits in the search for weapons that could stand against the nomads. Studies that would have been shut down at the business end of a gun in civilised space flourished in the distant dark of the Omicrons.

Military research was only a part of the Order’s work; however, and civil development projects marched in lockstep with Toledo’s growing population. Terraforming studies, advanced life support equipment and ever more efficient hydroponic farms became increasingly dominant areas of research as Toledo’s manufacturing expanded. While the houses of Sirius stagnated beneath the bloated weight of legislature, the promise of a hundred breakthroughs waited in the labs of Mora Station.

Those breakthroughs burned alongside Toledo.

Robbed of a huge portion of its industrial capacity, the Order salvaged what little it could from the ashes of its homeworld The lion’s share of research data and schematics survived, locked away in orbital habitats in Omicron-100, but the banks of machinery that would have carried those projects to production was no more than dust decorating a dead world. The knowledge that Toledo’s massive industrial base was no longer required offered little consolation. Overnight, the Order’s civilian population had been all but wiped from existence. The Order that rose from the wreckage was a twisted, militarised shadow of the organisation that had preceded it.

The changes began before Toledo’s shattered surface started to cool. Civil research projects, catered to maintain a growing population on the inhospitable surface of an ice world, were tossed aside. Teams that had worked on genetically modified crops found themselves plunged into bioweapons research. Engineers abandoned habitat design and turned to the creation of orbital weapons platforms and, with barely a whisper to mark its passage, the promise of a better tomorrow was buried with Toledo’s dead.


In its place rose the certainty of a fiery retribution. The Order had survived Toledo, but what emerged from the ruins could never be mistaken for the diplomatic, humanist organisation that came before. Military research surged forward at a rate not seen since the days preceding the nomad war, and civilian development was left abandoned and forgotten in its wake. Piece by piece, the relics of the old establishment were torn down as the Order reforged itself into an instrument of war. Only a handful of those old development projects remain, sealed in shelters buried deep beneath Toledo’s shattered crust and trapped beyond the reach of their creators by a landscape scorched beyond recognition.

Ironically, modern Order operatives are even better equipped than those who served before Toledo’s fall. The Overwatch’s narrow focus on military development and manufacturing saw a surge in equipment quality, and the sudden reduction in the organisation’s manpower reduced demand to a level that even Omicron-100’s orbital foundries had no trouble meeting. Older ships were rapidly modernised, and new strike craft rolled off jury-rigged production lines in quantities that, while a mere fraction of that manufactured by Toledo, were more than adequate for the organisation’s reduced numbers.

The capabilities of the NRI, an independent offshoot surviving on shoestring resources, are little more than a shadow of the strength wielded by the pre-fall Order and the Overwatch that followed in its wake. Apotheosis, between its long deployment to Alaska and subsequent rotation to low-risk patrols, was never prioritised for the upgrades that dominated much of the Order fleet and, while formidable, the ship lacks the most modern advances of Order science. Those few functioning examples of the Initiative’s pre-fall technology are geared more towards the rigours of immediate survival than replicating the bleeding-edge research of Omicron-100’s labs.

Not all of the Order’s advances were confined to Mora Station; however, and not all of them have entirely escaped the reach of the Initiative. A handful of half-completed schematics and early production runs survived, scattered among bolt-hole stations and the wrecks of evacuation shuttles. Though little more than untested remnants, these unfinished projects promise strength and annihilation in equal measure to a Fleet Director willing to risk their reactivation.

Aside from a few inactive remnants, most of the Initiative’s technology would be recognisable to a Sirian spacefarer. Warship drives utilise variants on the same fusion technology that powers civilian deep-space haulers, artificial gravity generators lurk beneath Apotheosis’ decks, and the presence of synthpaste is a universal torture. Hydroponics bays, all but abandoned as unnecessary relics in house space, supplement banks of chemical oxygen scrubbers aboard the fleet’s largest vessels, while strikecraft make do with rebreathers and what tanks they can haul aboard. Metastable antimatter stores are universally feared, and the compound is produced only when use of the fleet’s most powerful weapons seems inevitable.

The list below discusses life in the Initiative and the organisation’s general technological capabilities – what is and isn’t possible.

Apotheosis and her order-designed escorts were created with long-endurance missions in mind, and the quarters aboard the Initiative’s dreadnought and gunboats are testament to that. While rooms are still tiny by planetary standards, crew members on order warships have access to private quarters - often little more than a single strip-thin bed and a desk - and ablution blocks are shared between compartments.

Operatives stationed aboard naval ships are less fortunate. The jump network made journeys over a week rare and, consequently, accommodation aboard the fleet’s auxiliaries is cramped and communal. Crew compartments hold between four and eight racks, each shared between sailors on four-hour watches - a practice known as hot racking. Access to better quarters is dependent on seniority, and only a handful of ranking officers have ascended to the luxury of private quarters.

