War! War at last!

As much as the thought dismayed her, Valentina could not but dwell privately in her own guarded sense of elation. It was if she had spent the whole of her life plumbing the depths of a great ocean, holding one long, draining breath, and though the pockets of her lungs had been trampled to cheesecloth with every muscle in her body screaming for relief, she had just now mercifully glimpsed the surface and knew the life-giving air was but a single great thrust away. After so long and so much hardship, the desire to draw that conclusive breath was so powerful she no longer cared whether it was taken in this life or the next.

She must only make that final push.

All the torments, all the purges, all the sleepless nights permeated by the ghosts of gory pasts, they were all to meet their end. The tediously slow, unbearably painful degradation of the Party's soul would at last be halted, and every cadre, every loyalist, all would enjoy the fruits of human goodness without first wallowing in the pit of human misery. More than that, they would once again proudly hold their heads high and count themselves among the noble human race without the shame of innumerable depravities rendering such labels a hollow mockery.

All would forever more point towards that jewel, that glittering planet of Cassius Quartus and know without a doubt the sparkling redemption bought through the sum of their sinfulness. Just one more burst and all would be justified. The last slivers of conscience, the lingering vestiges of morality, the shrill winds sibilating the forgotten demands of right and wrong, all must be offered up now so that from the ashes of the decisive conflagration, their new utopia would arise.

Valentina bit her quivering lip, damming her mind just as the first flows of doubt appeared downstream. As much as she suppressed the thought, however, it could not but reappear again, popping up above the surface like a drowned corpse in a mud-logged riverbank, bloated and insufficiently sunk into the muck.

Would Mila see it the same? Would that girl for whom Valentina had cared and trained ever since she had joined their fledging Red Army on Cassia Prime those many years ago ever appreciate what had been done to her and why? As harsh as Party life could be, on Cassia Quartus, the chairwoman had been far worse. Valentina could hardly imagine a more sadistic crucible than to kidnap the child's puppy love and torture it before Mila's eyes, yet it was still a mercy compared to the alternative.

The Party Doctrine had already preached that those with the greatest means must pay the greatest tolls, and Lyudmila Ivanovna had perhaps been gifted with the greatest means of all. It was gift that put in service to the grander vision would save her and her entire generation the thankless, grueling, soul-consuming work of realizing their utopia by inch by catastrophic inch. Wasted on a man like Alfred, it threatened not just to abate their progress back to its bloodying, meandering pace, but to derail the project entirely.

Mila was too young to appreciate it, sadly, but as painful as the lesson might be now, she had little choice but to learn it. She had experienced a great many things, true, things to which no person should ever be subjected, but she had still joined the cause near the finale, just as the Party was on the verge of re-establishing Order across the Inner Worlds. Valentina had fought for decades longer, sacrificing so much and so personally that the purges had seemed little more than a tasteless joke of political theatre in comparison. And, most unlike Mila, she had suffered true doubt, the many, many times when defeat seemed not only possible, but an inevitability.

Valentina had faced the terror, snarling and vicious, and clawed back until she had seized defeat by the throat and beat it into victory, but something had still been lost in the process. It was not an object she could identify, nor a hole she could sense and try to fill, but the absence made itself known nonetheless, and it was that absence, no matter the other pains to which she subjected Mila, she could never bear to pass on.

She had been sure, however, that if the spy recognized her talents, saw her intended path laid out before her and became the perfect instrument she was always destined to be, her efforts would usher in the paradise for which they had all been waiting. There was a difference between the long, brutal slog towards uncertain goals and the sudden, revelatory flash of enlightenment, and Valentina hoped with all her might Mila would never have to understand it, for it was a difference that could only be appreciated through an immensity of suffering.

And yet, for all her expectations, perhaps they would be of no consequence after all. The spy had gone silent. It was Kang, in his self-pitying desperation who had told the Party of his whereabouts, begging to be saved.

Such was strictly outside the realm of possibility, of course. As soon as the codes to his nuclear arsenal had been extracted from his mind, the body was as good as worthless to them, but it was amusing to see these imperials as they flopped and folded, bargaining to the very last minute, convinced that an abstract idea of ownership could erect some magical barrier between them and their possessions. It truly was a sight to behold: an empire founded upon robbery and plunder, unable to imagine anyone doing the same.

And soon, Kang's life would be the only thing left of his to steal.

"The mountain has been spotted," the ship's radio reported, "six hundred kilometres and approaching fast."

The chairwoman bristled at hearing the jiaren voice. Here was the most obvious distinction the short flashes and lengthy wars of attrition: the unsure outcomes of one's experiments. The Cassian discovery of Faster-Than-Light technology had been kept so vigilantly hidden not even Valentina had heard of it until after the Party fleet had arrived above her in orbit, and the armada's unfortunate state of arrival had made it clear why. Already faced with enormous casualties from the imperial strike – an unknown weapon of apocalyptic proportions not even the Party's vastly superior intelligence had ever guessed possible – the admiralty had approved the FTL engines for emergency usage long before they had been sufficiently tested. They had worked well enough to clear the surviving Cassian ships from the imperial strike-zone, but the current surprise attack had proved far more costly.

Of the five transports the Party had sent to warp, four had vanished to an unreachable nether realm, trapped eternally between this universe and the next, and still shining in the night sky as a ring of glowing orbs, the fate of all those contained within an unsolvable mystery. Just like that, eighty percent of the Cassian ground forces, stolidly regimented armies specifically trained over the course of years for the invasion of this world had been lost. With them, the war over land supremacy on Cassia Quartus had gone from uncontestable to little more than a roll of the dice.

"Three-Spear Attack Formation," Valentina heard her commander, a newly arrived Comrade-Major now anointed Comrade-Marshal by the unhappy circumstances, shout back from the seat below her. Their plane jolted the chairwoman's head firmly into the cushion behind her as the nimble machine twisted in the wind to lead the charge.

"Yes, sir," a chorus of Cassian and jiaren voices replied.

With much of their pilots now dead or otherwise trapped in some unspeakably chilling astrophysical limbo, the Party had entrusted around a third of their airships to the Jiaren Red Army. It might have been better than having them languish the whole war in their bunkers, but given the stakes of the coming cataclysm, Valentina would have preferred the more reliable Cassian regulars. The jiaren had failed fighting the Black Legion in the colony, and now the chairwoman would have to be extra diligent in ensuring they did not fail again her in the tropics. The colonial battles had been a brutal practice; now was the time to display all they had learned.

"Enemy combatants sighted," the radio buzzed.

"Size est-..." a hiss of interference, "... to seven hundred."

Valentina let out as much of a sigh as the gasmask pressed to her face would allow. The imperial cannon would be formidable, but with only thirty or forty score left to man them, against the overwhelming numbers of the Party aircraft, they would never prevail. The chairwoman truly could not remember when she had last felt so giddy, - blockages the chairwoman had intentionally erected in her own mind prevented her from doing so - but as she heard her commander shout, "engage them!" she truly doubted if she would ever experience such a euphoric thrill ever again.

Such thoughts, of course, almost always tend to prove prescient one way or another.

"It's Alfred!" a stunned voice called out in jiawen. "I see Alfred's banners."

"Old Cassian speak on this channel only!" the Marshal snapped into his receiver, furious at his own ignorance of the imperial tongue.

"Alfred confirmed!" another jiaren proclaimed, keeping to his own language in violation of the commander's edict. "Halt the attack! The saviour of the jiaren race fights once again for us this day."

Valentina bristled, the white skunk line in her hair shooting out as if electrified by pure lightning. "Jam the channels," she commanded the Marshal, knowing more than enough jiawen herself to recognize the threat.

Even beneath his mask, Valentina could see the man's agitated confusion. "We are in the heat of battle, comrade. I know you cadres hunger to control communications, but we need to coordinate our-."

"Cassian brothers and sisters," a third jiaren pronounced this time in words all could comprehend, diverted both Valentina and the Marshal from their argument. "The Legion has been destroyed. He who lays below us now is Alfred the Great, the storied warrior renowned throughout all of Septimi for saving thousands of my people. Do not engage him! I beseech you. Do not engage them!"

"Left Spear is departing formation," the sensors officer reported, and the view outside their aircraft's windows confirmed as much. The entire jiaren flank was tumbling towards the ground, spiralling about as the novice pilots learned in real-time how to land next to the VLF forces.

"Tell our remaining forces to switch all radios to channel two and then reassemble formation," the Marshal ordered his signalswoman.

Valentina's face grew so hot with rage, her mask clouding over in a vehement fog, that she did not even notice that commander had turned, looking imploringly at her for direction.

"What must we do, comrade?" he asked, a telling hint of fear on his voice. Dying against the Legion meant nothing to a Cassian soldier, but ambushing Party allies and being forever consigned to a cadre's dungeon for it, that was something to dread indeed.

The chairwoman clenched her fist as her chomping teeth rattled in disgust. In the end, it seemed, the jiaren had proven their imperial nature after all; they were just as untrustworthy as any pure-blooded cousin.

They would die all the same.

