The long, tendril isthmus of Hellastharr that stretched up from Vihorr in the north-west connecting to the continental mainland in the south-east was a mostly temperate, densely hillocked and wholly isolated region of Vitharr. Many countless millennia ago, those well-fortified, natural enclaves and the rich archipelago of semi-tropical islands scattered about it had given rise to a web of fiercely independent and violently competitive mini-polities of kings, consuls and primitive ochlocracies. When the Holy Star's Great Judgement was visited down upon the sinful savages whose fearsome hordes had once dominated mighty empires mere steps above and below that tiny strip of the land, it was only the Hellasdar, finding refugee in their hollowed-out hills and towering city walls who survived the terrible rapture.

Alfred, his icy, rasping breath reverberating across the long-abandoned man-made caves, lay cowering from an entirely different wrath, but one no less perilous than the stars above. The VLF could never scrounge up the manpower nor the resources to mount an effective chase, but Edward's vindictiveness could be felt in other ways. Each rumble and quake of the shells exploding overhead reminded him of that.

The beginning had been so simple; it had lulled Alfred into a false sense of security. Edward's madness had been so sudden, so unexpected, he had no trouble finding a host of other generals to support him... at least, support him to his face. When action was demanded, however, when push came to shove and orders were brought down from on high, formally and in writing that each jiaren woman was to be paired with a VLF soldier and each man burned at the stake, the same courage so easily spoken failed to manifest. There was no rebellion. There was no refusal. Even the most virulently opposed began to dutifully, not even begrudgingly carry out their orders tossing the prisoners on to ever-growing, mountainous bonfires that now pockmarked the northern continent like the oozing lesions of a depraved planet.

In the end, the best Alfred could do was empty a single concentration camp while its commander and his staff turned their backs. They did not even choose to join in his flight, opting instead to destroy the prison walls and stage a break-in, thinking their chances still better with the genocidaires than against them.

And so, Alfred found his promised army to be entirely constituted of barely mobile, half-animated corpses. Even then, there was not barely enough of them to make the slightest bit of difference. He had evacuated merely four thousand of the most able-bodied refugees from the camp. One hundred times that many, at least, remained in the Principality, awaiting the ravenous flames.

Alfred had spent his whole life scrounging about and fighting through the northern mountains, and his plan had always been to pick off one camp at a time, keeping a small, but effective force to defend the jiaren through the passes into their imperial colony and pillage for food as necessary. In the face of reality, however, with no supplies, no soldiers but a handful of his closest friends (half of whom were almost certainly spies) and a train of gaunt refugees who could hardly lift both legs in the best of circumstances, a mountain campaign became impossible. They were left only with a mad dash into the hills of Hellastharr and down to Kang's territory: the least terrible of an increasingly dismal list of options.

The VLF's multi-generational guerilla campaign had paid cruel, strategic dividends, and they had managed to cut down the escapees with an almost impossibly ruthless combination of both brutal efficiency and offhanded indifference. In all the long weeks of marching further and further south through the windy, snow-capped fields, they had never met the enemy once. Instead, their adversaries chose simply to cut off the roads to all the major cities, letting the already emaciated survivors drop off like flies, clawing at the frozen ground for just the slightest satiation of their mind-numbing hunger. After the last of Alfred's meagre stockpile had been depleted, it was all they could do to stop themselves from chewing at the canvas of their shoddy tents: their only choice left between exposure or starvation.

Alfred had always been taught that the stars would look favourably upon those who sacrificed everything in the name of righteousness, and after naught but icy roots and stale water had touched his lips for three weeks and more than half of his jiaren had been abandoned on the road, either too weak to move or found dead after fitful, famished sleep, he had hoped for a respite of providence among the Hellasdar. Instead, he found them just unwelcoming and spiteful as the VLF themselves.

The Walders had been deposed somehow, it seemed. Now in every city up and down the isthmus, every man of any rank or power who could produce gang or gaggle large enough to intimidate the local inhabitants into submission was now calling himself a Walder, and there was no structure or consistency to those who pledged allegiance to Kang, to the Prince Edward or to themselves as independent. The only thing that united them now was the hatred of the jiaren, and the smoldering villages alongside sloppily dug mass graves popping across the country more than testified to that.

After being so callously dismissed, it did not take long for the starving army of refugees to resort to theft and pilfering to feed themselves, and though Alfred tried to keep such incursions as minimal and strategic as possible, their raids were becomingly increasingly hazardous by the day. Every robbery had its robbed, and those victims seemed to find their way back to the VLF someway or another, so that each loaf purloined in the daytime was traded with a whistling artillery shell at night.

And with each day, the explosions came closer.

A jiaren woman, her skin as colourless and translucent as the time-bleached clay at her back clutched at her mouth as the ancient ceiling above her rattled and shook. The tremors coated her in irregular bursts of uprooted soil and primeval plaster, but still she uttered not a sound. Her sunken, skeletal eyes were all she could move under that smothering blanket of soul-wrenching terror. Her fingers cupped her lips so tightly they lost even their meagre, pale colour and could no longer be distinguished between the digits of the living or the dead.

Alfred stood, gathering his nerve under a fresh barrage overhead, and dusted himself to salute his returning scouting party. He could feel a pit in his stomach, a centripetal force to the universe pulling, stretching, sucking him downwards. It was a motion on the frame of reality that threatened to tilt everything he felt and saw into an endless spiral looping down eternally to the pits of Blackhell.

As he breathed deeply in through his nose and perspired through his mouth, though, he could maintain just enough composure to contain that nauseating anxiety to the outskirts of his vision. The devourer remained, bubbling up around him, coursing through his veins and pressing hard against his lungs, flaring up across his eyes with every impact to that the point where the whole makeshift bunker shook with each detonation and threatened to circle around him at any second, but he fought the urge to submit to the dread. He gritted his teeth against his tongue hard enough to taste the first faint trickles of parched, gooping blood, and with that subtle ache, - his sole tenuous connection to his splintering reality- he ushered the reconnaissance team forward to a more secluded corner woven deep within the bleeding bowels of the earth.

The scouts may have been spared the onslaught of the enemy ordnance, but Alfred could see in the defeated, lifeless shock implacably tattooed across their tired faces that they had seen far worse on the road ahead. The commander could feel that vile, viscous doom swelling up around him, desirous to drown him its spinning, odious, clutching depths, but the piercing grip of the anxiety was so powerful now he could not stop himself from dredging up every scrap of news the vanguard could provide, no matter how afflictive. It was his last bridge to the world outside these hills, and even in his most agonizing throes of panic and distress, he knew he would cross it no matter how quickly it burned around him.

Alfred propped a reassuring hand on the scout's shoulder, but the gesture felt hollow and meaningless. It was only after his pulse had quickened and he began to flex his sweating palm on the soldier's back uncontrollably that he realized he had entirely forgotten what "reassuring" even was. It now seemed an empty metaphysic, of no whatsoever relevance to his aching, terrified muscles, a reflex his body could no longer recover and his mind could no longer fathom. Instead, his hand just flopped about as a whale might suffocate, stranded on a lonely beach.

He withdrew the hand before that depleting act of empathy had a chance to fully drain him, and he asked, "Good recce, our loyal servant, pray tell us of the road over yon."

The scout addressed his shoes more directly than his general, his face so dreary he could not hold his superior's gaze. "The way is made impassible, my lord. Word has been let slip to the Gretwalden. Kang's forces await us there, at the mouth of the great mainland."

"Their strength?" Alfred asked, though such was an idle question. It would hardly take more than handful to skewer the lot of them now, such a pitiful state had befallen his friends.

"Half a regiment, sir, and enough cannon to paint the ground with us at a distance of some eight hundred metres."

"And thou are certain there is no other route?"

The scout was too petrified to speak. Alfred stared blankly into the boy's eyes, not realizing until after the passage of many rippling bombs overhead that he was clutching the youth by the scruff of his neck, so dogged and intent was his questioning.

The general pulled away, massaged his straining jaw to refresh his sore, fierce complexion, and tried desperately to hold an uncanny, palsied smile at his lips. "Please, son," he stooped, nearly begging that swaddling officer, barely free of children's breeches, like he was the Holy Fire, the fond of all life and matter itself. "Please, dear servant, please. Thou will never see me ask in such a way again, I promise, but for now, I must, I need to know, please, dear stars, please tell me there is another way out!"

Tears began to well up in the child's eyes. He could not disappoint his commander, that man whom had been at the side of the prophet all his short miserable life, one arm length's from god himself, an icon, an inspiration, an untarnished and untarnishable holy ideal. The scout fell to his knees; he could not make himself say the words, but Alfred heard them all the same.

Of course there was no other way. No way for two thousand ambling wretches anyway. Maybe a few could steal some boats at the coastline if they were lucky, gamble they would not be swallowed whole on the treacherous ocean waves, but the remainder would be pushed to the sea, drowned for certain, if they chose not to immolate themselves on the beachhead. The jaws of death were closing in, and Alfred could feel them like a gush of blackened, melted rubber growing and gripping at his quivering heart.

Had they now been finally abandoned? Had the stars forsaken them, illuminating the path of others while their way was lost in shadow? Had their sacrifice been all for naught, their sacred stance a vain scream muffled entirely by the voracious morass? Would every man, woman and child they saved be spared only moments of commiseration, deposited from one cruel fate to the next? The two soldiers sobbed, for in every grating cough and sandy tear, they could find nothing but sorrow, their questions unanswered.

Alfred wrapped himself around that poor, shivering boy, and they prayed together, rocking back and forth, their bodies entangled in a suffocated, religious trance as quaking night gave way to still daybreak. Even as the day cast a brief lull in the explosions overhead, they continued to chant and pray, clinging onto any speck of hope with all the might they could muster in the infinite abyss of their fleeing souls.

There was nothing else they could do.

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The colony had fallen into shambles. Wang should never have allowed the Governor to impose, never allowed that Hui woman to steal his post. He should have demurred. He should have protested. He should have fought back, biting, clawing, scratching and screaming if he had to. That had been his duty; that had been his charge.

Instead, he had obeyed. Obedience was demanded of every citizen, that was true, and Wang was nothing if not a good citizen, but how could it be right to acquiesce to a rule so patently unjust? That was the conflict left unresolved within him.

Were it only himself concerned, the problem would likely have ceased to thread itself through Wang's restless mind. His faith in the Emperor was boundless, and his loyalty to the state unquestioned. It could strike, pilfer and slash away at him all it wanted, but Wang would never betray it. His fellow colonists, however, their parents and grandparents had worked far too hard, struggled too bitterly and died much too young to instill the same tradition which Wang had been lucky to inherit. Septimi was very far from Home in the literary sense, but it was home in every other, home to a new philosophy that did not shower the reader with transcendent poetry or mythic accounts of heavenly kingdoms. The new treatise was far simpler and could be scrawled across any building in big, bold characters of deep red ink: "No food. No loyalty."