Generators in inhabited compartments typically maintain gravity at 0.3G when the ship is not under acceleration. More powerful fields are possible, and are used to cushion g-forces during maneuvers and create the extremes of pressure that power the ship’s reactor, but the generators consume too much energy to make constant earth-like gravity economical.

Far from the support of the network of lanes and gates that links the houses of Sirius together, the Initiative is forced to use more archaic methods of communication. Communication between ships in the same system is conducted at light speed with laser bursts or radio transmissions. It is far from a perfect system, and the lag between sending a message and receiving a reply for ships on opposite sides of a star system can stretch to almost a day.

Interstellar communication is simply impractical by conventional means, and long-range messages must either be carried by courier ship or sent using Apotheosis’ on-board subspace array. Most ships within a few light-seconds of Apotheosis are capable of communicating with the wider universe using the Osiris’ systems, though the information must still be sent to and from the dreadnought using conventional means. Further, subspace communication is only workable so long as both sender and receiver have access to an array. A subspace-equipped ship cannot use it to contact a ship without one (except by using a nearby, subspace-equipped, ship as an intermediary); however, for most of house space, the trade network fills that function for both sender and receiver. For the most distant or most paranoid of humanity’s outposts courier ships remain the method of choice for long-range communications.

Traumatic injury is a surprisingly rare event in the Initiative. Most of the dirty, dangerous work that lead to injury in ages past is carried out by automatic systems, remotely-controlled drones, or hordes of interlocking nanomachines. Bloody boarding actions of the sort fought by house militaries and peacekeeping forces are all but irrelevant against an enemy that makes no distinction between ship and crew, and the forces involved in the destruction of a capital-class spacecraft are rarely survivable for things as fragile as flesh and bone. Nonetheless, Apotheosis and the fleet auxiliaries maintain small infirmaries capable of handling complaints ranging from viral infections to broken bones.

Hygiene and screening procedures for transfers between ships are strictly enforced. Nomad infiltration aside, conventional disease can spread rapidly in the confined environment of a starship and it falls to the fleet’s handful of medical officers to ensure it is not given the chance. Operatives showing signs of illness are frequently confined to their quarters, lest they infect the rest of the ship.

Long-range scouts, expected to deal with human opponents and colonies, mount comparatively advanced medical bays equipped with trauma kits, automated diagnosis units and cold sleep facilities in case an injury proves beyond the ship’s ability to treat. Overall, the Initiative’s medical capabilities are functional, rather than exceptional, and the cybernetic limbs and nano-scale reconstructive surgery seen in high-end house medical facilities remains beyond the reach of shipboard medical technology.

Modern starship engines hold tremendous power on a careful-forged leash. Even the smallest and weakest of the Initiative’s ships is capable of harnessing energies that outstrip the entire power production of Old Earth before the 22nd century. Every ship in the fleet is comfortably capable of flying brachistochrone trajectories and, without the impediment of an atmosphere, achieving escape velocity from most terrestrial planetary bodies. For a deep space hauler, landing on a civilised world poses fewer difficulties than inadvertently incinerating a continent on take-off.

Power for most systems is provided by tremendous fusion plants, though some particularly volatile dreadnought-killer armaments make use of carefully contained stores of antimatter collected just prior to their use. Similarly, some exceptionally backwards settlements employ fission-based shuttles where modern fusion ships prove too expensive or too complex for use.

All that power is less than the flaring of a match against the enveloping cosmic darkness. Travel beyond the immediate confines of the fleet is expensive, resource-intensive, and, in the Omicrons, likely to be fatally dangerous. Journeys that would take days via the trade network stretch out to weeks in the undeveloped edge worlds. Only a handful of specially-configured scout craft; typically freighters or stripped-down gunboats, tend to stray more than a handful of systems from Apotheosis without a supply ship in tow. Consequently the ban on unauthorised flights in the Initiative is as much a matter of practicality as it as of security. Ships and fuel are too valuable to trust to idle fancy. Any operatives with unofficial business outside the fleet must wait until space is available on an outgoing ship, and such spaces are inevitably highly sought after.

The Initiative’s limited store of military-grade equipment is kept under lock and key in shipboard armouries, and released only on the order of security officers or authorised team leaders. The fleet has access to a handful of powered hardsuits, intended for hazardous work outside the ship, in addition to ablative armor, man-portable gauss weaponry, and modern pulsed laser rifles. Rumours abound of more exotic equipment, kept under the careful eye of the Fleet Director.

As a mobile fleet the NRI rarely has the opportunity or resources to set up dedicated recruiting stations, and strained ties with the main body of the Order have rapidly curtailed supplies of manpower from the organisation’s overstretched population. Most recruits are survivors of some variety of nomad incursion or otherwise have found themselves so irrevocably entangled in the fleet’s machinations that a life outside becomes impossible. On occasion particularly noteworthy individuals may be headhunted by the NRI, though the cost and attention excursions into occupied space invariably attract makes active recruitment comparatively rare.