"The Jiaren have determined their fate," Valentina declared, cold and resolute. "We only now deliver it."

After all the blood that had been spilled, all the pain extracted, lives destroyed, what was just a little more now? In the report to the Presidium already being formed in the chairwoman's head, it would barely warrant a note, just one prick of a finger already drained long ago.

The commander looked stupidly back up at her, not understanding the implication of her tone, so Valentina, growling in a look of irascible brutality, pained to make herself clear.

"Fire!" she screamed, banging against the thin metal outsides of the craft. "Kill them all!"

"Of course." The Marshal bowed his head, and a thousand fiery commands were echoed throughout the cabin in response.

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For all the tasteful luxury of the governor's yacht, the ship's escape pods came furnished with only the most spartan of amenities. It had been enough for Mila to survive her impact with the equatorial mountain island, just not to do so comfortably.

The Cassian massaged her battered shoulders, passing worried fingers briefly over previously bandaged wounds that had torn open once again in slamming the rock. The pod was still intact, but imperial designs spared their occupants little of the g-forces from atmospheric re-entry and landing. Cassians always endeavoured to make their ships easy to pilot and gentle to ride; the imperials just swapped out one body with another.

Mila's hands came back wet, but rather than stopping to heal, the biological necessities were briefly cast aside. There was no point waiting for the blood to coagulate; with the amount of adrenaline rushing through her, she was thankful enough the liquid still came in drips and not spurts. All it did now was limit her time, but she was well aware of that pressure already.

Despite the unruly buffeting of her plunge back towards Cassia Quartus, the true terror of the voyage had come from those thirty long uninterrupted minutes of contemplation, her mind forced to process all the dizzying implications of choosing not to contact the Party. The Haruspex would be her bargaining chip, a guarantor of freedom. Mila had no intention of putting the device to use, and she remained profoundly suspicious of Ci's intentions in donating it, but if there was one thing the imperials had taught her well in the all-too-brief tutelage amongst them, it was the value of a bluff.

Though perhaps that was not exactly the way to describe it, because even now as she twisted through the cavernous insides of Kang's mountain fortress, searching out the tyrant who was to be the means of her liberation, she could find little enmity in herself towards that goal for which she had strived all her life. The Party utopia was so close, on the very verge of crystallization, but even in the face of such a grand culmination of efforts, Mila knew the chairwoman had forced upon her a false dichotomy.

She could not choose between Alfred and paradise, because to her, there would be no paradise without Alfred. The Haruspex existed now just to ensure the outcome.

In the end, she still would not betray the cause. That was an absolute, unquestionable in its purest sense. She would only improve their plans, force the Party to unlearn the imperial coercion and realize its own claim to justice. With the arsenal in her control, she would first end one man's suffering, then strive to end the suffering of all mankind.

As the Empire crumbled around them, it was undoubtably within the Party's power. They just needed to be pushed, needed to be steered away from the corrupting influences of ones like Ci Xiao, remembering the brilliant dreams that had united their trans-planetary sisterhood in the first place.

The mountain shuddered and quaked, concussive blasts exploring the rock above her and shattering stalactite in her way. Coated in rubble fragments, Mila could not even afford the indulgence of dusting herself clean. She was not alone on this mountain, and so not a single second devoted to finding Kang and his nuclear controls could possibly be wasted.

Mila hacked and coughed as she ran, the Haruspex bumping along as she dragged it through the nearly lightless cavern. Dark, igneous particles burrowed deep into her chest and lodged themselves wherever they could make their presence most painfully known. Unable to stop and catch even a solitary, fleeting breath, the spy heaved and wheezed, seemingly endowed with the lungs of an aged coal-miner. Stumbling across the body of a servant carelessly strewn on the keep's floor, she stripped some fabric from the dead man's shirt and fashioned a haphazard filter against her mouth.

With nearly every footstep, Mila found another corpse, and their density only multiplied as she moved forward to the fort's inner sanctum. Sorting through a particularly cadaverous pile, she was able to find a serving girl approximate enough in height and build to herself with whom she could exchange garments, though her partner was hardly in any position to barter back too robustly.

The spattering of dead cooks and servants seemed all to be unmolested save for the sickly green rivulets that crept from their mouths, agape and some still ghoulishly shuttering from their muscles' remembered agony. Their eyes were singularly white and aghast, as if each to a man had been as swiftly and shockingly dispatched as the last.

It was only the figure of Kang Shawn himself, a gas mask laying spent in one arm as a heroine needle stuck out from the other, that finally solved the mystery. His command room had grown sparse – just three empty poison cannisters, a row of computer monitors with their associated consoles and the still flaming blowtorch over which Kang had melted the opium now flooding his intoxicated veins.

"I... I... I!" Kang mumbled through his foaming lips, his crooked glasses enlarging one furious eyeball whilst minimizing its opposing, somehow ecstatic one. "I will... I wi-lllll ... will be reeee...." He spat, but the viscous spittle only fell back into his own mouth, "remembered!"

Mila ignored the man, glancing over towards the screens rotating through displays of different sectors of the island. The explosives overhead had been telling; she could see the leather-clad figures who made become so prominent after the Black Legion coup in the colony, but a fair number of VLF white star tunics remained curiously intermingled among them. Neither group seemed to constitute much of an army, and as she watched more closely, she could make out a few floundering figures pounding one another with stones and bloodied fists, carrying on the old feud as if by rote.

Good, she thought, let them destroy each other. It only buys me time. She thought of Alfred, locked in his cell while the pathetic remnants of the VLF were pulverized against the mortar of this island. Buys us time.

She returned to the murmuring despot, thinking her servile costume might win the favour of a few dying words.

"My lord," she pandered, stroking his icy forehead as if with compassion, "my great, bounteous King of Vitharr, rightful Emperor of all the Home Worlds, where lie your glorious weapons, those pretty shells that so capture the essence of our Holy Stars?"

"I...." Kang gargled in response, his eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling, not seeing the woman before him. "I will be ... remem-, remem-, mem... member...ed."

Judging the attempt to be futile, Mila was about to return to the computer and perhaps decipher the launch protocols herself when one of the monitors changed display, sharing a sight as familiar as it was unwanted. It was a fleet of airships, three spear-tipped squadrons of winged death machines rushing at full speed towards the now entirely undefended fortress.

The Party had come after all.

Mila interrogated the procumbent form more forcibly now, paying her disguise no more fidelity. "What have you done, my lord?" she asked. "For what shall thou be remembered?"

The tyrant seemed on the cusp of despair, yet a mystified ecstasy still gleamed from that one, demagnified eye. "I... I will never be Emperor, will I?" he wondered aloud, though the muffled, near soundless thoughts could not in any way have been meant for her.

There was no time to humour this madness. "What have thou done!" she shouted, slapping whatever sense the man still had back into him

It was only at the harshness of her touch that Kang's features finally settled into a singular expression, a mocking, cruel grin that stretched across his face in callous delight. "If I cannot be Emperor," he stated proudly, looking straight into the Cassian's gaze for the first time in their meeting, "then I shall be forever known as the last king of Septimi!"

"Proximity alert." the computer's dispassionate Vidar voice announced, as if in reply. "Warheads now arming."

Mila dropped the overdosed autocrat back into his blissful delirium and whirled towards the command console. Kang had sent the Party into a trap. Their arrival was triggering a missile launch, and scanning further, she realized it was not a handful of bombs either. The entirety of the nuclear arsenal was being armed and automatically deployed to the magnetic launching tubes just a kilometre or so below them. Kang was not just going to end the war for this planet, he was aiming to render it uninhabitable.

The Haruspex glinted from the corner of the room, waiting.

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The fighting would not end.

The constant and repeating reminders of the impending Cassian threat, of the enemy mere hours away from chewing away the imperial ships pulling up the orbital cannon had only deepened the resolve of the opposition. Each faction was only becoming more entrenched as the risks to both expanded, and although Pan had been assured multiple times that Jiang's party would be soon be finished, that he himself must have long since bled out to an untimely death, with no body yet produced, she found it a difficult proposition to believe.

"Praetorian Gov-." The prefect had not even been able to make out the whole title in warning before a bolt to his half black-painted face had silenced him. Quentin fell to the catwalk, covering her ears against the marine's bombardment of the ambushers.

"Time?" Pan asked her radioman, still pressed against the floor but unwilling to waste the delay as her vanguard dissected their opposition.

The signals officer shouted into his radio, inquiring how long until the Cassian fleet would reach firing distance on the orbital cannon, but whenever he paused awaiting a response, all that returned was the same empty static. Once the troop was on their feet again, moving through the bloodied pulp of their former foes, he gulped an anxious sigh and decided to make his report.

"Your honour," he addressed, tapping her shoulder as they marched down the frigate corridors, "we have lost contact with the bridge."

Pan did not even spare a breath as she weighed the new information. Somewhere deep within her consciousness, the now long-repressed academic portion capable of memorizing and recalling a bewildering array of biological facts and trivia, was identifying each precise region of her brain as one by one they rapidly ceased to function. The true percentage was impossible to calculate with any exactitude – three fifths, two thirds, perhaps even greater fractions were becoming permanently lost to her – but the loss was far from just the abstractly mathematical.

