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It had taken a lot of time and a lot of money for Alad V to get where he was now. And where he was now was standing on the bridge of on of his ships, staring at the Void. Specifically, the slightly newer rift that functioned as an entrance into it. The reason? It was going to be the only place he would be able to hide if the partnership went sour. No, that wasn’t right. When it went sour. Alad V had no doubt that this ‘partnership’ he had entered into was going to end in disaster, just as his dalliance with the technocyte virus had. He still bore the marks of the virus, a glaring reminder of his mistake.
If he was right about how this… partnership was going to go, then he wanted to guarantee a backup plan. An escape route, if you will. He had no plans of dying to those tau machines, and even less so to that Lotus the betrayers seemed to view as a mother.
He briefly wondered how they had taken to the knowledge that their precious Lotus was actually a sentient. An enemy to all in the origin system. How ironic, the very thing they thought was protecting the tenno turning against them.
He would have been more smug if he wasn’t feeling the effects of the new sentient scourge as well. But, in his haste and greed, he had signed the paperwork for that damned partnership. His aging face wrinkled as he grimaced at the memory. He should have known something was off, he had known that Regus wouldn’t have had any way to acquire tau technology. But he had been overconfident, too sure that he could weasel out of anything, too convinced he had found a way to regain the Board’s favor. He felt the bite of his error more strongly than he wanted to admit.
He still couldn’t afford to lose his gas city, the precious labs with all of his, ah… projects, within. He didn’t have the funding to rebuild again, at least not soon. Especially since the Corpus Board had turned its favor to that upstart Nef Anyo.
He knew that the Board wouldn’t be able to help him either, no. This was, unfortunately another… miscalculation. And given that it was not the first one, but rather the newest installation in a series of such, the board would be far less likely to show any type of... “mercy”. He had been fortunate enough with the failure of the Zanuka project, but this? The Sentients were the enemy, he and everything else in the system knew that. The Board would execute him if they ever found out he was working with them, even if it wasn’t something, he was particularly keen on it.
The void glimmered, the promise of both danger and salvation in its silvery light.