Chapter 87 36:
Far from the Viltrum planet, Vexa remained leaning against one of the structural beams of the resting chamber, ignoring the metallic cold that pressed against her back.
Her eyes fixed on the large window in front of her, where the void of space stretched out in a black mantle scattered with distant stars within that inexorable dark vastness.
The imperial ship transporting her was an auxiliary transport unit, the kind the Empire used for logistical movement between the moons of the system.
She had never felt comfortable navigating by herself in the cold of space; she would probably never admit the fear she had of loneliness.
And by Argall, there was no place lonelier than the black space of the universe.
The ship's design followed the standard parameters of a Viltrumite fleet.
It possessed an elongated hull approximately seven hundred and eighty meters in length, with a cross section that barely exceeded one hundred and twenty meters at its widest point.
The armor panels were composed of an alloy of Viltrumium and reinforced carbon, assembled at angles that did not exceed thirty degrees, a geometry designed to disperse both plasma impacts and enemy detection systems.
Korr-add never stopped comparing them to "flying tractors"; agricultural machinery, to be exact. That native always seemed to have new words for everything.
Vexa pushed herself away from the beam and walked toward the center of the chamber, where a metal table emerged from the floor. Her fingers found the fold of her uniform and extracted an object she had been hiding for far too long and which, fortunately, she had kept with her at all times.
Korr's journal.
She had not been capable of returning it to its owner after recovering it from Nouwl-an's hands, when segments (hours) later, the chaos of the Lithari rebellion exploded.
Fortunately, she had not been present because she had been under medical supervision regarding her already recovered injuries, and therefore, she had been spared from being thrown like a war dog into some trench abandoned by Argall in some border sector against the coalition of planets.
Now that they were under a decree of three days of reflection, Vexa had decided not to return to the capital city nor to the dorymathos. Instead, she had requested the use of an auxiliary ship under the pretext of a routine inspection of the lunar settlements, authorization that had been granted without objection.
The ninth moon of the Viltrumite solar system could be compared to a small world, with a diameter of approximately one thousand two hundred kilometers and a surface gravity of 0.2 G.
The atmosphere, practically nonexistent, offered a clear view of the surrounding space.
Her mother's house occupied an area of approximately three hundred square meters, distributed across a single floor.
The structure, built with the same materials as the Viltrumite ship, followed the standard parameters of imperial architecture; straight lines, devoid of ornamentation accompanied by smooth surfaces.
After landing inside it, Vexa entered what had once been the main room. The bed, a metal platform with a synthetic fiber mattress, occupied the center of the north wall.
A control table, now inactive, was located on the east wall, and apart from that, the entire room lacked any other furnishing. Everything that had belonged to her mother had been removed after her execution.
She sat on the edge of the bed, feeling beneath her weight the stiffness of the mattress. Her fingers moved across the journal's cover, feeling the texture of the leather, deciding to open the journal and continue reading from the page where she had left off.
"So... this is the year 4203 after Argall.... And... damn, time here is long, I still haven't completed my first orbit... I mean, does that matter? I'm almost immortal so I better start getting used to a long and boring life and..."
The handwriting was small and cramped, full of things that were uninteresting, although those little details were what made it more interesting.
She continued reading.
"Well... this is going to be long.
I've been researching... Again. Well, I mean, this is very interesting so I couldn't help it.
Well, without going into so many details; the castes.
I don't know if anyone else will ever read this, but if you do, I want you to know that the Viltrumite Empire isn't just a bunch of super-strong guys flying through space; although I had already said it before, it's necessary to emphasize all this given how easily anyone could interpret them.
And well... they are the factions that have composed the empire since its beginnings."
Vexa turned the page, stopping occasionally at fragments that captured her attention among the illustrations of each of the imperial caste emblems.
The factions of the Viltrumite Empire are characterized by one of the most sophisticated and enduring institutional designs of known galactic civilization.
Originally conceived by the Great Emperor Argal as a mechanism of functional optimization, this system transcended mere administrative hierarchy to constitute the ontological identity upon which the entire Viltrumite sociopolitical structure would be erected.
Therefore, from its beginnings, the empire organized itself through a distinguished pragmatic codification of role assignment within an empire whose bureaucratic and military complexity demanded absolute taxonomic clarity.
Argal, in his vision, conceived the faction system (referred to as castes) as a solution to the problem of organizational efficiency.
This model, although apparently rigid, demonstrated remarkable operational flexibility during the Empire's first centuries, allowing an unprecedented territorial expansion and a consolidation of power that no other political system in the galaxy had managed to achieve considering its simplicity, at least at first glance.
These castes were cataloged by colors: Vice-kern (white), Blut-rot (red), Hail-kern (yellow), Dienst-grau (gray), and Shöpf-er-blau (blue). Each one represented a structural aspect of the empire.