Yogo Benin flipped on the second and third monitors, scanning the patches of sky they revealed, including a wonderful view of Fu Leng. It was funny, really; the Isawa.Kaiu.Asahina joint venture Deep Space Observation Complex on Fu Leng cost billions and was situated on the most miserable rock in the empire. It was heralded as the greatest achievement that mankind had ever made. Meanwhile here he was, sitting comfortably in the warm tunnels beneath Bayushi and watching through the systems infinitely more sophisticated than the Complex. Wholly unknown deep space telescopes ringed the system only few million klicks out from Fu Leng, and the Ivory Tower Isawa couldn't even see those.

How did it bode for the rest of their system?

Not that it was their fault; the building of the DSOC had been shepherded along the whole way by Scorpion trying to keep the Tail Defence Ring under wraps. Just a distraction, freeing the clan to do what had always been their duty; to protect the empire from things it could not, or did not want to, see.

He remembered the day Otosan Uchi had gone up in flames. He had been - what , 6? - and living with his grandparents in what had once been called the Burning Sands. From all that ways away, he still felt the impact and saw a flash as a huge chunk of rock ripped out of the sky and plowed into the mountains north of the capital city. Luckily that had been after the exodus, where most of the clans started offering fiefs on their planets, so most of the population had moved off world by then. But nearly the entire imperial family, including Emperor Toku XII, were killed alongside anyone unlucky enough to be in the Old Empire on that day.

He remembered his grandparents crying when they heard. He asked them if they were crying for the Emperor and they had said, 'No. We're crying for the empire.' They felt themselves - their whole clan - at fault for not seeing this, the greatest unseen threat the Emperor had ever seen. And so they called his father, who was on Bayushi overseeing the development of the Yogo Habitation and Library Compound.

He couldn't remember any more specifics really: Phone calls, diplomatic visits, and conferences blended together in his mind. What he did remember was the launch, when the 10,000 modules of the Scorpion's Tale, the most sophisticated and comprehensive asteroid defence system ever conceived (which, in retrospect was not all that impressive. After all, it was the only such system ever conceived) were launched from the surface of Bayushi into the depths of the void around the Empire.

"Ben" The squeaky voice of his lab assistant pulled Benin out of trance. Actually, it wasn't as squeaky as usual. "Hmm? What."

"Switch on monitor seven."

"You mean the one pointed at the worthless hunk of rock orbiting Fu Leng?" He had a point; no-one had even bothered to name it.

"Yeah … Just, just switch it on, I see something odd."Benin did so.

"Chaz - I see nothing here. Rock. Rock and Ice, that's it." He stopped mid sentence.

His screen was indeed filled with the image of a barren rock-and-ice surface, but there was something odd. Down in the lower right hand corner of the picture there was the distinct shine of metal. Nothing out of the ordinary; the Mantis were quite active in their asteroid mining and would put a colony on anything big enough to have some minerals in it. But that was the thing, Fu Leng's moon had nothing of any use whatsoever on it. It was bereft of anything at all useful except perhaps water… and there were MUCH better sources of water farther in towards the sun. Besides which, no-one had gotten rights to build anything there; the DSOC courtiers made sure that nothing was built there in case they needed it for more equipment and, having the connections he did, Benin knew the DSOC wasn't expanding there either.

Whatever was going on with that place was very illegal. And Benin wasn't in on it."Chaz, get your things together. We're going to Fu-Leng."

The blue-eyes Soshi made a few noises, but at another look from his superior ran down to the living quarters of the Tail Ops Center. Finally, a chance to try out the Daimyo's Yacht. He doubted his father would need it any time soon.