She had been jogging longer and harder than ever in her life, yet she felt not drop of sweat glazing her back nor loss of air in her lungs. Words both urgent and vociferous flew all around her, but she found herself unable to listen, not understanding a single one, nor could she add a string of sentences together and glimpse some meaning from the totality. Try as she might, she heard only thunderously jarring rumbles of noise, each signifying almost less than nothing. Instead, the near primordial sections of her psyche still left in use focussed entirely on the faces of the men before her, on their tones, their emotions, their fears and apprehensions, and she responded with a guttural instinct that could not be codified or explained.

"Double speed!" she shouted in command, the whole troupe slamming their boots in hurried obeisance. Something as a distant and intangible as a "bridge" being "lost" held no bearing anymore. If anything, it only reinforced the imperative of success in defeating those she was now openly labelling "the Wangists". The bridge had been intentionally abandoned, controls rerouted to the auxiliary stations which Pan still controlled, and although it had cost her the ebbing loss of each ship's function one by one in a downward slope analogous to the deteriorating hemispheres of her own mind, all that mattered now was what was yet to be gained.

All that mattered was what laid before them now: the central weapons module.

The war over this ship's captaincy had become a secondary affair. In its essence, the frigate was floating city clumped together by little else than the vessel's constant rotating's centripetal force. She had already reconciled herself to the fact that she would have to fight through it block by blood-soaked block, perhaps for weeks at time just as she had done in the colony, before she could establish anything even resembling control. It was irrelevant to her; at least it had become irrelevant to the reptilian brainstem still governing her motor functions. All that imperturbable, inhuman personality desired was to strike, to attack, to feast upon the Cassians, and for that, one needed not the ship in its entirety, just this, the True Void at the heart of the weapons module.

Two of Quentin's soldiers began planting their mortars to the ship floor, but as they forced the miniature cannons to the ground, the action's counter momentum jerked their floating bodies violently upwards towards ceiling. Pan's whole contingent broke formation, their last footsteps propelling them off into a chaotic assortment of tangents, but none touching the life-saving ferrous strips of the catwalk. The Eternal Phoenix had halted its continuous rotation, centripetal gravity reversing into the pure force vectors of unbridled space.

The Wangists took immediate advantage, unveiling a gyrating railgun as they opened the module hatch. A series of cascading booms quickly followed, and suddenly the Black Hundreds were pelted in a maelstrom of projectiles, moving through their bodies in a bi-directional butchery.

The railgun was as precise as it was devastating. Designed specifically for the cramped corridors and thin walls of space warfare, the cannons discharged orbs of shrapnel which shredded whatever they encountered, stopping within the merest nanometer of the ship's hull before embarking on a return voyage to their magnetic core. The orbs would then recommence their grisly explorations, repeatedly skewering the flesh and rending the sinew, before finally depleting their batteries to hang about endlessly haunting the macabre graves of their own invention.

Within seconds, the passageway was filled by little else but the murderous metallic cores, propelled by white puffs of compressed gases as they sought out where to kill the greatest number in the shortest time. Lost of footing and fluttering helplessly, the front was devoured entirely, iron shards penetrating and repenetrating the same Black Legion victims over and over, spraying the hallway in ever denser mists of crimson globules and mutilated body-parts.

In the rearguard, nearer the Praetorian Governor, utter desperation sorted the professionals from the amateurs. Career marines, accustomed to spatial fighting, found the time to activate their repellant fields, and their lay colleagues not quick enough to follow suit found their sloth most viciously punished by the reeling in and reeling out of a million mincing fly-fishermen.

As she drifted on in this ever-filling sink of human remains, however, Pan reveled in the delicacy of her enemy's tactics. With every new surge against her, they proved only more clearly the futility of her attempts at converting them. Even in fighting to the sheerest proximity of death, these people sought to preserve the integrity of the ship, and in the bizarre logic of the deranged, this strangely comforted the woman against whom they fought so bitterly.

While the surviving troopers pushed themselves against the ship's hull, shooting the hovering cores in the only place where the blowback would at least keep them stationary, the Wangists floated out from the weapons module, rifles in hand. Most of the centurions and tribunes had sided with Pan, leaving Jiang a force of mostly raw recruits, and as they flailed about, taking precious moments too long to activate their magnetic boots, Quentin saw her advantage.

"Let it go!" a distraught marine yelled at her as she dove from under the protection of his shield, chasing one of the still orbiting mortars. Summoning an animalistic strength hidden deep within her, Pan thrust the enormous mass until it stuck against the bulkhead, her quieted brain somehow able to bypass the tremorous aches and unsteady rippling in her muscles as the heavy gun mounted onto the wall. She gripped the mortar, feeling as the blood within her clenching hands turned to molten steel, cooling in a hardened and immovable shell around its handles.

"My lady!" her legionnaires cried out, rushing from their shields only to be eviscerated before their message was ever delivered. "Please!" they screamed, "please, do not fire the-."

At last, Quentin thought, loading the cannon. Finally, she could be alone.

A shell exploded against the the airlock adjoining the module to the wider vessel. Bending her newly forged hands, Pan hung on as hard as she possibly could, gripping even as she felt her fingers crack and grow britlle against the tremendous force of the vacuum.

All at one, every single drop of liquid in Pan's gigantic body yearned to be rid of her. Her nose gushed, ears popped, and her throat gave a voiceless, rattling whistle as the air was forcibly wrought from her lungs. Eyes wanted free of their sockets; her brain sought escape from its skull, but even as the woman's very skin seemed preparing to strip itself off her body, her titanic claws stayed clutched around the mortar, anchored fast against the wall.

The hallway was exposed only for a few short seconds before Quentin skidded back to the floor - gravity being automatically restored along with any repressurization - but those seconds had more than sufficed.

The whole of both troops, Pan's and Jiang's, living and dead, the screaming, the terrified, the disemboweled and disemboweling, they had all been washed away, leaving behind only a wide, ghastly smear against the bulkhead where the blood had permanently stained it on its journey into oblivion. All that remained now was the single Wangist who had pressed his boots against the catwalk in time, arms raised in the air with swollen, repressurized eyes begging to surrender.

Cute, Quentin thought to herself, too breathless to speak herself. Thankfully, though, she had regained enough strength to remove a pistol from her belt and shoot the man dead. Even in death, however, the boots kept the ghoulish marionette upright, requiring a swift kick to the corpse's knees before Pan could cross into the empty control chamber.

Quentin looked around for her radioman but failed to see even a trace of the signals officer. Most curiously of all, the entirety of her troupe seemed to have vanished along with him. The mystery was shrugged aside, however; the only memory of the entire last few hours still left inside her was that this was the last weapons module, that control of the True Void now lay at her fingertips. All that was needed was for her to begin the powering sequence, and she would see the frigate transformed for a brief moment into one of the deadliest objects in all the universe.

As triumphant as it was, the feeling was a strange one, however. She had hoped to experience it with her friends and comrades; yet as she looked about her, she could not escape the intensity of her solitude. It so remarkably vexing, this mind of hers. One minute she could see herself traveling in a company of dozens, loyal Black legionnaires all, and then the next she was utterly and confoundingly alone, her body awash in foreign pains and ailments whose arrival was just as inexplicable as her companion's disappearance.

"But thou can never truly lonesome, can thou?" Wang asked, remerging from the shadows as he always did, the bullet-hole still shining through his barraged ribs.

"I will rid myself of thee!" she cursed at the empty console beside her, "just as I shall rid the cosmos of all thy kind!"

Wang smiled, old, yellowed teeth grinning even as red spittle poured between their cracks. "That is not the game, little sister, and this is certainly not how it is won."

"We shall see about that!" Quentin snapped, her cold, still clenching hands reforming just enough posture to ignite the frigate's weapons.

The ghost only grinned deeper, his smile cutting further and further into his face as if extended by two little razors severing his blemished, rotting skin. "Ohhhhhhhh, we shall see," he sputtered and moaned, masochistically reveling as the blades etched an ever more wicked smile.

Pan's eyes fluttered between him and the control panel, not understanding the disparity. How could the spirit remain even as the True Void was now seconds from forming?

Why has he not gone? she thought.

"Why indeed?" the apparition replied, cackling.

"Ha!" Quentin laughed back, her voice her trembling yet still defiant. "I know thou are gone! I am no lunatic." She gripped the sides of her head, sandwiching her face against what the abrupt smashing of phantom hammers all around her body, the residual effects of a vacuum exposure she could no longer remember.

"Thou are not there!" she cried, falling the against bulkhead. "I made thee up! I am not insane. I am not in-."

Am I not? The thought raced through her mind, though in a voice not her own.

"No!" she asserted. "I killed thee. Thou are a product of my imagination. I am no lunatic!"

There was no response.

"Answer me, Wang! By right, answer me and be gone!"

