Just as the world continued on in the absence of Noah Eclipse, the universe did so too.
Somewhere above Earth's orbit, in humanity's central orb of defense, the Ark hung in the void like a monument to organized paranoia. The station was massive, easily ten times the size of Vanguard, with defensive arrays that could reduce an approaching fleet to constituent atoms before they got within firing range. It had been humanity's last line of retreat during the worst of the Harbinger wars, back when people genuinely thought extinction was maybe three bad weeks away.
Now it served as the EDF's central command, housing the Supreme General and enough military brass to staff a small dictatorship. The architecture was all function over form, gray corridors and reinforced bulkheads designed to survive everything up to and including direct bombardment by weapons that violated several laws of physics.
