Colonel Wikström had served in the Royal guard for many years before Hanna's exodus, before that, he had served in the I.S.A. and the Black Hand back when the late colonel-general Wolfgang Heydrich had still been a captain and the I.S.A. was nothing more than a secret sub-section of the Imperial Armed Forces R&D division.
He had been young then, only 13 when he had been selected and started his training as one of the Emperor's Black Hand agents. When the Emperor and Emperess had been assassinated, he had been part of General Heydrich's command staff. The old man had noticed him early on and taken him under his protective wing. When the Emperor and Emperess had died, they had both been in the former capitol of Minerva, and during their escape by sea to rendezvous with the young princess he had learned many things from the grizzled old general who by then had more than a third of his limbs and some of his organs replaced with advanced, permanently attached prostheses.
What he had learned had been close to making him insane, but eventually, he had come to terms with what the man told him. He had never belived in the old stories of the Empire's orgins but to find out that they were indeed truth had been almost too much to take in.
And now, by a strange twist of fate, they were back on the world their ancient and long dead ancestors had left several millennia ago. Sure, the continents had shifted slightly, new nations had risen from the ancestors of the savage tribes that lived there then, the star had aged but the coordinates were well within the acceptable deviations, this was their ancestral home world, and by god they would reclaim it!
According to the old man, somewhere on this world there should be a remnant of the original Imperial cult. He would find them, and when he did, their acrolytes would be most helpful in deciphering the information on the ancient discs he carried and adapting it to the new face of this world. He would find the STC-terminal, and once he did, a new Empire would rise from it's fruits.