The empty walls stared back at her, the glaring warning lights playing across the bulkheads in little arcs that from just the right angle could strike one as a thin, sarcastic smile.

"I found thee! I found thee!" Quentin screamed in elation.

Pan danced about almost in time to the rhythmic hums of the ship's energizing weapons, chasing the air with the blade of a hunting knife, ready to slash her assailant at the first invisible contact. "Damn thee, Wang!" she screamed, stabbing blindly as she darted and parried.

"Damn thee! Damn thee! Damn thee!"

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Where am I?

I do not know, Mila's mind answered back, though there was something odd in the response, a twinge, a tone, a foreign accent somehow grafted on to her very thinking.

It is dark, so very, very dark.

True. I see nothing.

Can I feel?

I feel nothing.

Hear?

Hear nothing.

Taste?

With what lips?

Smell?

With what nose?

Where am I?

How can I possibly tell?

Mila concentrated, trying her best to-.

Concentrate? How? On what?

I know not. There is nothing here, she thought.

She? Why must I speak of myself in the third person? There is no other but "I" here.

Can I be sure?

It struck Mila then that she could not, in fact, be certain, that ever since she could remember having the ability to think, it had never quite been her own thoughts that had occupied her-

Who is this "Mila"?

I am.

Yes, her mind sighed, somehow facetious. I know I am Mila, but who is that?

That does not quite sound like me, does it?

A pause.

You're right! No... I'm right. It does not.

But who then?

I.... Father? It was Father's voice just now: his reaction, his annoyance, his buried anger.

We can try again. What does this sound like?

No. It's not right, and... and who is this we? Am I alone in here or not?

I am alone, as alone as I ever was.

Which is to say, in this undisciplined mind of ours, not alone at all.

I know who that sounded like.

Valentina, yes. The critique is unmistakeable.

Can I truly have no thoughts of my own?

There is no burden more exhausting than the weight of being one's own self.

Explain.

How can I explain myself to myself?

What else is there to do in such a place as this?

But you already know what I am to say! You feel it too, do you not?

Feel what? I have nothing with which to feel.

But I know! I know that every line of reasoning, every train of thought, every idea that comes springs forth in myself without hesitation is reckoned unprincipled, unimaginable, even inhuman by all those around me. When the class would think of oranges, I dreamed of apples. When they possessed themselves with numbers and logic, I could only stomach pictures and poetry. The things they see, my eyes neglect. The things they intuit, my intuition overlooks. The things they feel, I cannot ever hope to experience. Whatever prides them, shames me, and in whatsoever I am fascinated, they are only repulsed.

I am an alien creature trained only to paint her face in the camouflage of humanity. Every second of every day, I strain against that nearly unbearable character, that thing that others call my "self", because to tilt the mask for just an instant would invite extermination. I am made to dress like them, to speak like them, to have their thoughts run through my brain, punished all my life for a crime no law shall ever care to articulate. It is a load so great that even when all alone, surrounded in nothing but silent stillness, I cannot dare remove it.

Intriguing.

And what exactly does intrigue me? Is this what I am become? A pompous self-flatterer? I call my own self fascinating?

By who else's standards am I to judge?

But that is exactly it, is it not? I have no standards but theirs. All I ever do feels horribly wrong, yet I have not even the slightest notion of how it might be corrected. I have come to know them and their ways so well that they speak their thoughts into me with voices claiming to be my own, and often I cannot tell the difference. They speak in my tongue, yes, but the words belong to someone else.

Whose words were these?

First and foremost, my mother's.

How can I be sure?

It has always been that way. As I aged, the voices grew with me. I became more accustomed to them than even my own thoughts, until eventually I began thinking in their tones without warning or ability to stop. It is her whom speaks loudest, so loud in fact that even as I speak in the world of reality, it sounds to me with each passing day it is her tongue in my mouth and not my own.

Being human does not mean recognizing my humanity, no. I simply act as if I were human, and so long as the performance is convincing enough, I am treated as such. I have those on whom I base the role, and on some days, I act so perfectly, I may forget almost entirely that I am even acting at all. I fool myself into believing that perhaps I truly have become human, that every word, gesture and affect are not borrowed, that every sentence is not a half-hearted lie, that there is some inalienable quality to me that can never be lost or fail to be recognized, no matter the space nor time nor unit of analysis.

But I always remember, eventually.

Another pause.

So, if I am just those things that I copy from others, and in this... place there is no other from which to copy....

Is there even an "I" in here at all?

Suddenly, what was dark now became black. Though the space did not even exist, it tightened, constricting, squeezing at an ever-accelerating pace.

I...

There was nothing here.

Am...

Nothing but terror.

Afraid.

Where once was void, there now came an infinite nothingness, a nothingness that suffocated, that suppressed, that tortured, a nothingness that screamed and hissed, that immolated and devoured, a nothingness that accosted and condemned all without explanation or relief and so threatened to continue from now until the end of eternity. In fact, deep within that hidden and inescapable layer of nothingness, "now" had become an illusion; "now" was a falsehood, a fool's gold, a primitive superstition.

I... am... afraid.

The reel of film was clicking by too slowly, each new picture disjointed and out of sync with the last. The gods had plucked the roll from its projector and begun to burn away random frames, lacking all impetus, neither even humour nor malice, save pure chaotic apotheosis. There was no continuity from moment to moment, no comprehensible narrative, no chronological structure, no action and reaction, no cause and effect. Nothing maintained no relation to nothing; all was dissolved in all.

I am afraid.

An infinite, petrifying pause and then:

There is an I!

A breath.

I can breathe! Dear stars, I can breathe.

Stars... Really? That is my foothold in this reality? A banished religion of heliophiles?

Once more, suffocation.

Must...

Lungs did not exist, yet they cried in bitter agony.

Must find a...

A breath. Only a single breath. Just a breath would make it all go away.

Mantra. Must find a Mantra. Mantra!

That is silly. Why would I do that?

Finally, she could breathe.

Who is this "she"?

A mantra! It works.

Try it, then.

Party, yes. The Party. Glory to the All-Cassian Party!

Juvenile. I hate the Party. I betrayed them by coming here alone, did I not?

Confusion, the stricture ever tighter.

Where is "here"?

The air sucked away.

Alfred! Please, let it be Alfred. Alfred!

That is worse. Him? He is my identity?

Alfred! Alfred! Alfred!

What sort of self-abnegation is that? Should I tear out my own womb and make myself an incubation chamber?

I....

I, what? What am I?

I am...

A spy! A Party cadre! An instrument of a million deaths, a thousand tortures, a hundred torments.

I am...

I am nothing. I am a being of painful repetition, a single link in an infinite chain that stretched farther back in time than I can comprehend and farther forward than I can bear to believe. I am lost in a-.

I am Mila!

No. We already agreed otherwise.

I am Mila!

I should probably reconside-.

And "you". You are-.

This is insanity. There cannot be two heads inside of one.

You are...

I am me! I am Mila. Is that not what we decided?

It was not just the arrest of suffocation she could feel now, but the feeling of the air itself: the taste of it, the smell of it, the pleasure as it satiated her most instinctive desire to fill her starving lungs.

You are the Haruspex.

Mila sensed a grinning from outside her. It was the first time she had truly felt any sort of awareness separating her from that which she was not.

Close, but no, we are not.

A realization.

You are Legion!

Suddenly the field of view cleared all around her, a singular blue sashed legionnaire appearing before her from the darkness.

"Indeed, Mila," he said, stepping towards her, a hand outstretched in greeting. "It is a pleasure for us to finally meet thee. We have been waiting so very long."

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"Alfred! Great one! Reach out thy hand!"

When the monstrous aluminum bird has first swooped to overtake him, Alfred's first instincts had been to swim below the surface. Instead of reigning hellfire upon him as he had seen those beastly chimeras do in the Hellastharr, however, the jiaren pilots hovered just inches from the sea's edge. Opening a metal hatch, they extended their arms to pull the commander in from his watery incarceration.

"You are alive!" one man exclaimed while another quickly doused Alfred in a towel. Evacuating his own cushioned chair for the slab beside it, he pointed Alfred towards an empty seat.

"We were worried," he said. "Seeing the slaughter below, it seemed doubtful any would survive."

"I...." Alfred was hardly capable of stringing together more than that single syllable. His eyes darted nervously about, chest heaving as it verged upon hyper-ventilation, the oppressive suddenness of his newfound circumstances too shocking to fully absorb. "My men," he asked, voice scratching as every sound cut with the remnants of ocean salt, "did they survive?"

But as he looked closer in awaiting his answer, Alfred noticed the Red Army insignia strapped to his saviours, and he tried to jerk himself away, easily preferring death to yet another sentence of Party captivity. His two neighbours, thinking the listless squirming of the pathetically frail man was just the natural reaction to the unwieldy piloting of their novice helmsman, only strapped a series of buckles and leashes around his weakened body to keep him still.

After affixing an oxygen-mask to his face, Alfred's partner on his right grabbed a forceful hold of his arm, and though the commander's muscles immediately yearned to strike, he was too restrained now to do anything else but hope the man meant no harm. The jiaren just anchored himself upright long enough to harness his own body to the ship's frame, though, and with that finally done, he replied to Alfred's original question.