As Wang strolled down the outer city boulevard making his way to the starport, he noticed the first warning signs had already been erected in the struggle. There, against the tin panels that pressed the arctic tundra together into an earthen wall surrounding the city was written in hastily scrawled, barely legible painted words:

THE EMPEROR SLEEPS.

ONLY THE RED ARMY DEFENDS THE JIAREN NOW!

To Wang, what was more curious than simply the outright sedition was the use of the Cassian letters to spell out "jiaren". When he was growing up, most imperials had still referred to themselves as such, "imperials" or "Home people". When rendered in Cassian, however, it lost the meaning of the characters and became just a sound, an ephemeral empty sound in the way that most Cassians named themselves: a sound that once had held meaning long ago but now was just a name. The context was lost and forgotten, only that sound remained, echoing against new tongues and eardrums and taking on new meaning and new connotations with each reverberation.

This is what the governor and her magistrate could never fully comprehend. To them, any person who swore fealty to the Emperor was the same, no matter their birthplace or ancestry. Imperials and barbarian alike were made equals under the sword of the Emperor, and so long as they held that sword, it made no sense to swing it more or less swiftly across the head of one subject or another.

But Septimi was not like the Home worlds, and jiaren heads were not the same as other imperials. For one, as Wang continued his way down the boulevard, he noticed a sprawling network of improvised shacks and precarious metal sheets leaning against the city's walls. That certainly was not something that would ever have been allowed to happen back Home, at least not in the Home about which Wang had spent his whole childhood reading. On the Home worlds, especially on Old Terra where the electoral practice had not been interrupted for nearly fifteen thousand years, even the destitute and unemployed could always look forward to the generosity of tribunes buying votes to keep their stations. Here on Septimi, even the most meagre of social spending seemed to find its way straight into the pockets of Hui's closest friends and confidantes.

Property records and land titles were just as nebulous there as they were here. Knowing what and how much land belonged to whom was a perennial issue the Empire had never really learned to solve, but at least in the Home worlds the magistrates respected tradition. No one was tossed off the land they had farmed for countless generations merely at the production of a scrap of paper. Here on Septimi, however, those generations could easily be counted (there were no more than two), and the governor and her cronies were more than willing to rationalize the colony's accounts on the backs of popular misery.

How many had already been forced from their homes by spurious documents or lost their employment at the questioning of their citizenship? Far too many, and even as the newly appointed Chief of the Defence Staff, he could not funnel even the tenth part of them through to work on military projects. Now the centurions on up were all demanding blood quantum tests for entrance into those work teams, putting even more onto the street, attracting even more to this mysterious "red army".

Was it the fault of the officers, factory owners or Ci's bureaucrats that they did not trust the Cassians? No, of course not! Wang had heard the rumours of what they were doing to his people to the south in Vitharr, and he hated them every bit as much. He himself had cousins, friends and acquaintances all uncounted for, all unheard from for months now, lost to the chaos of that nation and like every colonist with any connection to Vitharr, he suspected the worst.

But even so, Wang knew he could not paint every alien with the same brush. His family was filled with Cassians. His and every other household above the size of a hovel was attended by one. The ancestral lines of the two races had been so intrinsically mixed that few of the grassroots truly remembered whose blood was pure and whose was not. What mattered to the colonist was not who met what antiquated criteria of race, but who helped the colony and who did not.

The governor and her legions, though, they could never accept such qualitative distinctions. People needed to be sorted, and even if there was an error in the sorting, it was better to accept the error than to reject the sorting. After Kang's coup and simmering hostilities with Vitharr, the Cassian was just too dangerous to allow even a single drop of their Hamite blood to pollute the imperial veins.

Wang had surrendered too easily before, but he was preparing to fight for it now. The Chief of Staff was strictly separated from the other Legion officers who all reported to the Executive Officer and Commandant. Wang was restricted purely to the oversight of the massive civilian army which supplied, housed, fed and built defences around the actual army, but so long as he was separated from the uniformed officers, his power was limited. Rao had been the Executive Officer before the governor promoted him to Commandant of the legions, and it was clear he still preferred to think of himself in that strictly military role, staying pigeon-holed with his officers and never so much as entertaining a meeting with Wang in all the weeks he had been Chief of Staff. Tonight, however, he had been invited to his first ever conference of the Legion Command, and he was going to make it count.

Such trifling political matters seemed so trivial when Wang surveyed the ever-fattening skeleton of the orbital cannon growing larger and larger in his view as he neared the starport. At first, long before Kang's usurpation, the Imperial Joint Chiefs had envisaged recycling most of Septimi's small, uninhabitable moons into an intricate orbiting platform webbed all around the planet, where a permanent labour force could design, build and immediately launch any defence mechanism or vessel directly into space, but such efforts would have required millions, probably tens of millions of Cassians, and such numbers were now clearly a flight of fancy. Instead, the governor had elected to focus squarely on the Vidar threat. No space vessels and no interplanetary defences; just as many colonists as possible working to forge the largest gun ever assembled before shooting it off into space.

The first few weeks had been dedicated to organizing work teams, constructing barracks, canteens and supply trains hundreds of miles long linking to foundries and manufacturies all across the vast, barren wastes of the North Pole. Only just recently had the work on the immense cannon begun in earnest, and yet already it was a magnificent, awe-inspiring sight. Wang stared into the perforated mouth, that endlessly spiralling frame of metal and welding sparks and thought he was staring down to the fiery core of the planet itself. What would the Cassians think when it they saw it hovering over their cities? Would they look up and see the inky desolation of their dreaded Blackhell before the governor's laser delivered them onto it?

Hopefully, it would not come to that. If there was one thing the Legion truly hated doing, it was actually having to fight. Much better to threaten and bully, winning through forced acquiescence. Now, it fell squarely on the shoulders of the colony to enlarge the governor's threats.

Already the undertaking was far exceeding the limits of the meagre starport, and the temporary shelters –squarish igloos of snow and permafrost bulldozed and compacted together into short walls topped with glass pyramids to capture light and natural heat – housing the hundreds of thousands of labourers did not just form a competing, chaotic cityscape; they were beginning to ring around and entirely surround the city itself. Unlike the carefully planned, meticulously laid quadrants of the model colonial city, however, the labour camps were spaced randomly and haphazardly about each other for miles on end, their only pattern being their proximity to the cannon and the colourless cement canteens. Other than that, the hovels had been placed wherever there was enough snow and frozen dirt to pile together.

It was a mess, one Wang had inherited from a Legion that was in total disarray: a collection of unruly officers and thieves, murderers, rapists and other miscreants who had used their uniforms to escape any number of shames on the Home world. The easiest officers were just purely interested in soaking up Cassian liquor, growing red and swollen as alcoholically pickled strawberries. It was actually those commanders who desired a taste of authority that gave Wang his greatest grief, for they seemed addicted to the cruelty of the whip and having long since succumbed to the idea that all the jiaren colonists were half-breed barbarians, they had lost all sense human restraint that might reign in their sadistic tendencies.

Bit by bit, Wang was pushing back, but every problem solved birthed only greater confrontation in the future. Within hours of taking office, Wang had eschewed the standard chain of command where legion officers were made to organize and direct work teams along hierarchal rank and opted instead for a bottom-up approach of workers organizing themselves into working committees to meet individual tasks and goals. It was the preferred method of the Party on Cassia Prime, and though there was hardly any love lost between the jiaren colonists and Party activists, Wang and the other colonists could not argue with results. The Legion officers, both unaccustomed to Party ideas which had been censored in the Home worlds and resenting their loss of influence. had lodged formal complaints, and it appeared their grievances had finally filtered up to Rao himself. There was little doubt that was the cause of the Commandant's sudden interest in meeting him now after waiting so long.

Wang was preparing an offensive of his own, of course. Now that he had established his own civilian hierarchy, a chain of elected chiefs chosen from the workers' councils was circulating all the news of the worst abuses and most incompetent commanders, and Wang had already used it to dismiss a great swath of the officer corps from the cannon. He had no doubt that the Commandant had refused to sack them as recommended, but at the very least Wang had to the authority to banish them from his worksites. Slowly but surely, the colonists would regain control of the colony.

More importantly, Wang was circulating material and literature down to the grassroots, ensuring the workers understood their rights and demanded they were respected. Wang knew it was only a matter of time before the governor grew impatient with him and sustained the Commandant's efforts to remove him, so he sought to plant roots just deep enough that they might survive the trimming of the plant's head.

He knew the loyalty of his people was not as steadfast as his own. If conditions did not improve, the colony would revolt, and if they happened to do it after the cannon was placed in the sky, Wang had little doubt they would be vaporized without a second thought. He may have willing to sacrifice his position, but Wang was not ready to cede the colony, and so he staved off great revolts with minor reforms in their stead.

If only the Legion Command had felt the same.

Somehow, in all the dense confusion and hectic slums, MacGregor, Rao and their inner circle of tribunes, legates and prefects had managed to construct themselves a stunning palace of marble that must have been smuggled from the planet's equator and transported by train (or very likely by workman's back) nearly four hundred kilometres from the icy coast. With fourteen-foot pillars, three expansive wings and a ring of protective iron-reinforced trenches that cut a natural, star-pointed fortress into the frozen terrain, it was as equally impressive as it was unconscionable.

Deciding that the tent city of their oppressed labour pool was too crowded and diffuse to navigate, the commanders had also saw fit to built their own private railcar network to and from the magistrate's own newly minted palace in the city. Wang chose to walk, shunning the monorail sheerly out of principle, no matter how the cutting winds and aching in his old, leathery feet begged him to reconsider.

The legionnaire's palace had become so enormous that Wang did not doubt it would soon be home to a dedicated rail within the premises as well. By the time he had cleared the three rings of the fortress gates, passed through two sets of heavy steel, red-painted doors to the palatial interior, he was already well late for the beginning of the meeting. Still, Wang afforded himself some time to wander about the magnificent grounds so carefully secreted away from those whose hard-earned taxes (and bribes) had built it.

The palace was an odd mixture of worlds and worldviews, each a façade disguising an ever deeper, more zealously hidden layer of the imperial psyche. As one entered the fortress gates, they saw only the sharp spearpoints of the trenches, miles of barbed war and the few hundred men or so stationed at imposing watchtowers and burning spotlights. This was the military prowess of the Empire, the quality any barbarian would first notice and appreciate of his great martial race.

