A meeting was held at the beach house on Vespa, in the mansion's main room, where a wide table sat at the center with four people arranged around it, the sound of waves still faintly audible through the walls. The tension in the room ran heavy — not the tension of enemies, exactly, but not the ease of allies either, more like the wariness of predators who had simply agreed, for the moment, not to test each other. All four of them were captains: renegades, infamous criminals by the empire's own reckoning, and among the very last of their kind still standing after everything the empire had thrown at people like them over the years.
Leon Cortes sat first. Broad-shouldered and unnervingly tall, he had the presence of a man built for intimidation without ever needing to try — long brown hair falling all the way down his back, and a scar running from the bridge of his nose across one cheek, a souvenir from his fight with Commander Sinckler of the Terrian Empire, a fight he'd walked away from victorious. That single win had cemented his reputation across the entire eastern district and earned him his seat as one of the four Archons. He captained the Mandor, a renegade crew that controlled the shipping routes through the eastern reaches of the Tellkas Nebula, notorious for both their ruthlessness and the sheer firepower they carried — five ships and a hundred orbitons strong, closer to a small army than a crew. The empire had placed a bounty of seven million zells on they're heads for anyone who managed to bring them down.
To Leon's right sat Patricia Mastrov, a woman in her late forties who carried herself with a poise that made most of the men in the room look older than she did. Her face was smooth, almost entirely bare of makeup, her dark hair cut short against her neck. She was, above all else, a tactician — sharp enough that people rarely made the mistake of underestimating her twice. She had once been a princess in her own right, heir to the throne of Tarstenia, until the empire's arrival tore that world apart beneath her. She'd barely escaped with her life. When she did, she gathered whatever firepower she had left and returned home for one purpose: revenge against the man responsible for slaughtering her entire family, Marquis Garnell. A sneak assault on the royal palace gave her exactly that — she cornered him, took her revenge, and briefly reclaimed her homeworld in the process, before the empire answered by dispatching a God Unit to finish what it had started. She got out again, this time for good, taking her people with her aboard a ship large enough to rival Avenoir Island itself. She named the vessel Tarstenia, after the world she'd lost, and continued waging war against the empire's advance from that ship ever since — work that eventually earned her a seat among the Archons, and a five-million-zell bounty on the crew the empire came to know as the guerrillas of the Hopus Nebula.
Across from Patricia sat a bald man built almost as much from metal as from flesh — his left eye, arm, and leg fully robotic, and beneath his open collar, a chest plated over in iron where skin should have been. This was Tyron Plexus, better known across space as the Mad Cyborg. Operating out of the Perpetual Nebula, he and his crew had built their reputation manufacturing high-grade orbitons and selling them to anyone with the credits to pay — faction, empire loyalist, or renegade, it made no difference to him. Between his output and his client list, Plexus single-handedly controlled more than half the entire arms market, a level of influence significant enough that the empire had no choice but to name him a renegade outright, placing a nine-million-zell bounty on his crew and, with it, sealing his place as one of the four Archons.
Beside Tyron, across from Leon, sat Silvester Morbin — an old man, his face folded into deep wrinkles, carrying the particular stillness of someone who had witnessed far too much to react to most things anymore. He captained the Venus crew, one of the oldest renegade outfits still operating anywhere in the empire's reach. Silver, as most people called him, had once been known across the north as the Butcher — a name earned by hunting down lone, isolated Terrian ships, setting them ablaze, and shipping their crews' severed heads back to the nearest Terrian outpost as a warning. Brutal as it was, the habit hadn't come from nowhere. Silver himself had watched Terrian soldiers murder his own parents in front of him when he was a boy, decapitating them and leaving him drenched in their blood. That moment had broken something loose in him. At only fifteen years old, he'd killed four of those soldiers with his bare hands, taking every bullet they fired at him without ever going down, before finally strangling the last one to death with more than twenty gunshot wounds in his body by the time it was over, and still standing. He'd spent every year since hunting the empire from the shadows for it. The empire, in turn, had placed two separate bounties on him — six million zells on his crew, and a rare, almost unheard-of bounty on his head alone: four million zells, a distinction that made him, without question, the most dangerous of the four Archons in that room.
The wooden door slid open, and a man stepped inside, taking his seat at the head of the table, his face still swallowed in shadow.
"I imagine you're all asking yourselves why you're here," he said, a note of amusement in his voice, "and exactly who I am." He chuckled once, then rose to his feet and gave the table a light, deliberate bow. "Allow me to introduce myself, then. I'm the Chairman of the organization that's brought the four of you together under one roof — the four infamous Archons." He straightened, spreading his hands slightly. "Welcome to the Progressive Union."