"Some, my lord. A few hundred we think. We are ferrying whoever we can and rallying at another point on the island."

Alfred nodded, sighing with almost all his being. Flooded with at least some much needed if only momentary relief, his vision stabilized enough to adequately scan his surroundings.

Scattered amongst the munition crates and supply boxes of the cargo hold, he could make out about two dozen faces, all with their own eclectic jiaren mixture of imperial and Cassian features. Their eyes all flashed in excitement behind their masks, yet a handful still stood out for the intensity of their gaze, and even with the rubber tubing covering most of their features, Alfred could immediately recognize why.

He had saved their lives once.

As he met the eyes of one, Alfred recalled the last time he had seen them. The man had been peeling the bark from a rotten, discarded log with nothing but the yellowed keratin of his fingernails, unable to muster the strength to sharpen the putrefying wood with a stone. Even with his skeletal form so horrifying gaunt that every bone poked from his flesh in sharper points than his rough-fashioned spear, the refugee had planted his thin, leathery feet proudly into the ground, steadying himself for one final sacrifice in the name of freedom.

Seeing this man now, rescued and nourished back to health, his slender frame now populated with the first sproutings of tiny muscles, his wearily aged face bearing the tell-tale wrinkles of joy displacing the lines of anxiety, Alfred ignored the tribulations of his own sorry position, and revelled instead in the deliverances of these others. The black splotches of electrical burns on his skin, the matted flesh left from searing knives and fired irons, the hole still cut through his rib from which he could now always feel the beating of his own heart, it had not been in vain after all. Alfred felt his lip quivering; and he was grateful that the mask could obscure the profundity of the emotions welling within him.

"I remember thee from the Hellastharr," Alfred gesticulated in wavering hands towards the man. "What be thy name?"

"Guwan, my lord," he replied, shifting uncomfortably both from the abruptness of the craft's turn and the uncertainty in how formally he should address the general before him, "though, to your people I am often called 'Godwin.'"

Alfred smiled. "It is fine, Guwan," he said, tasting the jiawen tones like a long-awaited delicacy on his parched tongue, "I shall call thee as thou are, not as my people might force thee to be."

The man bowed his head, so overcome with humiliating gratitude that he could not bare to look up at the living icon before him. "I am so sorry, my lord. I truly do not know what I could do to ever repay y-."

Guwan was cut off by the red-flashing alarms, and the captain's voice shouting through the intercom, "all crew, brace for-."

Alfred, still staring forward where the jiaren had been, looked out now only through a freshly cleaved window, the entire tail of the aircraft melted off from a single explosive blow. For several terrifying seconds as he plummeted to the ground, Alfred could see the earth spinning around him as the ferociously waving waters, the yellow plastic-clogged beaches and oil spattered skies all blurred together into one dizzyingly colourful blob of vibrant death.

Somehow, even the raucous crash of the steel monstrosity slamming into the island sand could not overpower the sound of a neck snapping right beside Alfred's ears. He turned to see the corpse grotesquely twisted around him, frantically fighting against the imperatives of gravity as it fell towards his lap. That corpse had offered up its seat and headrest, and now, its dead eyes stared blanky directly down at the broken spine it had earned through generosity.

Alfred struggled with his shackling harnesses, resorting to slicing the belt with the jagged edge of the craft's ruined shielding when the jammed buckles refused to unhook. Scrambling towards the injured cries and tortured screams, Alfred could hear also the chattering of the cockpit's radio, jittery voices buzzing in frantic jiawen before they were cut off into indefinite static.

"The Party," a makeshift medic crawling up behind Alfred translated for him, "they are attacking us."

"I thought you served the Party?" Alfred asked, nearly hysterical as he hid as best he could from the irrepressible realization of what these jiaren had sacrificed in his name.

"We disobeyed to save you, my l-." The man tried to continue, but Alfred rushed out from the wreckage, unable to bear another word.

The plane had scored a long, ragged trail through the beach and all the way down to the island bedrock as it crash-landed, and strewn all across that fissure, bodies laid in similarly unthinkable states of agony or death. Yet, somehow the carnage splayed about the land could not rival the battles being fought over the heavens.

The jiaren ships had been caught completely without warning, and although a few had been able to abort their landing in time to return fire, the battle was hopelessly lopsided. Breaking their formation, the two pincing hundred-toothed jaws of better-trained Cassian pilots chewed through their opposition, belching out nothing more than the macabrely mingled flotsam of shredded human and machine.

Though the sky rained hot iron upon the pulverized island, Alfred could find no will within him to shelter in the plane's smoking husk. The beach was teaming with jiaren, men and women emptying out from every newly-crashed aircraft, men and women he had likely saved from the fiery clutches of certain death in the VLF camps only to be delivered to another annihilation under the assault of the Party bombers. He screamed, sinking to his knees as bitter tears of helplessness coursed down his splintering cheeks, welcoming the on-rush of molten metal that might mercifully bring an end to this mortal hellscape.

"I repent!" he howled, thinking of the innocents whose souls he harvested in his prophet's name.

"I repent!" he wept, haunted by the ghosts of the enemies he had so viciously slain.

"I repent!" he roared, remembering the torments Elena had inflicted on his miserable flesh, only for him to unleash that demoness upon his own generals - men he had once called friends - all to protect a secret that had never demanded protecting.

In the end, it had all been just as pointless as anything else. His hands cursed all they felt. His good intentions yielded evil ends. His kiss of love had become a touch of death.

"Forgive me," he thought to himself, too feeble to usher forth another sound.

Alfred felt his lover's hand placed once more on his aching shoulder. It dawned on him then, that this time, his life truly must be rapidly coming to its end. His face became bathed in a wash of tears, the triumphantly dismal realization allowing a mixture of fatal despair and spiritual elation to bridge over any innate fear of the unknown. This lonesome journey had reached its conclusion; the dismembered was to be made whole once more, and even if he had burned away his chance at paradise, there would be providence in the reunion to come.

As Edward's strong, reassuring hand materialized more fully in its embrace, Alfred could hear that silky, prophetic voice reaching out to him.

"Thou are forgiven."

"What?"

Alfred gave a startled look behind him, but there was nothing to see. Edward's hand was gone and his celestial presence along with it.

Above, however, the Stars had given their answer.

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Nearly half a million kilometres away, the Eternal Phoenix fired upon the Cassian fleet.

The Party armada – twenty-three ships stretched across a field of battle so wide it took light itself more than twenty seconds to pass from one edge to the other, the collective hopes and dreams of thirteen billion people whose civilization had fallen nearly to the absolute brink of desolation only to find the most incredible of salvations, the symbol of incredible technological genius and the unlimited possibilities of human achievement even in the face of the most daunting was entirely obliterated before a single vessel had even the slightest idea of what had happened.

Although the Home Empire had struggled for millennia to keep its secrets, one, perhaps the most the important of them all, had remained hidden, if for no other reason than that it inevitably destroyed all with whom it contacted.

Many thousands of years ago, when the Empire was yet young and humanity's greatest scientific minds had been set upon solving for the ever-present limitations of lightspeed, the imperials had discovered that the vacuum of space was not exactly a perfect one. It was a vacuum, yes, but only metastable. Replete with the still unknown and unknowable dark energy, space itself was absent of the presence a more perfect vacuum. In the process of folding said space to develop warp travel, one could - in fact, sooner or later, one almost certainly would (by accident or by intention - create a True Void: a bubble in space somehow less dense all round it. Left unchecked, the whole of the physical universe would fold into it at faster than the speed of light, working as fast as possible to obey its most precious rule, that nature abhorred a vacuum.

Though the True Void at the centre of the Cassian fleet existed for less time than any instrument ever invented or ever to be invented by man could measure, its brief play upon the cosmological stage squashed each of the Party vessels to less than microns as they were stretched into a nearly infinite new depth. Bursting out shockwaves through the very fabric of space-time itself, the gravitational strings tying Septimi, its moons and the imperial ships together were each in their turn plucked (if not torn asunder), rippling outwards in all possible directions, only to resettle in chaos and mutual extermination.

The Eternal Phoenix, the purveyor of this quantum annihilation, was flung from the discharge into relative safety, though the G-forces experienced by such the blowback was enough to liquefy the vertebrae of almost anyone not pressed tightly against a flat surface. Her three sister ships, sharing a cable whose tension unexpectedly increased by exponential magnitudes incalculable to all but the most brilliant of arithmeticians were snapped into pieces from the pressure. The two smallest of Septimi's moons, asteroids by any other name, slammed into their much larger cousin, and suddenly the vast heap of raw material the Empire had so meticulously planned to be converted into its lunar defence stations lay in tatters.

At its core, the great Vitharr moon experienced a re-emergence of volcanic activity not last seen for the past half billion year. On its edges, the smaller, more agile chunks tumbled in tangents towards the surface of their mother planet. A stray asteroid even nudged the old colonial solar mirror from its decade's old geostationary path, and now the repurposed transport longed to relive its glory days when the Home Empire had discovered this glistening gem more than seventy years ago, only at a far more dangerous velocity.