As a visitor stepped into the first red door, they were greeted by the brutalist, tall, cubical and nearly entirely featureless cement exterior of the palace. This was the industrial might of the Empire: a monument to its logistical prowess, its sheer size and scope. The simple fact that where there had once been flat nothingness there was now a concrete mountain, as contrived and unbending to the elements as pure conceptual geometry made vividly real, was meant as an eternal testament to the imperial conquest of nature. The neatly stacked pile of heavy artillery ordnance, packed higher than Wang's head and ringing all the way around the palace for as far as the eye could see, tied clearly that first and second value together.

Once inside, one immediately felt the chill frost of the Arctic clime recede to the wet, humid and exceedingly warm temperature for which the Home worlds were known. The interior cement walls curved into a giant biosphere that delicately encased the true palace: marble pillars, hard-carved archways and delicate statues, clay-brick floors and bronze-tiled roofs glazed in multi-coloured glass all shielded with a manmade jungle of vibrantly green trees and dense, leafy foliage transplanted from the Septimi tropics.

Wang rested there for a while, gaping at the beauty of the exotic flowers and suckling the delicious nectar of forbidden fruits that he, having spent all his life in the northern colony, had only ever viewed on a screen or tasted in tin-flavoured cans and starchy, dry packages. This was the resplendent display of imperial wealth and decadence, tastefully hidden behind layers of ugly, industrial pride, but sumptuously enjoyed by those lucky enough to attain it.

After Wang passed through the second set of red doors he was finally met with the resonating heart of that great Empire: its tradition. Marble walls had receded to paper and wood, brick flooring to simple, but soft thatched grass. Here the jungle faded to a few bamboo seedlings growing steadily through a gentle stream that trickled over mossy rocks, forming a moat around the central courtyard. In all the grandiosity of the palace, this was where Wang finally felt at peace, but he had already wasted enough time. He would return to commune with that fresh spring soon enough. Now, it was time to pass through the final doors and meet his reckoning.

All that stood in front of him now were two paper panels, one printed with "Majestic Imperial Legion" in harsh, angular, authoritative characters and the other bearing the Legion's seal of a dragon wrapped around an exploding star. Wang smirked to himself at this hint of pomposity, still somehow thriving here, even in the very inner sanctum of their revered rituals. At his gesture, two servants removed Wang's rough-hewn, grey tunic for a colourful silk robe. They next replaced his heavy, metal-toed winter boots with a pair of wooden slippers and then slid the paper panels apart for his entry.

Though only Commandant Rao and his new Executive Officer, Haig outranked him, none of the four legates, their dozen prefects or twenty tribunes rose to give a customary bow towards the Chief of Staff. Wang had not been expecting otherwise. Though the courtyard sat underneath a neatly painted blue dome with cotton-ball clouds circulating through that artificial sky imitate one sitting under Heaven, no coat of paint could ever truly summon Heaven's gaze. The rituals, consequently, waned in its absence. Wang, though, had lived under an artificial sun for half his life and an artificial night for the second half: that was a fact he already knew full well himself.

Not only did the Executive Officer not recognize Wang's entrance, he continued onwards with his introductory poem:

One world thrown to ripple the pond.

From Heaven, earthquakes have no fault.

Chefs' legion in cosmic kitchen

Toss warheads like one sprinkles salt;

Empire sauce from war's wine and pleb fond.

With his ode to metaphorical mediocrity now complete, Haig straightened his torso and bowed low and theatrically towards the table. As the room rose to applaud, Wang noticed a fat-faced young woman sitting behind one of the prefects whom he recognized from his lessons with the governor. He became so transfixed by the intensity and darkness of her small, sharp, pale purple jade eyes that he missed entirely the character the Executive Officer had drawn across his poem. It was only with the fluttering of the quill's ecstatic feather down at the corner of his eye that he deduced it had been written at all.

Now was the moment of tension, and Wang waited apprehensively, uncertain if the snubbing was to continue all night or if Rao, who seemed nearly dozing at the head of the table would awake long enough to enforce some semblance of decorum. Thankfully, he was not held long in suspense.

Although he made a peremptory glance towards his commandant for more instructions, seeing nothing but drunken stupor in the eyes of his superior, the Executive Officer succumbed to tradition. He held his teapot high over Wang's head so he could inspect it – an offering from Heaven – and then poured a long, aerating arch to the Chief of Staff's delicate little porcelain cup. Once the pot had been gently placed down in front of him, Wang nodded, sipped at the same time Haig drank his own tea, and then removed his own poem from the folds of silk at his breast.

Wang's fingers shook under the immense weight of that thin scrap of parchment. All through the walk here it had clung at his heart, impeding his every step, and now that it was finally on the table, finally off his chest, it felt as though a mound of rocks had been lifted from his shoulders. Half in eccentric delight, half in debilitating fear, Wang unwrapped that imposing parchment, feeling those last few torturous worries leave their papery prison and escape beyond the echo chamber of his nervous mind. Wang breathed deeply, the shaking stopped, and he knew as he spoke the words, he was finally free:

Funny fellows filch our colony's funds.

Heads held high hearing not whimper nor howl.

Let lowly Laobaixing sing soft and lull

Stout stalwarts of empire to be stunned.

Plague passed politely, legions charge but pence.

Whips woosh without transacting more than wind.

Do downtrod denizens join this defence?

Silk sock'd sentries ensure "half-breeds" are shunned.

Foreign armies

Ransack with law

Pillage with sick

Yield slurs as yoke

Chide not child's chirping nor cause of their cheers.

From frail frigid naïfs, hope is wrested free

That thorny thistles with love's scythe be thrashed

Man melding man in front to misery

Filial feelings can fill that pit of fear.

Dead daydreams awake from imperial dark

Reds riot, rampage minds with spirits roused

Spread specie, spew fire, tinder vision sparked:

Princeps, pastor and peasant be peers.

It seemed not a breath was taken in the whole courtyard as Wang stood from his chair and bowed to his paper. Mechanically, without reservation or even acknowledgement that not a soul was clapping their hands, Wang withdrew the giant peacock feather quill from its inkwell and with his heavy-handed, messily smeared calligraphy, he wrote the character for "righteousness".

Wang, still standing, brought the teapot over his head, passing it towards the silent but terrified legate who sat to his left. The commander began to noticeably sweat, unable to bring himself to allow the tea to be poured, his embarrassment growing to outright agony the longer the ritual remained unfulfilled. Finally, Rao's anger was great enough to overpower the languid intoxication that had enveloped him, and he brough the uncomfortable charade to an end with a furious, "what ... what! ... what sort of colonial filth, uhmm, yes, filth! What filth have thou vomited, Chief... chief? ... Chief Egg!"

The already unclever insult was delivered with such a pathetic helping of slobber that it spoke less to the Rao's authority and more to a potential bought of early-onset dementia. Wang was already parsing back his island of thinning hair, looking as swathe as possible to mount a confident response, when he was defended instead from the mighty jowls of the jade eyed woman sitting across and behind the table at the far side of the courtyard.

"Cassian poetry, Commandant," she called out. The woman could not help but smirk as she said it, though that expression was easily swiped off her face as the tribune in front of her, her immediate superior, spun around to silence the impertinent outburst. "My apologies, sir! I only offered for the benefit of those from the Home-."

"Silence!" Rao shouted, slurping his word through the right side of his mouth, whilst the remainder of his face remained grotesquely frozen in place. His right eye bulged outwards, red and aflame with rage, angry drool leaking from every conceivable facial spout.

Haig spared the general any further humiliation, rising to interject himself, his words shooting down at Wang directly beneath him in a morbidly personal, sadistic manner.

"What sort of imbecilic Hamite nonsense have thou dragged before us, thou unclean Septimi mongrel! Are these words suitable for a genteel conference under blue Home skies? Have thou lost all sense of etiquette and decency that thou would accuse thy colleagues before even having the courtesy of first making their acquaintance?"

The chief crossed his arms, biting his lip. "As for making your acquaintances, do remember fair commanders, it was I not you who first solicited such an audience and for more than a month I was rebuffed. Our fraternity lied in tatters before it ever took shape. I come with credible reports of significant graft rife throughout your ranks; there is little point in castigating me for bad manners." Wang snorted. "Afford me the dignity, if you will, of keeping better company than yourselves."

Haig battered the table before him. "We shall not sit silently whilst thou barrage the reputation of our most sacred institutions. Not a single penny has ever been embezzled or wasted in the defence of His Majesty. There can be no report more credible than that."

Wang bunched his shoulders together and gritted his teeth. "What an absurd thing to hear echoed about a literal palace."

The officer scoffed. "And what of it? The Joint Chiefs have their own courtyard and baths in a palace too."

"The Emperor's Palace," Wang pointed out. "You wasted your ninth line, your Excellency. Had you wished to enthrone yourself, you should have done so there."

The court needed no direction now. They gasped in astonishment, some prefects booing in stunned indignation.

"This is profane to the utmost degree, Wang!" Haig shuttered. "Continue down this line and the Commandant will have no choice but to demand the governor rescind thy appointment posthaste!"

Wang smiled, crossing his arms, cementing himself comfortably in place. "I haven't the faintest doubt you two have conspired about that already; multiple times, I'm sure." Wang leaned forward, challenging everyone at the table now, "in fact, I fancy each and every one of you longs to see my head on a spike. I do not doubt it, no. But will you? No, because no matter how self-righteous and upstanding you think yourselves to be, the governor demands competence, something not even the most brilliant of the uniformed shits among you possess."

Haig fumed so belligerently now, one can could nearly see steam burst from his ears, but Wang could not help but continue. "You want to know the real reason I removed the centurions from my work teams? It's not because they abused my staff. It's not because they brand my people with horrific racial epithets or beat them senseless to feel some modicum of miserable superiority (though they did do just that). It's not because they, like, our beleaguered Commandant here, chose to swill every drop from the wine casket and swindle every penny from the coffers, but trust me, they did that as well! No, the real reason I removed your officers from our cannon – yes, you heard me, our cannon – is because you've surrounded yourselves with the most sycophantic, idiotic, asinine dog whelps this mortal plane has ever fucking seen!"

The fat-faced woman in the corner let out a brief chuckle, perhaps in agreement, but she quickly capitulated to the overwhelming stony silence.

The officers were now so remarkably uncomfortable, the alcoholic vivaciousness of the conference so thoroughly shattered that a great number were pressing hands against their heads as if to muffle their ears and shield their eyes from the galling spectacle before them. Some had cringed so far backwards their cheeks were buried under their shoulders, their faces almost entirely nestled below their chests in the most rudimentary form of social defence. Haig was far too furious to end their discomfort now, however.

