The messenger was swiftly ordered to proceed directly to Earth, escorted by the picket detachment nearest to her. After signaling an acknowledgement of the order, the small vessels VI fell into formation between the two corvettes and behind the destroyer. Once everything was in place, they lit off their gravity drives and began maneuvering through the Oort cloud and the Sol systems heliopause beyond it.

As it passed through the system, the VI communicated with CENTCOM and received the updated map and access to the system plot, allowing it to see all of the public ships in the system. Almost all of the industry and shipping was distributed along the system ecliptic. Humanity still thought of things along 2d planes, it seemed. But it was unimaginably difficult to overcome hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years of evolution telling the species that ground was ground and sky was sky. Learning that down was more loose as a concept than they had imagined would naturally take some time.

The VI continued scanning the system plot and updating its navigational database.

The orbit of Neptune, the eighth and last planet in the Sol system, was mostly vacant. Only a few picket vessels were patrolling it, constantly on the lookout for anything coming into the system from beyond the Kuiper Belt. Pairs of fleet corvettes sailed hither and yon through the area, their sensors reaching out at full power.

It was mostly the same for Uranus, though there was a thriving industry in orbit around the planet itself. As an ice giant, Uranus was a hub of activity for so-called slush miners, who would send ramscoops into the planet and haul back container after container of supercooled slush. They would then bring those containers to processing facilities that had been built by civilians on Uranus twenty-seven moons for further processing.

(Ed note: Insert Uranus pun here.)

The empire was also in fair competition with the civilian cooperatives and maintained a processing station in high polar orbit, where those who were contracted to the empire instead of a civilian company would drop their loads and spend time in one of the many entertainment establishments there before heading out to pick up their next load. The imperial station was somehow more dignified than the lunar ports of call, with higher-class entertainments and a far calmer atmosphere overall, compared to the moon-based processing plants.

The same held true, for the most part, around the next two planets in-system from Uranus. Saturn was mostly occupied by a far rougher sort of asteroid jockey, mostly grim and stubborn men and women who made their living in the densely packed rings of Saturn. Jupiter, on the other hand, was primarily a rest, resupply, and logistics station where the miners of the Trojan Asteroid Belt congregated. They were more... corporate than the rough and tumble rock jocks of Saturns rings.

There were a few things in common between the two gas giants, in terms of industry. Both planets were gas farms, with the same ubiquitous ramscoop tanker vessels operating around Jupiter and Saturn as there were around Uranus.

The biggest difference in the Sol system, though, was displayed on the next planet in-system from Jupiter. Mars had simply... ceased to exist on the plot. The planet was hidden from all forms of detection the empire could itself use; even visuals were blocked by the always-active Planetary Defense Shield around the red planet. In fact, if Aron werent so paranoid about using the brainwashing tech at his disposal, only to have it somehow fail, he would likely go so far as to remove the very memory of the planet itself from humanitys collective memory.

He had even considered removing it from textbooks and movies everywhere, so the next generation wouldnt know that there was a hidden planet orbiting Sol. After all, another lesson the cult had taught the then-fledgling emperor was that not even humanitys minds were completely impenetrable forces. Even though he had the psionic shielding technology from the system, human beings were far from perfect and would lose them, break them, or even simply forget to charge them. Much like they did with cellphones, before cellphones became obsolete upon the introduction of AR glasses.

But since the star system's planetary information can be extrapolated from the rest of the planets in the solar system, he decided against it, making the thought come and disappear from his mind in only a few seconds following his thought process.

Mars, and the ARES facility that was almost completely operational upon and within it, was simply just that important.

Finally, the messenger reached Earth. The planet looked nothing like it had when the first diaspora had left, much less like it had when the exploration fleets had left before Aron got fed up and threw all the malcontents off the planet and sent them scattering off across the galaxy.

Orbiting outside Luna were hundreds of thousands of vessels, carrying the raw material from the giant processing stations and factories concentrated around planets and dotted here and there throughout the system. The ships there were in continuous movement, though, as planetary traffic control slotted them into arrival gates within hours, if not minutes, after their arrival from the outer reaches.

The planetary shield was in its low-power mode and being used mostly for automated scans of the ships passing through either of its two main gates, ensuring that nothing was being brought inaccidentally or otherwisethat could harm the planet or the people that lived on it. On the messengers visual scanners, it looked much like two lines of ants trooping along, one line going toward the space elevator carrying food and the other line leaving in search of that same food.

Once the messenger and her escorts reached exolunar orbit, the escort ships broke off and returned to their picket stations, leaving the messenger boat behind. But it didnt stay in the entry queue for long, however, as Gaia opened a priority path for the meteor-class ship to jump the queue and directly enter Earth through a gap that was opened up in the shield for her use specifically.

Those ships the messenger passed were naturally curious. In all the time that humanity had been building its space infrastructure, one thing and one thing only had remained constant from beginning to end: nobody jumps the lunar queue. Nobody. But though they were unaware, that rule was constantly broken as stealth ships considered the lunar queue more of a suggestion than a rule. However, the meteor-class messenger ships had no stealth capabilities. And nor should they, as their role was to carry dispatches from place to place, so adding stealth functions would run counter to that role.

Still, it was the first time that any ship had ever flouted the rules so blatantly, and for a long time after the messenger had landed in her docking cradle on the surface, traffic controls communications lines were tied up by the complaints of those who had been passed in the queue.