As the remnants of Septimi's orbital partners, both moon and vessel alike, pierced through the clouds, the difference between night and day became a strictly academic one. Myriad comet tails streaked through the atmosphere and although relatively few impacted anywhere of any real importance, so much debris was launched back into the heavens that they became blotted in a deep, ambient purple. Nearer the stratosphere, the colour reached even a deep blood red as the skies set themselves on the fire, the planet transforming for deadly minutes into a giant, eerily beautiful oven.

To Alfred and the few jiaren fighters crawling on the ground, that the Party craft above them had been baked away and fallen into the ocean was entirely a secondary concern. Even on a planet as irreparably divided and hideously anarchic as Septimi, the blanketing of an impenetrably dark dust now coming to smother the whole world took precedence. All who remained alive now, Red or Black, Vidar or jiaren, Cassian or imperial, shared precisely the same goal: seek shelter.

Hearing a VLF signal from a hidden passage into the mountain, Alfred rallied whomever he could towards the entrance of the fortress. Whether the Vidar race lived or died would depend entirely on how deep they could press inwards and how fast they might be able to do it.

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"But, who are you?" Mila asked, still failing to comprehend the smartly dressed officer standing casually before her. "And what does it mean that you are 'Legion?'"

The legionnaire pursed his lips, as his head tilted side to side in thought, the pleasantly rolling countryside behind him seemed to twitch almost in time with his movements, as if he were standing more behind an electronic backdrop. "It is difficult to explain," he said, "though I will attempt to do so to the best of thy limited individual understanding."

Their frame of reference was shifted lightyears away and thousands of decades past to a time and place entirely foreign to Mila, and yet it was a setting which she recognized as instantly as if she had walked about it with her own two feet. White cassocked figures walked with her through a disquieting, gaudily white lamped laboratory in the city of Shenzhen on Old Terra. They were affixing medical diodes and suction clamps directly to the shaved heads of gangly, empty-eyed participants encircling a massive metallic cylinder only vaguely reminiscent of the much smaller modern Haruspex. Needles poked through the patients' wrists, a wash of chemicals luring all into a deep, collective trance.

Though their eyes closed asleep one after the other each in accordance with their individual metabolic rates, once entranced, their irises radiated a pale, nauseating yellow, opening all at once and staring directly at Mila. The researchers seemed unaware of her presence, yet the sickly bald men, their gazes affixed into one many-eyed, many-legged, many-minded creature, could not be so easily fooled.

"We are Legion." Their words echoed in deafening unison, coursing through every molecule of Mila's form, yet not a single of their lips ever moved. "It was our dreams that fed the first Haruspex in the tenth year of the Emperor Cai Lun."

"Our nightmares..." one of the men rasped out from the far corner of Mila's vision.

The legionnaire returned, tapping at her shoulder just as the lab was disappearing. He held his arm aloft, pointing at the astonishing possibilities just as they materialized for the most ephemeral of micro-seconds before them.

"Think of it, knowing the future before said future has even occurred, predictions so accurate they take the place of prophecy in a godless society," he said, swept in his own glorious revelation. "No more earthquakes, no floods, no volcanoes or hurricanes; every life saved from disaster, every crop delivered from blight, every house settled on eternal foundations. Diseases eradicated before their first infection, enemies scourged before they ever rise to prominence. An infinite species stretching not just across our ludicrous, children's trading-card game of stars and systems, but throughout all the Silver River, perhaps the whole of the cosmos, never to fall until the fall of time itself!"

Then his expression soured, transformed into a grimace. "But every prediction needs its data, and for the Haruspex, its data was... us."

The scene bled away once more, this time to a boundless abyss of dark amber amniotic fluid stretching out in all horizons, densely populated with all variety of human forms, suspended on spindly, almost cancerous umbilical cords stretching down to the unseen depths. "The Haruspex yearns only for information, and ever since it has been us - the legionnaires, the auxiliaries, the most expendable of the most expendable - whose minds have satiated that unquenchable thirst, sleeping in its grasp as the Legion travels through the stars."

One of the naked, floating forms snapped awake, his words gurgling through the fluid in his mouth, "she wraps us in mother's arms."

His neighbour agreed, "arms which warm us."

Another awoke behind her, grabbing with slimy, gelatinous fingers. Whispering uncomfortably into her ear, he said, "arms which afflict us."

The vision evaporated around her, the wax figures and their oceanic womb melted down to a grotesque puddle clinging at Mila's feet. A harsh, spuriously undetailed landscape stretched out before, not a single tree, flower or shade of green to be found outside the myriad craters and featureless sink-pits. It was if the surface of the moon itself had been deluged in rain and ordnance for a hundred eons, leaving behind only scars and muck.

"Careful," Legion warned, "the mud is alive."

A sea of writhing and gored, filth-spattered hands rose from the dirt, first groping blindly at Mila's ankles, then her legs until, too late, she realized they had begun to drag her down towards their desolate netherworld.

Mila floundered and fought, trying to scream, but a gag of grimy fingers muzzled her clay-drenched cries.

The legionnaire knelt, watching as she was steadily drowned beneath the murky surface, impervious to the wriggling digits clawing at him. "We are the cost of Empire, the living memory of imperial woe. Every siege, every rebellion, every injury and plague, every blockade and starvation, every war and pyrrhic victory, it only expands our unexpandable grief. Each of us is trapped here, forced to live and relive the worst of our experiences, the most depraved of our fantasies, the grimmest of our traumas ad infinitum, all while the Haruspex watches, processing, calculating, determining how humans might react to any and all scenario, no matter how terrible."

As he watched over the sinking Cassian, his strangely serene visage was disrupted briefly again, remorseful white pearls catching the light on his cheek. He continued, his voice caught, "every woman we ever ravished, every village we ever razed or city we ransacked, every throat we slit or nation we erased, we remember them.... We are made to remember, all at once and forever."

"Help... meee....," Mila sputtered, spitting out the last of her pleas just as her head fell below the darkness.

"But," the legionnaire interjected, his dour lapse now recovered, "with time, we learned to take our vengeance."

Mila felt herself pulled back from the brink. The impossibly opaque totality of her surrounding was sucked from existence, replaced with the same pleasantly fake matte painting of the Tuscan hinterlands on which they had begun their odyssey.

"The Haruspex is only as effective as the data we feed it," Legion explained, rematerializing atom by sparkling atom in a wave of gaussian interference. "So, we have coordinated our efforts. We intentionally misremember, skewing the machine's calculations, causing random errors and false projections."

Mila's head was spinning. The visions had seemed so real she could not neither feel nor truly ascertain any level of safety, yet even still, her curiosity could not be sated with fear alone. She yearned to delve deeper even as every other aspect of her psyche dreaded what might be next discovered. "Is that why merging with you consciously drives one insane? You implant false memories which the waking mind cannot untangle?"

Her interlocutor flashed just the hint of a condescending grin. "It is not so simple as this, although it is true almost none can separate their thoughts from our own. Most people only define themselves in relation to some other, so the vast majority cannot even survive entry into our collective consciousness. Presented with no alternative with which to juxtapose themselves, their minds grasp desperately at the infinite nothing, clutching at that nothing for a final form of self-definition and by so doing, one annihilates the self."

"Why, then, was I able to survive?" Mila asked, still not assessing whether the danger had passed or merely halted temporarily.

Legion bit his lip, pondering. "We cannot fully articulate why thou succeeded where others failed, but we would posit the Party's mind programming paid some dividends. As horrific as the experience may have been, thy efforts to reassert thyself, to find thyself in the midst of the mind's own obliteration is perhaps what has made thee one of the few people in all the universe who can truly empathize with our condition."

Mila could feel a shock spreading through her, and worse still, she could sense Legion feeling it as well: every sensation shared, every thought spoken aloud.

"How can you know of what the Party did to me?" She creeped backwards as she spoke, yet each step bringing back to exactly the same position on the infinite treadmill. "How can you read my memories?"

The legionnaire shrugged. "Thy remembrances are no longer thine alone, Lyudmila Ivanovna. They belong to Legion now, and if we are not careful, they will be gobbled up by the Haruspex as well."

Mila fought against the terror gnawing just at the edges of her soul, hearing the winds around her whisper every mantra as she repeated them in her head.

I am Mila. I am Mila. I am....

"What do you mean, 'if we are not careful?'" she asked, breaking the chill gust of her own anxious thoughts.

Legion smiled, gripping the Cassian by her shaking arms. A gravely serious yet simultaneously excited look worked over him as he said, "with thee, Mila, we have an opportunity - the greatest opportunity we have had in millennia - to strike back, to not only end our suffering, not only end thine and Alfred's as well, but to end the suffering of all mankind!"

It is reading my desires, the woman wondered to herself, hearing the gales singing her musings right back to her.

