The Lone Dome; meetings on the final frontier.

[Jane Hartman]

Captain Jane Hartman may as well have been planetside. Carefully seeded grass folded beneath her boots, trees rose from the dirt before her stretching wooden limbs up towards an inky black sky. Save for the honeycomb of beams that hung above her, bracing the Lone Dome's tiny bubble of atmosphere against the void, the illusion was almost perfect. Or it would have been perfect if she hadn't needed to climb three flights of stairs through life support machinery to get here. Oh, it looked like a planetside forest, sure enough, but like everything else in orbit it existed only by the grace and ceaseless labors of humanity's machines. After two days crammed aboard Triton, Hartman had been glad of the walk. She was less fond of the biodome itself. It was an illusion, a luxury sustained purely for the sake of it, and provided nothing that could not have been replicated by hydroponics beds for a fraction of the cost. The whole thing seemed vaguely dishonest to her.

Then again, if she had a problem with dishonesty she was in entirely the wrong place.

Ellington was waiting at a table, engaged in conversation with a red-haired woman wearing a uniform that Hartman had seen once before. The Order. Outstanding. Hartman had never before encountered an organisation that seemed to take such perverse pride in their own machinations. Terrorists. Or the last hope of humanity, if you were foolish enough to believe that dark uniforms and double meanings made you the good guys. Special Operations and spooks. Outstanding.

Hartman swallowed her distaste and made her way across the bar.

"Commander Ellington. Making friends already, I see."

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