"Never in all my battles, in all my wars, in all my service have I witnessed such blatant, seditious insubordination-."

"Insubordination?" Wang asked, his eyebrow lifting skeptically. "I do not report to thee, Haig. The only man outranking me here is currently too inebriated to object to even the slightest of my proposals. Given his present condition (and I am electing to be considerably generous in assuming it is not his permanent condition), the dictates of our social order would have you," he gestured to all the officers at the table, deliberating speaking past Haig as if he were little more than the president of a dining club instead of Executive Officer of a legion command, "you direct the soldiers, and I'll direct the workers. An last I checked, there's many times as many in rags as there are in uniform, which is perhaps the more mathematical way of stating: I am in charge. If the Commandant disagrees, of course he is free to say otherwise."

All eyes briefly turned towards the hulking general, his face now firmly planted on the table, slobber dribbling down his face in a macabre pool about his tea-plate. Haig turned back, every ounce of colour seemingly drained from his body in utter shock and abandon.

"Seeing no objections, the chair closes the floor for debate." Wang had to keep himself from smiling. Even after only the briefest of instructions from the Governor, he was already beginning to appreciate that subtle, cruel, mocking art of teasing one's inferiors with their power. Still, he had to remember the crux of the lesson, not the words the Governor taught, but what he learned from watching those treacherous leeches who openly bridled under her whip. To demonstrate one's power was admirable. Enjoying it was sinister.

"I know you all fought battles on distant stars. I know you served under mythic heroes and paid terrible costs for the glory of our Empire. I know you are born of the sword and I was begat of the scythe. But, though I do not doubt or challenge or wish to reform whatsoever our places in the great balance of our society, I expect, no, I demand that we each respect one another in those stations. My people built this palace. They sweep its flours. They paint its walls. They flush its shit. And they will be respected."

"To these aims, I have three and only three significant policies which I will enact immediately upon retiring from this council. My first order of business: our staff will be dismantling the monorail to the city centre. If you want to complain to the governor, you can bloody well walk, and given the general lethargy of this particular assembly, I imagine that will stifle the overwhelming part of the dissent outright. Secondly, all officer's apartments will be remodeled with reduced but still more than ample space in this palace's second wing. The East and West wings will be rededicated to house homeless colonists who are currently employed on the orbital cannon. Third, and finally, all salaries and benefits are to henceforth be paid through and only through the quartermasters' department. Officers absolutely will not touch a single tael without my prior written authorization."

"If anyone dislikes my work, they can take it up with the governor. Just be well aware, before you go, she is rather interested to know why my quartermasters are now projecting such substantial savings since I entered office. It seems someone, somewhere might have been skimming off the top before I got here, and she is most interested to discover who that might well be."

"Now, I know that not all of you are grifters, and I especially know not all of you are lazy or unmotivated. I, more than anyone, understand the effects of a vacuum of leadership. Whether consciously or not, we emulate the behaviour of those above us, and find ourselves falling into habits we abhor or performing actions we cannot justify despite our best intentions and deeper desires. I removed centurions from the work-teams, yes, but I fully understand my lack of military knowledge. For all those industrious persons who have grown weary of sleep, whoose great minds bore of tedium, whose skilled hands ache for labour, we need you at the cannon. We need every one of you."

"I am going to leave now, and I will never return to this courtyard. If you too can no longer tolerate this farcical performance of gold-buttoned uniforms, opium pipes and steam-clogged bath-houses, if you are ready for real, honest, meaningful work to serve the Empire, meet me outside and we shall speak together, not like this with me lecturing to your inferiors, or like a prefect beating his subordinate, but as equals: two people who both love their Emperor as fondly as the other and want to serve him as best they can. Come join me on the other side of that door, and let us discover how we might best serve Him together."

With this half-hearted muster, he stood, bowed with perfectly calculated form to the incapacitated Rao in a final show of empty, ritual obeisance and left. The servants who removed his sandals on the other side of the screen said nothing, but he could feel a newfound aura of energy and enthusiasm guiding their hands. He understood the nature of such paper walls. It was just as important to craft a message for those in the room as those outside it. The words always had ways of slipping out.

Though he wasn't drooling on a campaign table, Wang could not pretend that he wasn't aged and infirm himself. The long trudge through the snow and shouting match in the courtyard had taxed his frail body to its limits, and so he rested his aching buttocks on a smooth-cushioned bench under the cool shade of dove tree, sprouting proudly through wet-trickling cobble stones. There he waited for the officers to file out one by one to join him, to throw off the shackles of their bungling masters and reach new heights in their collective struggle.

But no one came.

Instead, a gentle roar emanated from the closed doors of the courtyard, and with every passing second, the sounds of inebriated cheers, clanking glasses and rowdy dancing fed that roar until it vibrated through the cement hull of the palace like the aftershocks of an earthquake. It wasn't until long after Wang had placed his head down for a light nap, batting his hands against his ears to drown out the noise, that he finally noticed the trail of legionnaires spilling out from the hall, carrying limping, incapacitated drinking fellows as real soldiers would shoulder their maimed comrades. The serving staff stood in horror as the officers smashed bottles, torn down banners, hacked apart trees, urinated in clay urns and defecated in open corridors purely for their own amusement.

"I must note, thou have a most peculiar manner of making friends."

Wang sat up to see the fat-cheeked woman centurion addressing him. Standing as she was, her enormity was even more difficult to disguise. Wang had never been much opposed to fat women; his wife was a prime example. But there were levels of fatness, levels that spoke well beyond the outer, squishy layers and hinted at the person deeper within. His wife, like many other colonist women who had mingled with the stout, Cassian population, had thick, iron-set thighs, feet wider than snowshoes and the arms of fully-matured silver-backed gorilla. This woman, on the other hand, had none of the signifying marks of but a single day's hard labour. She had the pure-blooded imperial tiny, bird-boned skeleton with a drooping belly of lazy, wealthy fat. And so, where Wang would have appreciated a sturdy ox, this golden cow repulsed him.

Still, she had approached him. He could do make something of that. "What are they doing?" he asked, gesturing to the bibulous chaos about him.

Officers were now throwing themselves through paper walls and breaking furniture over their knees. Others heaped scraps of wood from burst panels, shattered benches and doused the tinder with the strongest liquor they had, lighting it while his friends danced about, singing and cursing as if possessed by Dionysian devils. Bustling troupes of servants hurried to and fro extinguishing one fire just another was lit.

The woman smiled, pushing up her tiny circular glasses out of nervous instinct. "Thou have taken the palace from them, so they're intent to leave thee as little as possible."

Wang scowled. "This is childish buffoonery. If they think I won't have the cleaning staff man-handle them straight to a holding cell-."

He stopped at the feeling of a pudgy, padded hand cupping his shoulder. "Thou absolutely can do no such thing, good citizen. Remember who still holds the monopoly of force here. They behave like children, but they're armed as the deadliest of adults. Do not interrupt what is ultimately an irritating, but harmless release of pressure. They just crave the illusion that they are still in control. Give them that, and thou can press them however thou please."

Perhaps this woman was far more useful than he expected.

"I've notice thee from the governor's tutelage but have yet to make thy acquaintance. I am Wang Mang, father of eight sons and a single daughter. Is it that I meet thee as a friend?"

This time the woman's smile was far less forced, though a slight upturned sneer in the corner of her cheek prevented Wang from calling it entirely warm. "It is my humblest pleasure to meet thee as a friend, Mr. Wang. I am Quentin, Pan Quentin, daughter of Pan Aaron and sister to two older brothers. I, too, have recognized thee from our time under Master Ci and have wished to meet thee for some time."

Wang nodded. "Let us fly this unsettled coop and discuss in a more sanctimonious setting."

As left the red doors to retreat to the cold, impersonal, cement walls of the outer palace, Quentin began to tell her story. "I think, like thee, I am very glad to have been granted such trust and opportunity by the hands of our master. Before her, the only one who had ever seen any potential in me was my father, and though he may be perhaps the colony's greatest philosopher, I had no wish to float to glory on the draft of his name alone."

"I know something of thy father's work, though it demands much more attention than my modest brain can provide. Is thine similar in any way?"

She shook her head. "No, and yes, perhaps. Though my father set out to prove the superiority of our Empire to the barbarians on purely moral grounds, I found the whole project dubious in its ontological foundations. I think that much of our success as a society has been due to our empiricism, our desire to seek observable, material facts and not overly rely upon superstitious traditions as the barbarians do. Thus, my work has been almost entirely phrenological, not philosophical."

Wang scratched his head. "I'm afraid this might be above my understanding."

Quentin laughed. "This is just the Cassian within thee submitting thyself to ignorance. With simple technique and practice, the barbarian can be expunged from within and controlled from without. Have no fears of this."

Wang laughed. "I do not think I have ever feared it. For me, it is our flirtations with barbarism that make us special, that mark out the colony from among the countless stars and faceless myriads of the Empire."

Quentin held her hands palms-open in self defence. "Oh, take no offence, Mr. Wang. This is not my meaning. I, of all people, having studied the barbarian all my life, am well aware of their tricks, their talents, their innate characteristics, and I would never doubt they have their uses. The question is not of purity or of complete segregation, but of which side should rule which. This is what I study, and it is why the governor had me plucked from obscurity in which I languished in the university to serve as chief of the scientific corps in our legion."

Wang raised an eyebrow. "And did thou never apply to our administration when I was magistrate of the colony? Such problems of barbarian and imperials, of integration and control concerned me every day. It seems so strange we are only meeting now, at the impetus of our Governor."

Quentin looked down her feet, sputtering out a long, dry, humorless chuckle. "In fact, Mr. Wang, I did apply, for my research required funds on many occasions. And what was the answer, always the same and always delivered with such a menacing grin from your clerks: 'if I needed something to fuck, I wouldn't stick my dick in the pigpen, now would I?'"

The old man hung his head in shame. "I... I am truly sorry, madame Pan. Such words should never have been spoken to thee."

Quentin winced, but attempted to brush it off. "It is fine. Your clerk spoke the words of his time and place. We cannot expect more of anyone. If we want to change the man, we must change his environment. The governor understands this, I think. She'll listen to me at the very least, and after a lifetime of being ignored, that is more precious than I dare to admit."

"So...," Wang conjectured, floating the conversation to less choppy waters. "On what do thou advise her?"

It was at this that the women's sullen, thinly slitted eyes shot open in ecstatic energy, a great spark of joyous inspiration lighting her whole face so that in that moment Wang lost sight entirely of the fat and decrepitude of that miserable form. He saw only fire and reveled in what had been lit.