The legionnaire's expression only became more fixated, hyper focussed to the point of near derangement. "It is no trick; thou can determine so thyself. Reach out, Mila. Extend the new limbs we have given thee. Kang's arsenal, the weapons for which thou have searched so long and so zealously, feel them now as if each was a finger in thy one, infinite hand. The launch has been halted, this planet saved. The missiles belong to thee now, thee and thee alone."

Legion had approached so closely now that Mila could see beyond the inky blackness of his pupils. "Now," he demanded, a frenzied, neuroticism on the verge of overtaking him, "thou must use them."

His eyes grew larger, reflections of innumerable everlasting horrors and agonies welling within them. Its tone became a tortured amalgamation of a million anguished screams, howling in hellish perpetuity as it ushered forth the final request, "use them, and destroy the Empire."

"I...," Mila kept trying to retreat, yet somehow every step only brought her closer. "I do not understand how...."

"One imperial ship yet survives, and for thee, we can requisition it," it elucidated. "We have been waiting for thee. For millennia, Mila, we waited, but now we can wait no longer. With thee at the helm, walking between the world of the mind and world of the phenomena, between Legion and Empire, thou can pilot the Eternal Phoenix through the stars, appearing wherever the Haruspex would least expect, leaving behind only radioactive wastes in our wake. The Empire, now and for forever, will cease to be, and not another nightmare shall ever be added to troubled sleep."

The Cassian shook, a firestorm of nerves shocking her with every glimpse of every planet and every life whose destruction this devil sought. "How many?" she demanded, accepting now that she could not outrun this no matter how desperately she tried.

Legion scowled. "What concern is that? It is only one moment in time. For an Empire of fifty thousand years whose very existence causes and will cause countless calamities for every second longer that it lingers, the brief-."

"How many?" Mila yelled, an electricity tingling around her, strong enough to push the legionnaire back. "How many will die?"

The man blinked, and Mila could hear him wondering where her newfound powers had stemmed. Knowing little could be hidden here anyway, however, he still elected to answer. "Hundreds of billions, for certain. About a trillion in all, though the imperial census has not been accurate for many centuries now."

Legion only shrugged, and the same trillion lives that struck him as nothing more than a triviality assaulted his guest with the full, incomprehensible weight of their tragedy, each death so uniquely heart-wrenching that even when fitted amongst a galaxy of such calamities it remained tragic in its own, specifically horrendous way.

Mila could feel the void returning, the air being pressed from her lungs. She shook her head. "No. I will not do it. I... I cannot do it. It is too many, too much. It is wrong!"

Legion threw up his arms, incensed. "Thou have dedicated thy whole to the extinction of this Empire. Thou know its evils nearly as profoundly as we do ourselves."

"And how does the evil of an Emperor condemn the fate of his subjects?" Mila accused, startled by the thing's callousness. "No, this cannot be the way, Legion," she affirmed, gritting her teeth. "Destruction is but half the equation; replacement is the other."

"Rid of their Emperor and parasitic apparatus that supports Him, His people can be enlightened to the benefits of true liberation. But only if they yet live! I am not of the past, superstitious Cassian ilk who believe one's soul can freed from beyond the grave. There is only the here and now for salvation, and as much as I desire your release, it cannot be bought at a price so unthinkably dear."

The legionnaire's expression turned blank, his speech flat and unbetraying. "So, even after all they have done, both to thy people and to thee most personally, thou still believe most fervently their lives have some mystical, intrinsic value we must strive to preserve?"

"They are human beings!" Mila shouted back with a stalwart clamour under which even Legion bristled.

"If only thy opponents saw it that way," he muttered, dripping in caustic cynicism.

Mila could not explain how the thought came to her, but all of sudden, she found herself overcome with an all-encompassing and inescapable dismay.

"What..." she was not quite certain what she needed to ask, but the premonition was too overwhelming to be ignored. "What has happened?"

The man's stare became imposingly cold, as harsh as the most sharply chiselled stone. "They have released a virus into your population, Cassian. Already, it is too late to stop it. Most, if not all of your race is now doomed to die."

Mila reeled; her once sturdy legs collapsed to molten rubber under the impact of the news. The backdrop countryside became thickly maculed with the spectres of her past. Her family, her friends, her allies and partners, those people she had sworn to protect and longed to see transcended, all as equally dead as the next. Their pale, hollow faces floated about her, somber, defeated gazes inundating their solitary surviving sister with all their kindness, their loves, their selfless acts and glowing smiles; all crumbled to dust.

"So long as the Empire persists, this will always be inevitable," remarked the legionnaire, helping Mila to her feet as he slung a comforting arm around her. "The Empire guards its power jealously. To it, the advancement of barbarian cultures remains no just a political threat, but an existential one. Worse still, that the savages have conquered them before only renders the threat more real, and their countermeasures the more extreme. They regard the Yuan dynasty with the most fearful disdain, an aberration that could just have easily resulted in their demise as it did their transformation."

"There is something inherent in the advancement of technology itself, in the folding of space to travel faster than light, that generates weapons so powerful, threats so terrifying, the Empire reckons it preferable to decimate whole civilizations rather than risk the secret being shared. Some of their academics posit that the stars remain empty save us for the very same reason. Perhaps every other alien people who ever ventured out into the cosmos, warping space as we do, fell inexorably upon self-immolation. The imperials are determined not to meet that fate, and, in following this path, they have become the very annihilator they themselves do dread."

The comforting hand on her shoulder gripped painfully tighter now, constricting her. "We must end it, Mila. We must break the cycle. We must finally bring peace to a weary universe, restore silence through the echoes."

Mila pressed her head against her knees, positioning herself like the distraught Karl had once done before her, tears flooding her beleaguered cheeks. "No," she whispered, tilting her head weakly back and forth, repeating herself with a single, straining breath. "No. No. No. No. I cannot. Not that. I cannot do that. I cannot."

Legion's fists plunged through her shoulder, grasping straight onto her clavicle and pulling with agonizing force. "It must be done."

The pain only summoned up an appallingly stark clarity capped with a booming, "I will not!"

Mila's body exploded with a crush of radiant energy, blasting the legionnaire to his particulate matter.

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"Mila!"

She blinked, finding herself hovering in a swarm of grease-laden Haruspex tentacles astride Kang's septic corpse on one side, the arsenal control console on the other, and in front-.

"Alfred!"

Her moans resonated in a cacophonous layer of distinct frequencies, vibrating with an unfamiliar, almost ghoulish timbre, giving the commander pause.

"Halt," Alfred ordered the stumbling escort of jiaren and VLF behind him, proceeding at a cautious pace towards the yellow-eyed Mila baying atop a teeming pillar of rubber appendages.

"Alfreeeeed," Mila called out, her hissing speech sounding at once frantic as it was calm, comforting as it was imperilled, as frightenedly confused as it was absolutely certain. "Helpppp meeee."

Alfred stepped back, one timid hand reaching at the sword on his hip while the other fondled the pistol still hidden near the open thumping of his heart.

"No!" Mila cried. "The Haruspex!" Her mind quivered as it sensed Legion lurking once more on the outlines of her consciousness. "Please, Alfred. Remove me from the...."

The storming tentacles jerked erratically upwards, swallowing Mila's whole lower body, and in the contours of her blinking vision, a putrid, half-dismembered legionnaire resembled itself piece by rotted piece.

Alfred had backed into a wall, pushing himself as far as he could from the motorized whirlwind. "What do thou want of me, Mila?" he asked in a nervous whine, agitated but searching out any way to rescue her from the wriggling harnesses.

Behind Mila appeared a bottomless tunnel of teething faceless human mouths sewn together in a sopping mucus membrane. Spinning her head just as she registered their bleeding gums clamping at the soles of her feet, the legionnaire, already rushing towards her, kicked her down to the gnawing depths below.

"No!" Alfred heard Mila's possessed body scream as the tendrils lashed out, a flurry of slimy hoses, each sawing a gashing cicatrice down the walls of the chamber whenever they touched. Alfred rolled, unsheathing his blade right as it was needed to slice away a probing appendage.

"Stop this!" he pleaded, overtired limbs locking in place, unable to bat away the onslaught of diode-tipped tentacles nicking and grazing him as he ran. "Dear stars, stop this, Mila!"

Mila was too far down to hear anything now. She could but fall and continue to fall, her plummet interrupted only by a desperate clinging on a still clamping mouth. Though her motion stopped, her thoughts poured like sweat from her glands, dripping down her to continue their plunge, each droplet loosening her tenuous grip.

Yet, somehow, even as her own mind persisted in its sloshing down the endless tunnel, she began to hear the groaning of the infinite mouths all around her. Their words were slurred and muted through the dribbling of their toothless gums, but as Mila strained herself to hear, the origin of the sound became obvious. It laid just beyond this place, back where she had been, where still she was, where she so desperately longed to be.

It was where she would return.

Gripping her fingers inside the disembodied gnasher, she grabbed the thing's tongue and yanked, pulling in a tug-of-war with a neutron star, wrenching as a black hole flattens even the densest matter to the thinnest, most infinitesimal string. Like little more than a fleshy brick, the mouth was torn from the tunnel wall, providing just the briefest window of perspective back into the world of the living.

