Four hundred meters in long and an unearthly jet black from end to end, the destroyer Amagiri passed through the twelve sets of rings that would connect it to the docking bay. Everything about the vessel, Aishi Chandradhara reflected, was built for war, and only for war.

And that was something she didn't like.

Aishi loved watching the great starships come in to dock at the ring, from small luxury yachts to the old, majestic battleships of the Ausare battlefleet, being "painted" in all manner of colours by metallic coatings mere fractions of a millimeter thick on their hull. Collisions with microscopic meteorites gave each ship a unique pattern of weathering, so, if one looked closely, especially on older ships, no two of them looked alike in colour.

All those colourful, beautiful ships used to come in, slowly, gracefully, matching their velocity with the ring before meeting it, with the grace of lovers kissing.

Not so the black warships that were crewed by the Republic. For a long time, the Nyame had been at odds with the Ausare empire, and they had the backing of a force so old and so formidable that few dared say its name- a name that was supposed to be linked to all manner of dread and evil.

Feeling somewhat repulsed by the arrival of the black ship, the young noblewoman turned to the small, reserved space elevator. It was meant for upperclassmen (as nobles and others of high social rank were called) to take down to the luxury stations at the base of the huge support columns.

Perhaps, she thought, she would see something less inauspicious while going on her jetski trips around the island. She wouldn't want to keep her cousin waiting down there too long.