"I will admit, I doubt the governor sees much in me as an individual. It was likely only through my chairmanship of the Septimi chapter of the Hansu Eugenics Research Group that she would have heard from me at all. In all perfect honesty, catching her eye was one part labour and five parts fortune. For almost my entire career in the academy, there have only ever been at most two dozen members of our group, but as the Cassian Party's stranglehold over this system has increased, interest in the non-academic community has massively amplified. It just so happened that I won the rotating chair of our Group at the exact same moment that the Lady Ci arrived, and our membership had swelled to many thousands in the colony."

Wang winced, trying to pry just a little. "But surely, thou are too modest as to suggest it was all luck and politics? We have been acquainted for but a short while yet already I sense a great intellect about thee. Thou must bring some ideas to the governor, not merely a list of partisans."

Quentin nearly laughed at that. "Ah, but thou miss the point! What relevance is there to have ideas at all without some partisans to defend (or enforce) them."

She tilted her head a little towards the old man, as if offering a secret. "I think, sadly, thou have perhaps followed too closely the style of the Governor in thy work. You both think yourselves to be magnanimous arbiters of justice, those who keep their swords clutched at the hip in terrifying display but only unsheathe in the direst of circumstances. You'd prefer to instruct than to conquer, to make servants instead of obstacles and allies in the place of foes."

"Yet in this goal you ultimately are self-defeating. In your violence, you humiliate the enemy, but in your lenience, you let him run free. You expect him to be grateful for his not being destroyed, but far from it, in reality, it is the initial humiliation he cannot forgive, and though he may prostrate himself for a moment, expect a knife between the shoulder-blades the instant your backs are turned."

Wang had to keep from rolling his eyes at this. "And what would thou have us do? 'To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.'"

Quentin smiled, displaying a full set of pebbly-round white teeth. "But this is precisely what I mean. You are only doing as is natural to your time and place. We cannot unthink our thinking nor unlearn our learning, and ours is a society built on teaching! That is who we are: the instructors of the universe. We created the eternal drum of civilization, beating out a rhythm for all to follow as they choose. It matters not to us should others dance or not, all with which we have ever concerned ourselves are our feet, our dancing, our rhythm."

"'The superior man seeks in himself what the inferior seeks in others.' Yes, yes, yes! Thou have heard it all before. It is our clarion call, our unifying message, our pale indifference to the world outside ourselves, and should it continue to be so, it will be our downfall."

Quentin turned sharply as they had reached the final red door, tilting towards her own quarters still in another wing of the palace. Wang knew he should begin the long, snowy trek back to the city and his family, but he was much too unwilling to surrender the debate now. As much as every hair on his back bristled in abject scorn at being made to follow a woman (and a much younger one at that!), he continued, his breath caught in excitement.

"But who is to be our downfall, my lady? Those officers I have offended? It was not in my power to destroy them even had that been my design."

It was clear she wasn't fully listening to him. Her glasses seemed to be growing more cloudy and mystified as her thoughts slowly transcended her from the mortal plain. "But that's just the difference between us and the barbarians, isn't it? It's that lack of imagination. Our lack of imagination! It is not that one is more rational than the other. We like to think it is, but at heart both are capitulated to superstition."

"The difference is the level of analysis in that superstition. The barbarians believe in the soul of the individual and in so doing they justify great misdeeds against the soulless at the hands of the souled. Humans are separable from animals for that quality of their having souls, and so in a very real sense all humans are inherently valuable. But the soul is intransient, it is disconnected from the body and the mind. Sometimes, in fact, the soul can act in such disharmony with its host that it is only through the destruction of the body that the soul can be let free. This is essentially the barbarian act of immolation, the natural desire to help others taken to such extremes that the barbarian will burn the heretic alive so as to cleanse their immortal soul from the evil misdirection of their suffering body."

"The Empire has no such predilection. We see no more soul in man than in any animal or machine. We grind humans into the gears of empire with as much concern as clock grease. And what reason is there not to? Equality does not lend itself to harmony. We are no different than a tiger, but will a tiger not gobble us up no matter whether we offer it kinship or hostility? Of course it will! We are a part of nature, not separate from it, and no matter our human sensibilities, the laws of nature are rigid and unchanging: eat or be eaten. We do not whip our dog's hide, steal the hen's eggs and murder the sow's children because Heaven ordained us masters over the universe, but because should we not master them, they would master us. It is from our fear of what, after millennia of cruelty and torture to their kind, they would wish to inflict upon us that we keep them commiserated and wretched."

"That's all very well, but what are thou saying?" Wang demanded, barely able to keep the thread. He was beginning to understand the Governor's election of this impish philosopher. She was as predisposed to errant rambling as Lady Ci herself. "We have to maintain just that level of violence to cow the enemies and nothing more? How can such a thing be a justified? Attacking others merely proclaims a weakness in the self. We must always order our own affairs before assaulting those of another."

Quentin continued, shaking her head in disagreement. "That is exactly the case! For the Empire, then, the soul is not regulated to individuals, but to the Empire itself. We narcissistically obsess over improving ourselves. Fixing ourselves, ameliorating ourselves, strengthening ourselves. That is the being that is separated from all others, and it is only at the level of the Empire that any philosopher or academician or great leader ever speaks of mortal peril or moral dangers. The barbarians fret day and night about universal laws of ethics, of eternal right and wrong. The whole universe is a symphony and to hear one single discordant note is to foul the whole piece. One in a trillion is too many when the standard is Heavenly perfection."

"And yet, this is their fundamental flaw, for their fascination with morality leads them to commit terrible atrocities all in the name of goodness, and so perfect, so self-justifying is their system that they have come to believe that their torture is a favour, that their victims should in fact be grateful for their suffering. The barbarian cannot sleep while a single evil persists in the universe, and assuming that all people are alike, that all humans demand such unflinching separation between black and white, they insist their quest is natural and inherently beneficial to all of humankind no matter the obvious material consequences. To the imperial, who knows his actions can never be so cosmically justified, he does just enough to keep himself on top, and never more, because it is not necessary to be cruel. The barbarian can always justify more cruelty. He never knows when to stop, and because he demands perfection in an imperfect universe, he never will stop."

Wang could feel the conversation treading down a darker path. His feet suddenly lost their will to keep plodding forward. He'd have to return to the icy winds soon. "Thou are not suggesting that we cannot live in harmony with them, then. Thou believe they cannot ever live in harmony with us."

She nodded. "The two are dialectically opposed. For us, with our pragmatic ethics and our lacking the desire to universalize right and wrong, we care not about the health of every soul in the universe but merely the more ascertainable health of that one, very particular soul: our Empire. What is or is not good for it? What shall make it grow and prosper? What shall make its rule more just and righteous? What wisdom can it engender and propagate? To the barbarian, the sacrifice of one innocent for the good of all is an unspeakable error. To the Emperor and His subjects, to exchange a million lives for even a slightly more stable order seems a worthwhile transaction."

"The Empire has a soul and the people in it do not. It is only that thing that matters. Absent the unifying, unquestioned and extra-rational devotion to the Emperor, we all as humans would be left to our Darwinian devices: eat or be eaten. It is thus irrelevant whether we believe the Empire has a soul or not, and certainly irrelevant whether the barbarians believe. All that matters is enough believe it to give it a soul, or that enough believe that enough believe, and so order can be maintained. That is good for everyone, believer and non-believer alike, and if barbarians truly do desire to do what is best for humanity, they shall accept this fact and kiss the feet of the Emperor as we all do the same."

"And the principle can be extrapolated, of course. It is uniformity that breeds harmony, not righteousness. One cannot prove righteousness. One cannot prove the universality of any concept, no matter how seemingly absolute. To teach, to instruct, to convince the enemy into submission is a fool's errand tantamount to dieting on the dimsum cart. Any sense of moral right and wrongness is anti-rational, which is why I abandoned my father's moral research in the first place. The important point is to find the balance of humanity, the place where almost everyone is already and force the rest to join them there. Then, the universe can enjoy peace."

"And what if they do not?"

Quentin suddenly halted, choosing to face her partner directly, her eyes as intense and clear-focussed as a snake slowly un-hatching its jaw at the sight of an unsuspecting mouse. "The existence of the barbarian is in of and itself a contradiction, Wang. They strive to render perfection onto an indifferent world. First shall die the heretics: us. We are the most obviously errors. Then will go the sinners of their own kind. Then those who think of sin. Then those who think about thinking of sin. Then, finally, when they have reached through immense suffering and personal fortitude total strength of will and Heavenly character, they will despair at still being unable to bend the cosmos to their unnatural ideal, and in such despairing end themselves. That is their ethos, Wang. Their only goal is annihilation."

"And that is where you and the Governor misstep. The enemy is already dead. It is no crime to kill them now. We can demand total surrender and let them become exactly as ourselves, or we can do them the favour of cutting their misery short. Those are the only two options. There is no compromise. There is no 'assimilation through education'. There is either complete victory or total defeat, and everyday we ignore the choice, we stray closer to defeat."

Though he fought his hardest to keep them at bay, Wang became overwhelmed with the heavy weight of tears stabbing at his eyes. How could such cynicism, such darkness, such nihilism plague the heart of one so young? How had all the hope and promise, all that boundless optimism of the intrepid colony on the far frontier, the beacon of freedom and prosperity for all the Empire, have been drained away to hollow misery and contempt? Had the winds swept away not just their snow and soil, but their beliefs as well, leaving nothing but a existentialist void adamant to consume all in its path? No, he had to at least try to bring it back.

"And what of the Analects?" he protested, quoting, "'Even when walking in the company of two other men, I am bound to be able to learn from them. The good points of the one I copy; the bad points of the other I correct in myself.'"

At this she merely smiled, bowed and bid the man good night. "I already spent my life learning, Master Wang. Now, it is time for correction."

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"Thou did cry out his name again, this night past."

"Hmm?" Mila scoffed, concealing her surprise as she leaned against the bed, pulling her tight, maroon pants back up her short, burly legs with enough effort and concentration to avoid looking at Song's face directly.

Song leaned up on his pillow, the covers spilling out and unveiling his naked, sweat-soaked, still slightly heaving chest. "Thou know exactly of whom I speak. Waste not this petty treachery with me. Thou shall find I am not easily toyed with as thy other bedfellows."

Mila hoped he could not see the wry, self-satisfied smile forming on her lips. It was a statement of admission, but irresistible in the circumstances, irresistible as that other, far more charming, more enthralling bedfellow did come to mind, the one whose name she had undoubtedly murmured in her sleep.

"It's not possible for a Party spy to mutter in her sleep," Mila dismissed, nonchalantly, facing the merchant as she buttoned her uniform up over her breasts. "The chance of psychological betrayal is too high, the effects of nervous sleep deprivation too great. One imbibes a sedating concoction each night to keep our minds blank and refreshed, our secrets safely stowed away. I have dreamt no dreams since I was but an infant, and my sleep is as restful as preparation for the grave."