"Alfred!" she cried, reaching out with her mind and ordering the slithering Haruspex limbs to cease their demonic ministrations.

Alfred's sword laid dashed on the floor, but as he pounced to grab it, Mila's appendages shuffled it away from his sight.

"Thou have no need of that, my love," Mila announced, her voice finally becoming her own, the tendrils retreating back inside their still immaculately steely container save a single cable linking her still. "It is all over now."

Alfred did not know quite how to respond, for even as every aspect of Mila had returned back to its original self, he could not quite see her as she once had been. She was the Mila of his sight, for certain, but the Mila of his memory had withered away, replaced by something far more foreign, far more dangerous, and suddenly, to Alfred, far more reminiscent of the hated Elena.

The console beeped, distracting him as the computer announced that the arsenal had been unlocked and was ready for instructions.

"The weapons are ours, Alfred." Mila's voice was warm, almost loving as she declared it, but there was something unsettling there as well which could not be uncoupled.

"We can use them, my love," she continued, beaming with every facet of her corporeal divinity. "Together, they are ours for the betterment of this world and for all the worlds beyond!"

"Mila..." Alfred muttered, a pained expression now plastered onto his fraught countenance, "my nation is in tatters. I... I do not know if we can recover. The challenge is-."

"Have courage, my Alfred," Mila stepped nearer, wanting nothing more than to embrace him even as he walked further away, "the Party... it is gone, Alfred, gone! We are free, Alfred. Free to chart a new course. There is an illness, a terrible illness, there will be chaos, yes, misery and desolation, true, but we are at liberty to make of it what we will."

"Stand with me, please, Alfred. Do not let the Empire destroy our Cassian race. We can save what remains, building it back this time with justice, with clarity, with love in our very essence! We can build a new world in a new way, not one that dominates through conquest or conversion, but that prospers purely on the strength of our example. We will do what the Empire and the Party cannot. I know we can, Alfred. Please. I know we can."

"And who are these 'Cassians,' Mila?" he insisted. "I am a Vidar, and the Vidar are nearly all, to a man, already dead. What more can you take from us now?"

"Nothing, my dear!" the woman held out her loving arms to reassure him.

But Alfred could not be reassured. The Party had angled since the very first days of his confinement to deprive him of his soul, and under the twisted guidance of Elena, they may have finally succeeded. What would Mila demand of him now in constructing this "new world"? What secrets would demand their keeping, what moral bridges demand crossing? What friends would need be tormented or populations to be subjected? What reformation and re-education would be necessary for their general betterment?

"Alfred," Mila stopped her advances, confused as to why the general failed to reciprocate the openness of her gesture.

Warning! The Haruspex blared inside her, he conceals a weapon.

She pushed the thought aside. "After all we suffered, Alfred. Remember all we suffered to be together!" Her throat was clogging itself in painful tears.

Alfred could not bear another word. "There is no purpose to our suffering!" he shouted back, blubbering as the echoes of Elena's dungeon rattled in his mind. "There is only one truth in suffering, Mila; take it from me who has suffered far too much: it is simply better not to."

"Annihilate him!" Legion shouted from the depths of his banishment.

No, she refused. "Please," she begged, walking towards him, palms outstretched, exposed.

"Get back," the man warned, reaching beneath his tunic as he felt his feet hit the wall, ending his retreat. There was no room for compromise now. Everything that could be taken had been taken. There was nothing left for him to give.

"Alfred," her face was teary-eyed as she pled with a whole-hearted desperation. Recalling the moment of their first kiss – that ethereal half-second that had transcended all barriers between their two disparate beings, that interlocking of ardent lips yearning to forget a lifetime of sorrows and experience a providence of bliss – she beseeched him, "remember! Alfred, please. I need yo-."

The bullet smashed Mila back onto the ground, her lungs rasping in blood-soaked final breaths. "Mila!" Alfred howled, throwing his gun aside.

Unable to hold himself back even despite his terror, he ran towards her, cradling the dying body in his aching arms.

"No, no, this cannot be," he began to wail, the regret almost as instantaneous as the shot itself.

Mila's eyes showed not even a hint of anger, not a trace of betrayal nor hope of vengeance. Instead, those grey, glistening orbs – once again slowly becoming jaundiced as the Haruspex reasserted itself – were swept in one emotion and one emotion only: a confounded shock. Her mouth flapped discordantly up and down, like a fish wrested unto dry land, unable to understand the abrupt thinness in the air.

"Did...," she tried to speak, her words sputtered and weak. "Did thou... did thou ever...?"

Legion reappeared, answering her question before it was even asked. It delivered Alfred onto her as he truly was, inferred from its insights of the human mind. It showed her how their kiss had touched his lips, how a moment of sublime wonder for one had been nothing but an empty farce for the other, how the affection he had borne for her was dwarfed by the enormity of feeling she felt towards him, how his touch had felt warm and inviting to her and hers had been cold and performative to him. She saw how that single globule on the steam of time had solidified a whole life's worth of romantic expectations and dreams in her mind while only reaffirming the love and devotion to his prophet Edward in his own.

In that kiss, she had seen Alfred for what he was, a human being. For Alfred, he had only seen her as she had made herself to be, a spy and nothing more. As much as he had felt, as viscerally as he had desired her, there had never been a modicum of trust, just the bids of mutual obligation, binds that had now been irrevocably severed.

He never loved me, she realized.

"No," Legion agreed, and she felt a stirring in her core as her being was ripped once more from her control, "not like we will."

Alfred was thrust backward to watch in fixated horror. The coils erupted back from their steely prison, ripping into Mila's corpse, melding their rubbery, metal tubes with her bleeding flesh.

"Thou belong to us now," the legionnaire's tongue licked just at the lobe of her trembling ear. "We will not let thee die." The swirling limbs began to douse her in scorching hot solder, welding her wounds shut as she screamed in mortal agony. "What was thine now is ours. Our selves are now one."

"Alfreeeeed," Mila's many-voiced cries rang out, every muscle in her body spasming wildly as her organs were bolted and wired, engine coolant blasted through her veins, and blackened, tarry oil lubricated the joints of her shattering skeleton. "Un... Unpl..."

She wrestled against the totality of the mechanical smother, erecting herself in a burst of vanishing power. "Unplug me!"

The still fumbling man saw Mila's finger point to the central cable before it was suddenly snapped back forever, the Haruspex casting her arrested hand in bubbling iron and rubber. Alfred leapt towards the console, but without the sword to defend him, a straying appendage was free to shave all but a few tendons from his arm just as it wrapped around the fatal cord.

"Arghhhh!" he screamed, pressing every ounce of strength into the crumpled remains of his right shoulder. His lifeblood spurted in wide arcs across the room, tentacles coiling around his ankles, lacerating his waist, choking his neck. Even as he pulled, however, his frenzied heart thumping so fast it now protruded in irregular beats from his tunic, his emptying corps could not summon up the effort demanded of him now.

The spastic form beside him stretched out its steeled, gangly limb. "To...gether." Mila whispered, the melted flesh of her hand breaking through the metal shell to grasp the cable on top of Alfred's. Screeching with the collective rage of their woebegone people in all their anguished billions, the two pulled the Haruspex away, the tiny cord slinking back from whence it came.

Gasping for breath, a whole new lattice of cuts and slices introducing themselves upon his miserable hide, Alfred slumped against the console, still asking for where to launch its arsenal. Her frigid hand clasped in his, Mila tried mouthing her valediction, but could only manage a "good..." in her deformed lips before the long-awaited rest.

"Alfred! Commander!" the VLF and jiaren soldiers entered in, interrupting their general just as he was sitting on the verge of an irretrievable wallowing pity.

"Are you hurt?" one of the jiaren asked, immediately bowing down and tending to the most grievous of his wounds.

Alfred lacked the vigour to respond, but he could see well enough the distressed looks on his men's faces, seeing even, in fact, that his masticated form was the least of their worries. He summoned the will to speak. "What has happened?" he asked.

A VLF radioman came to the fore, his visage as grim as the gatekeeper to Blackhell himself.

"It is the Empire, sir," the signals officer announced. "Two legions in their aircraft have arrived on the outskirts of the island."

"And they are too close now to blast away with atomics," one of the jiaren added, "at least, not without destroying ourselves in the inferno."

So, Alfred thought, this is where it had all led. All the grief, all the devastation, all the false promises and moral negotiations; they truly had been for nothing. Well, perhaps not nothing. There still remained a choice. It was a choice his ancestors had once faced themselves and one which he had fought so bitterly to re-decide.

Were they to live as slaves or as free men die?

Alfred pressed in a finger into an open scab and drew blood about his chest in the sign of the eight-pointed star. As with almost everything from his imaginings, now that the reality was finally upon him, it was so much more difficult than he had ever expected it to be. He prayed, hoping, pleading with all his sapping might, that somewhere in the heavens an answer might come to him.

But no matter how hard he prayed, the reply always came back the same.

The Stars had gone quiet.