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Greetings Clarks World Citizens.

I hope this podcast finds you extraordinarily well.

This is our fourth story for the month of August 2016 issue 119.

The piece is titled The Engine's Imperial

and is by Sean Ben Singer.

Sean was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in New Orleans. He attended LSU and has a bachelors in English in history. So I'm just going to jump right into the story. So I hope you can sit back,

relax, and let me tell you a story.

I blink and the stars change. Another blink and light years and centuries pass, and I reorient the bulk of my body for the next leg of the journey.

Banks of thrusters, kilometers long glow in the darkness of inter-system space,

while the armored plate of my hide twists with the inertia of the directional change.

The fusion cores at my heart melt the ice from my insides, even if just for a moment.

I set sight on a distant star and blink.

The system were site on a distant star and blink.

The system where my sister died opens before me. No human has laid eyes on it in 10,000 years.

Once it had been called SP-0043879, and after my sister's death it had been

named Engine Kill. Later it became victory, then later the Shoals. Eventually even that name faded out from history and it became a forgotten cluster of gas giants and moons surrounding a yellow star,

but had mattered once.

In a war 10,000 years dying it had been another hill to die on.

...