Song smirked, filling a pipe on his bedside table for a morning smoke. In between his fervent blows and sucks, attempting to light the stubborn opium cube, he managed to let out, "yet I heard thee all the same."

Mila shrugged. "Being not trained in the arts of psycho-analytics, it is not my place to posit on the state of thy sanity."

This excited a fit of indignant fervour on the jiaren's part, and he rose from the bed, scattering a pile of papers and writing materials on Mila's desk until he found a plastic sheet map of Hellastharr, which he flapped triumphantly above his head. "And what of this, my darling, innocent, dreamless daisy? Thou mark the passage of thy lover down the isthmus just inches from my sleeping head and expect me not to notice. Is thy opinion of me truly so abysmal as that?"

Mila allowed herself a commensurate flash of annoyance as she responded, "What lover is this whose steps I mark? It is your people, two thousand jiaren, hobbling defenceless into the jaws of our enemies that I track. Are these not the people thyself do claim to love, or are thy feelings somehow less than genuine, a manufacture for claims of influence and power?"

Song sucked a long string of breath into his nose like a revving bull, flaring his nostrils and readying for a fight. "We," he placed so much emphasis on that word it was impossible to discern whether he meant him and the Party collectively, or just himself in the royal form, "have already decided those people are no use to us."

Mila scowled. "For a man who but short weeks ago stumbled blindly in my arms, hacking up the taste of gunpowder and bleeding pools of precious lifeblood from his mangled body to the safety of our care, thou show a remarkable lack of empathy for those now facing the self-same catastrophe."

Song threw the map on the ground in a throe of petulant rage. "I would be safe in my palace, floating in the steaming hot-springs of my private bath if I had not let thee, painted foot to mouth in whoring drapery, drag me into this conspiracy with the force of thy feminine charms."

Mila could not but laugh in a harsh, condescending tone, simmering the lovers' quarrel ever further. "Thou chose to contest the Walden election, not I, nor anyone else. Thou flirted with the spotlight, bought its attention, fanned the flames of fame long before that brothel ever knotted our disparate strings. Thy palace now lies in ruins at the mouth of a burning capital, and thou would have perished within it if the Party had taken pity on thy pathetic soul."

Song made a childish attempt to stand tall and proud, puffing out his chest in patrician indignation. "That is no way to speak to the leader of the Jiaren Red Army. You Party women can condescend as much as you like, but you know there would be nothing without me. You dug your holes in the ground; shall I praise your name for all eternity in exchange? The moment I announced my presence, my people flocked in their tens of thousands to our banner. What had you accomplished without me? You sewed uniforms for an imaginary force and slept with a single Walder."

Mila calmly collected the discarded map from the floor, choosing not to give her tormentor the satisfaction of her ire. "Thou have not even the slightest inclination of all we have done, all we have sacrificed so we could install thy self-infatuated, pearl-clutching faux-freedom-fighter self in thy throne of vaunted irrelevance."

Song could not accept such a flagrant stab at his ego, and so he lashed out with every coil of verbal whip he had. "Indeed, I have heard many rumours of thy personal forfeitures, my dear. First, forfeit to me. Then to Karl. Then that VLF commander to whom thy yield in thy sleep. How fascinating it is to remark upon into what your womanly utopia has matured. You Party members had all your men enslaved and killed on Cassia Prime just to chain yourself to our beds on Septimi? But how can I be surprised. When one's only asset is found between their legs, what else would they see fit to sell?"

Mila did not respond. Instead, she merely opened her valise, and began hurriedly shoving her paltry assortment of belonging inside. "I am leaving," she announced. "I will not return to thy bedside."

Song laughed manically, cradling his face in a deranged, self-satisfied gesture. "Thou have said that before and thou have always returned. Do not try to deny your nature. I know who issues the commands around here; for all your talk of equity and freedom, you are as rigidly bound to rank and order as any. Thou are a comfort woman; that's what thou are, and thy superiors have instructed thee to keep my bed warm as long as I demand it."

Mila could feel her fist forming into a tight ball of iron, falling into the cannon barrel of her anger. "We are all called upon to assist the Party in our own ways. It is not for the one to decide how to serve the many."

Song creeped up behind her, draping his arms over her shoulders as if he were to kiss her neck, only to whisper more biting words torturously close to her trembling ear. "Is that what thou told thyself as thou bedded that commander, thy 'Alfred'? Thy colleagues talk, Lyudmila Ivanovna, and my ears know enough Old Cassian to listen. I know they are losing faith in thee, Lyudmila."

"I know they are left wondering if thou are still thinking with this," he turned her face towards his and kissed her forehead like he would patronizingly kiss a child goodnight, "or this." And then grabbed her crotch, much too rough to have any semblance of sensuality. He owned her as thoroughly as the merchant had ever owned any commodity in his life, and he needed her aware of that possession.

"I am leaving," Mila said, letting her body grow as cold and rigid as a stone, not reacting in the slightest to his touch.

The man only pressed in further, flattening his bony, angular chin against the top of her breasts, nearly at the point of puncturing her lungs, saying, "leave now, and I will tell Valentina. I will inform thy commander. Leave now, and I will see to it thy life and liberty is forever put in peril."

As if her stiff corps had been but a hollow smith's mold, Mila felt pure molten steel now pouring her hardened veins. "I am going to Hellastharr, Theodore," she said, pulling the jiaren's clutching hands from her body with all the ease of a mother cat displacing her kitten. "I am leaving to save thy people. Do with me what thy will afterwards, but if thou truly are these people's leader, thou will follow me first. Prove thy mettle or proclaim thy cowardice; it makes no difference to me. I am no one's comfort woman."

Mila walked towards the door, but just as she crossed the threshold, she turned back to finish. "I joined the Party to kill the enemy, and that is precisely what I shall do."

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The VLF commander had arrived in Kang's headquarters in much the same way as MacGregor, head tucked away in cloth sacks, body dragged from one winding, circuitous car route to the next until a final elevator plunge deep beneath the surface brought him to the enigmatic location not even the Commandant had managed to discern after living there for quite some time. He only been allowed back to the surface on a handful of occasions in the two months he had stayed there, and each time in the daylight, with no stars or landmarks of any kind to place himself. MacGregor could, of course, have made secret contact with an imperial ship in orbit to pinpoint his location more accurately, but the risks of such a call being intercepted were extraordinarily high. If he were going to send a message, it would have to be worthy of that risk, and so he had set out mine Kang for every piece of valuable information he could.

For dealing with someone who was ostensibly his military advisor, however, the new Gretwalder had been surprisingly tight-lipped. He evaded all but the most mundane of questions, opting instead to harass and interrogate the Commandant for ever increasingly more esoteric legion secrets in their every interview. The conspiratorial side of his mind had clearly come near to possessing him, and no matter how much and how often MacGregor disavowed it, Kang could not shake himself of the notion that the governor must be colluding with the VLF in some way.

In Kang's mind, that was the only way he could explain how the Empire sat so still and refused to move into the VLF territory, even as they had begun burning the jiaren alive by their thousands. As much as the Commandant might empathize, it was impossible to espouse to a colonist like Kang how the true-blooded Home-born actually felt towards their loose jiaren cousins: they had their sympathy, but they would never garner their support. Although Kang had been more than willing to persecute his own people for the sake of expediency, perhaps he was still too Cassian in some way enough to understand this. Like the rest of the Hamites, he had gone native, and his imperial tactics were withering away from his faltering brain.

Inviting the terrorists to diplomatic talks had been puzzling, however. MacGregor could not decide if it was prime evidence of the leader clasping at straws or if some greater strategy was at play. He might not have been able to see what was happening at the ground level, but knew the months of imperial blockade had left Kang few options. Even if the Vidar had chosen to devour the jiaren instead of merely roasting them, they would not have been fed for long. The country needed to eat something, and this new VLF "principality" would be much easier to chew than the colony. Perhaps this was all an elaborate ruse to lull the enemy into a false sense security, projecting weakness in the place of strength.

Perhaps. The insurgent general, at the very least, did not seem lulled in any sense, and how could he be? After the ordeal he had undergone just to appear before them, he seemed unshakeably incensed, his diminutive, dried apricot of a body so consumed with annoyance it was lurching him over in excruciating resentment. Kang's omnipresent smile only heightened his displeasure, as the leader rose from and towered above him, adding insult to injury for the prideful warrior.

"We must apologize if we have heightened our security to uncomfortable levels, honoured visitor," Kang began, opening his arms wide and respectfully, though not bowing as was the imperial custom, clearly to appease his guest. "We were expecting your colleague, an acquaintance and true friend of our people, the General Alfred, and when he did not arrive, we thought it best to tread with an abundance of caution. We hope he still fairs well, and that no matter the outcome of our discussions, you will bear my greetings of thanks and good luck to him and your Prince."

The dried apricot suddenly swelled in anger all the way back to its original size and brilliant, bright colour. "Be rest assured, I am not him, but quite another, and should thou wish to prolong this ill-fated interview, it would be best not to speak of that one nor offer wishes of any sort. My name is Cuthbert, and it will be the only name uttered from thy lips in our dealings. Whatever compacts and promises you infidels may have extracted from that like-minded devil, thou shall not find any continuance with me."

"Of course, as you wish," Kang merely dipped his head and widened his smile, "welcome, General Cuth-."

"My Lord Cuthbert to thee, foul imp!" the commander interposed, lifting his nose and baring his sharp, though blackened teeth. "I still expect to have thee staked to our holy pyre with the rest of you jiaren demons soon enough, but some courtesy may earn thee yet a quicker death when the time surely comes."

"Ah, how presumptuous of us," Kang chuckled, though there did not seem to be even a hint of condescension in it. "My Lord, Cuthbert, in the meantime when we are both still very much unengulfed in transcendent flames, would you honour us in taking a seat at our table?"

No matter what he thought of him, MacGregor had to admire the man's ability to withstand such flagrant abuse. The Keeper of the Scrolls had told him many a tale of the vitriol thrown upon them by the now comatose Gretwalder; it was clear he came upon the skill most honestly. Now, of course, the habit had grown into far more complex usages than a mere tool of political survival.

A servant withdrew a steel chair for the general to sit, and Cuthbert carefully held the back of the seat while slowly lowering himself downwards, a strained look on his face that betrayed some immense pain in his joints as he did so. MacGregor could easily trace Kang's eyes following his opponent all the way down, greedily lapping up every hint of weakness.

"Mister Shawn," Cuthbert began, mistakenly addressing Kang by his prénom instead of his family name as Cassians often did, "my journey here has been lengthy and tiresome – thou would know having erected the primary obstacles in question – I would appreciate, in the principle of fairness, a curt and sincere statement of purpose for this meeting that circumvents all the typical diplomatic niceties and empty customs for which I have no patience. Do me this favour, and I will listen, no matter how absurd I may deem thy agenda, I will listen for a short while and then we can have done with one another and return to our broad-swords to fight like real men."

Cuthbert waited, his hollow cheeks cycling up and down in ghoulish clockwork timed with his ragged breathing as Kang wrapped his long fingers together, the smile flattened to nothing but a wry smirk as he pondered. Changed as he was from their legion days, MacGregor knew him well enough to open his notebook and wet his pen. There would be something to write soon enough.

"In my opinion," Kang began, dropping his lofty plural pronouns for the first time since assuming his new office, "this insurgency has gone on long enough. You have made your point, and you have made it quite clearly. I am happy to report I am ready to listen."

The eyes of everyone else at the table narrowed quite considerably. Kang's expression barely ever changed, so it was impossible to decipher the veracity of his statements, especially something as blasé as that. The leader paused just long enough to see a subtle, unconscious nod come from Cuthbert, and he knew the general was primed. MacGregor smiled to himself as Kang continued; legion training was second to none. Even a raving lunatic could use to pry open his adversary like a book.

Kang leaned forward, speaking in a quieter, gentler, almost collegial tone. "I will admit, in my dealings with your predecessor, I found in myself some genuine fondness for your cause. Even as Chief of Security, I never did enjoy persecuting your Old Believers; I hope thou can believe that. It was the job, thou see. Simply the job. We were the vassals of the Emperor, and the Emperor would not tolerate you, simple as that."

"But...," Kang winked, grinning like a huckster with his arm on the shoulder of his mark, spinning handsome, fantastical tales to separate the victim from his cash, "as thou may have remarked, the Emperor and I are no longer on the friendliest of terms. In fact, I have been thinking a great deal of late on whether or not we should just cut ties all together and go about our separate ways, once and for all."

MacGregor knew it would be too obvious if he jotted this down, but he made a mental note regardless. He would have to find some way to report this up to Lady Ci.

"And when we look past all the trivial instances – the murders, the bombings, the rapes, etc. – it seems rather apparent to me that it really was not the Emperor, but you who have been the mistreated party here. After all, which seems more atrocious: the killing a few innocents in defence of an ancient, storied religion or a foreign king demanding an alien population worship his image alongside their revered stars, pray in his tongue not theirs and submit to his eternal service and not their god? When one tallies all the sins on one side and the other, it is hard to find any accounting which would tilt the balance towards you."

"And as for what you have done in the North, oh my stars, what wonders! It would be impossible for me to complain about the murder of those three Walders (considering it was I who conspired with your Prince to dispatch them) but in their place, you have accomplished such excellent results. Three provinces now united by one principality: your Thunorr. A case could be made that you may have made the management of our Northern continent – never an easy task – a far more efficient exercise."

Kang leaned back on his chair and tilted just slightly to the side in an almost casual manner, continuing with what appeared to be cool indifference. "In light of this, if your Prince would elect to reunify the country and place Thunorr once more within the domains of Vitharr, not only would I be willing to toss away all the boot-licking, closet-imperial ecclesiastics I am saddled with now, reverting back to a strict, Old Believer state doctrine, I would ask your Prince to serve as my primary advisor and Prince-Bishop of the reinstated church."

MacGregor's pen fell straight from his hand. He flopped about the page trying to retrieve it, but no one paid him even the slightest amount of attention. It had been just as much a shock to everyone else.

"I...." Cuthbert's face twitched in unconcealable bewilderment. The colour drained away so rapidly that his parched, pale complexion coupled with the masticated, bony structure of his face gave the impression that the news had startled him to an early grave. "I...." he shook his head, reverting back to his only stable emotion: anger. "Am I truly expected to trust what I hear?"

Kang spread out his arms in another open gesture, trying to dig in his talons while he still could. "Cuthbert, dear Cuthbert, there is no reason to deceive thee. Bizarre and unpresaged as the events leading here may have been, we now make common cause against a common foe. What reason have we to fight?"

"If that be thy attitude, I would extend the same invitation to you, Gretwalder," Cuthbert spat back. "Lay down your arms and join us as our vassal. Let all Vitharr come under the domain of the Stars and our anointed Prince."

Kang smirked, but MacGregor could tell well enough it was a look of chagrin. "My forces outnumber yours ten to one. My spirit of conciliation might be strong, but at the very least it must bend to reality."

"Ha!" the general seemed to have stolen Kang's mirth, for he laughed most bitterly at the thought. "What good is an army thou cannot feed, thee petty despot? Our Old Believer heads are not so stuck in the sand as thou might think; we see perfectly well your famine ravaging all across this forsaken country. Every day more and more cities, nearer and nearer to your capital, bow to our Prince, for he offers bread and thou has none. Take your army and invade; we fear it not. We shall retreat once more to mountains like we always have before and starve you out. If this blockade lasts any longer, we shall win all of Vitharr without firing a single shot."

"I think thy sole estimation of our capabilities is a single failed incursion under my unfortunate (and inept) predecessor," Kang snarled, the threat finally superseding his unnatural smile. "I would not recommend you test us now. We might be hungry, yes, but we can still gobble you up if so pressed."

Cuthbert rose from the table, "so be it. We shall take our chances. The VLF will never submit to a foreign devil, plain and simple. There is no 'Prince-Bishop' or 'primary advisor'. Either we lead or we fight. There will be no alternatives."

Kang gave a polite, but clearly forced smile in return. "In that case, we are sincerely sorry for having wasted your precious time."

MacGregor was not quite certain where the idea had originated – perhaps he was still obsessing over his first interview with Kang where the man had all but espoused a new religion of nuclear armaments, but suddenly he found himself madly scribbling on a piece of his notepad and sliding it over to his master. The message simply read, show him the arsenal.

Kang grinned. "But while thou are here," he called back, regaining the general's attention for just a moment if nothing more. "Perhaps there is one thing I can show thee. One thing that might just yet bear the power to change thy mind."

Cuthbert sneered at the proposal. "I am happy to review anything located along the exit."

The jiaren did not skip a single beat. "Good!" he chirped, before leaping from his seat and helping the unflinchingly suspicious general into the elevator.

Though he was not expressly invited, the Commandant squeezed himself into the same space, knowing Kang would never reprimand him in front of a foreign dignitary and risk exposing any rift between himself and his lieutenants. This was his chance, and it was worth any possible repercussion that may lay in the future.

Kang nodded as MacGregor entered, only acknowledging his presence with the raising of a single eyebrow. The Commandant could feel his old heart thumping wildly in his chest, and he hoped sincerely the deafening sound of blood rushing in his ears could not be heard by the two men at his side. Espionage was clearly a younger man's game; it was agony just to maintain a neutral expression. The real spy work seemed more than likely to conjure a stroke.

Though they were already several hundred metres underground, the elevator at Kang's behest fell at a dizzying pace further and further towards the planet's core, causing the cabin to crackle and sizzle as air was rapidly released and re-filtered to restore internal pressure and keep the occupants from being squeezed out like wet rags. Even once the elevator had come to a stop, it took several seconds for the lightness in their heads and heaviness in their feet to fully balance themselves out.

As the elevator doors opened, the trio was greeted by a narrow, dimly lit catwalk leading towards an amorphous, silvery bubble, seemingly floating magically on the air in front of them.

"Have thou ever fancied a ride in a hyperloop, our dear Cuthbert?" Kang asked, somewhat superciliously as he stretched his long legs through the entrance of the bubble and sat himself down upon a richly padded white leather chair within.

The general gritted his teeth in frustration. "Thou could esteem perfectly well I know not what it even is."

Kang laughed as the bubble closed and he retrieved a bottle of baijiu from a compartment under his seat, pouring three glasses, though Cuthbert declined to partake. "I meant no disrespect. Having been born on this planet also, I would never have imagined such a thing were possible were it not for this man here," he gestured to the Commandant who returned the salute with an upturned glass, "and our time in the legion."

"How strange it would have been," Kang reminisced, arching his back far down into the cushions, "to think back then, that one day I, lowly, unrenowned peasant boy Kang Shawn would have been making a loop of my very own. Perhaps that is what you fanatics would call a miracle."

"From humble origins, you have undoubtedly gone remarkably far," MacGregor cheered.

"Hmpf!" Cuthbert grumbled. "Imperial sycophancy truly knows no bounds. Am I to be a prisoner now to your eternal verbal fellatio or shall this 'loop' of ours ever do us the mercy of moving?"

"Oh, to the contrary," Kang grinned, "We have already moved a great distance. Two or three hundred kilometres by my estimation, and we shall be arriving just momentarily."

"What!" cried Cuthbert, shooting forward in his seat, completely perplexed beyond all hope of recovery. "That is entirely impossible. I have not felt the slightest hint of motion this entire time! With your elevator the movement was quite obvious; my stomachs still bears the ignominious fruits of that wretched descent."

MacGregor chose to answer this as his master looked on, clearly inundated in his own pool of immense self-satisfaction. "The elevator experiences torque from cables lodged both above and below it, so one can always feel an external force pulling up or pushing downwards. The hyperloop car is suspended magnetically in a total vacuum, so there exists no friction to generate the feeling of momentum."

"Until one comes to rest, that is?" Cuthbert asked, growing anxious. "Is this some manner of imperial death-trap? Have I stumbled into an alien demon-worshipping suicide cult? Will at any moment this car come to a halt and pulverize our bodies as they smash against the wall at unimaginable speeds?"

MacGregor attempted not to mock the barbarian's flight of primitive paranoia. "The hyperloop always accelerates and decelerates at an exponential pace that renders it impossible to detect or experience any but the most subtle of g-forces within the cabin." He drank another deep swig of the liquor and attempted to reconnect with the merriment it had always inspired in him before. "I can well assure thee, my fine fellow, neither myself nor our formidable leader harbour any desire for self-destruction."

Kang guffawed at that. "Perhaps thou should let the man see what we have here for himself before he reaches that conclusion, hmm, Kanshou?"

That certainly did not inspire confidence. MacGregor did his best to disguise his sudden gulp with another swig of wine.

As if the car itself was determined to prove the baselessness of Cuthbert's fears, the bubble suddenly slid open, and Kang, too excited to allow his guest the customary honour of departing first, quickly rushed out into the darkness, a clear spring in his step. The Commandant and the general stepped out far more gingerly, but they soon recognized what had been the cause of Kang's exuberance.

The abyss was clearly acclimated to perfect darkness, but as they left their pod, tiny lights sprung into existence, illuminating a cement cavern that stretched infinitely beyond the grim, grey horizon. Supporting the immense, concrete ceiling were tremendously wide steel tubes, serving both as structural reinforcement and silos to the surface. And besides each silo were neatly packed lines of hundreds of gleaming, metal cones, each no taller than the men themselves but tipped with tiny spearpoints of a dazzling variety of colours. Beneath them and connected to the silos were glowing rainbows, great floods of current rushing through enormous conductors that linked whole landscape of missiles together like it were all just one giant circuit-board seen from the eyes of Heaven.

Everywhere, rockets were being moved, picked apart, reassembled, shifted about, but all without a single human being in sight. The hyperloop had been the key, MacGregor realized. The glowing rivers of current moved the missiles about with the same magnetic propulsion, and once placed in their proper depot, the rockets seemed to protract tiny arms that could diagnose, repair or alter themselves at will.

Judging from the shining, neon-coloured lines that streaked the silos, it seemed the tiny missiles would ultimately be propelled by magnetic levitation all the way up the tube with enough momentum to reach the stratosphere. That, undoubtably, had been Kang's great invention. Producing enough conventional rockets and their mountains of fuel would never have gone unnoticed long enough for Kang to have amassed such an arsenal under the Emperor's nose. But, repurposing civilian technology, all while utilizing the limitless electrical supply the Empire itself had created in its desire to extract and refine Septimi's vast uranium deposits, it had granted the petty tyrant just the cover he needed to stockpile an apocalypse.

Kang planted his feet near a red-tipped missile and began stroking it with all the fondness and feeling of a lover, cooing to it gently as he recited what MacGregor assumed was Vidar scripture: "'Oh, what joy is this? What tearful misery yet rend me? That beauty doth transfix and repulse, the sum of all hope and torment in a single glimpse. This fire, this eternal flame, it wrought the Earth beneath my feet, yet in a single strike of Thor's hammer, will singe away all else to dust.'"

Kang lifted his eyes straight towards Cuthbert, holding his gaze in a hollow, deadened gaze that seemed to dare the general to stare into the bottomless white, a reflection a supernova no one had yet seen. He continued, the inferno spreading raging across his prophetic eyes, "'Obey the Star, and may its light radiate upon the Faithful. Renounce it, and shall its wrath dispel thee from the memory of the cosmos.'"

MacGregor did not wait to see the astonished general's reaction. He already begun pressing his fingers discretely against the hidden transmitter grafted into his palm, informing the governor of exactly where they were.

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They had returned to the stone age.

Five weeks without food, without sleep, without hope, the frosty wind chewing at their hides and the falling ordnance chipping at their sanity had finally taken its unpayable toll. Alfred and his refugees had been ground down to savages, and even as they sharpened sticks to dull spears, wove reeds into spindly shields and pulled heavy rocks from the ancient foundations of their hilled sanctuary, no one could dare admit the obvious. The confrontation had been decided long before it would ever take place. Now, they were merely play-acting in the face of doom.

So deplorable was their current state that even their fantasies seemed juvenile and morose. At best, their last show of violent struggle would win the lives of but a handful across Kang's iron grip. At the worst, they would give the jiaren the option to flee the field of life mercifully, choosing not to endure whatever horrors awaited them if captured. Suicide was the only option left to them now, and so they readied their weapons solely to ensure that one final choice.

Alfred had been certain his whole life of what would await him after death. Even as tiny babes, when Edward was being groomed to follow his father as prophet and Alfred to continue his warrior lineage, he had heard the same story repeated over and over, from every set of lips he knew, every mouth he loved and trusted. There had been great comfort in that story, in knowing that out amongst the Holy Stars there was planet resting just beyond their earthly reach, that the destiny of every human being was written within that silver river in the sky, that each pinprick of light was the cosmic manifestation of every man's eternal soul. The true believers would be rewarded with a whole, rich, sumptuous planet of their own, lush and stunning paradises that marked the culmination of their destiny in the afterlife.

Alfred had never known his own father, though he had felt the man's colossal weight on his shoulders all the same. For the first two decades of his life, it seemed it was all he ever heard, all he ever spoke about with any of the Old Believers in those echoing mountains. It seemed every man in the VLF had admired his bravery, every child had heard of his legend and every captive lady secreted affection for him in their hearts.

What Alfred knew was far less illustrative: his father had been a talented and confident field commander, who, when finally pinned down against the Walder Vihorr's army, had chosen to rush headfirst into the enemy formation, a chain of grenades strapped to his chest. His sacrifice bought his men's escape and was looked upon as a holy martyr forever afterwards.

Although the VLF had never had time to properly document their exploits for posterity – so bitter and unceasing was their struggle – the mountain people who hosted them had a long, storied oral tradition which proclaimed Alfred's father had been the first man to immolate himself in the name of the True Faith. Once the prophet began eulogizing, however, exclaiming how the beloved martyr had been rewarded with eternal bliss and peace upon a twinkling gem amongst the stars, it did not take long for a crashing tide of imitators to flock to his immortal ranks.

In retrospection – and in the face of certain death, what else was a man to do but contemplate in such a delving and depressive manner – Alfred, even as a child, could see that had been an inflection point for the movement, the moment where they became something very different, something he had hoped would be greater. Before then, they had been a people on the run, defending the faith, protecting the believers, but keeping their heads as low and their guns as cool as possible. After that, they had turned on the offensive, devoted to a mission to push every last infidel all the way back to Blackhell.

Edward had been the perfect vessel for such a message. Even as an adolescent, the aging patriarch had ushered him to the pulpit to give fiery speeches of the encroaching evil from the foreign devils and the myriad pleasures bestowed upon those who would dare oppose them. Edward might not have had a strategic bone in his body, but that had hardly been detrimental to the cause. It was like every failing, every loss, every reckless charge or sacrifice of lives only strengthened their fervour, only solidified their belief.

Alfred knew that to be true more than most. He could never allow the loss of his father's life to be meaningless, and so he soaked up his prophet's every last syllable. Somewhere in the stars, his dad's eternal soul was feasting on the fruit of victory and luxuriating in the fountains in youth. And one day, when he had fallen just as selflessly and heroic on the battlefield, he would join him there, and they would be acquainted there once again and for all eternity.

As much as he hated to admit it, Alfred had not even now excised from himself such cancerous thoughts. Here he was, filing kindling into spearpoints, hoping to make one last vainglorious attempt for a higher cause. And yet, for all his efforts, for all his commitment, he could not even hold the gaze of a single jiaren for more than a second. He could not look upon their sorry faces or glance up their ghastly, parched skeletal bodies without knowing in an instant that this labour had been all for naught.

In the end, he would save no one, and they would all be sent to Blackhell forever. There was no planet waiting for anyone, Alfred was sure of that. He now just longed for the charade to draw to a close and his misery to be put to rest. One way or another, the uncertainty would be resolved.

One after another, the woeful company fled their bunkers, primitive arms at the ready, rallying just outside the range of the enemy guns now separating them from freedom. There was scarcely more than a thousand of them now, less than a quarter the number with which they had started out, an original figure that itself had been abysmally small. Of his many regrets, that would likely be his greatest: in the end, Alfred would not be able to save more than he had killed.

He would go to his grave have taken more lives than he had returned. How could he have gotten it so wrong for so long? How could he have so unbalanced the ledger? How twisted and incomprehensible had his moral compass become? It did not truly matter one way or the other now. It was up to the stars, as it had been all along.

Alfred gave a subtle nod to his lieutenant, ensuring his army of the dead was in place. Then, he raised his arm, crouching as he did, preparing for the final sprint of his life. He could feel his feet tremor against the ground in nervous anticipation as he nearly lowered his arm and-."

"Stop!"

A woman's voice cried out from hills around them, and suddenly Mila was bolting towards the jiaren like a burst of Cassian lightning. Though she ran up to Alfred and wrapped her tender arms tightly around him, the general's mind was too addled under the stress of imminent death to respond. His arms hung limply at his side, his eyes cold and stone-like as Mila hastily related her tale, each word simply dropping into one ear and falling out the other.

"Listen, Alfred! Please, I haven't much time." she pleaded, scrunching the tattered fabric of his tunic as she dropped to her knees in sorrow. "The Party's coming. I knew they'd come. I'm much too valuable to let Kang capture me. They will take me away, Alfred. Probably to Cassia Prime, probably for good, but it was the only way to save you, thou see. It was the only way to save you! I'm doing this for thee. Please, dear stars, my Alfred, please look at me!"

There were tears of desperation flowing down her cheeks as her frantic fingers clutched at Alfred's frigid face, pulling his empty eyes down to meet hers. "Good," she said, swallowing, trying with all her might to remember her training, to steady her breathing, to flatten her pulse and focus her mind.

Finally, a single spark of warmth returned to her lover's cheek, and she flushed with joy, continuing. "Listen, my love. Whatever thou do, thou cannot trust Song. He has bought them off somehow; with his tremendous wealth and commercial connections, he's dazzled them beyond all reason. He has the Party waiting on him hand and foot, lapping up his every word. But he's an imperial to the core, Alfred. He wanted to abandon you with all his people just out of spite, Alfred, just out of spite. Thou have been an ally of the Party so long now; I hope they shall heed thee. I know they shall heed thee! Thou must convince them in my stead, Alfred. Thou must shout it to their faces. If the Party does not cut him down, he will be just the tyrant Kang is. We just canoot allow that, my love, not after everything we've done here. We must make it worth it. All that death. All that misery. We have to make it worth it."

Mila broke down, stammering that same phrase over and over into Alfred's unfeeling chest, as he watched the sky open up above him. Three steel-plated chimeras materialized overhead, and the valley below became inundated in a torrent of blinding, hot light. In nothing but an instant, the whole regiment of soldiers - their guns, their barricades, their food stores, their tents, their mess-halls, their intricate line of trenches and barbed wire - was all evaporated. Nothing was left behind but the blackened embers of five hundred humans, the sand beneath them turned to glass.

A firebolt erupted from far beyond the horizon, striking one of the Party vessels and causing it to spiral downwards in a tailspin towards the ocean. Alfred crumpled to his knees beside Mila, watching in awe as that great metallic beast, a whole whale of gleaming aluminum and sparking circuits, crashed beneath the chopping waves, sending a towering tsunami to engulf the beaches below them. The ocean stormed countless caves and bunkers whose origin spread all the way back to farthest antiquity, shredding them apart under its watery weight and returning the planet's history to the sea.

He felt Mila's lips on him just as two Party officers dragged her away from his ailing body. He knew she had finally meant it; he just hadn't had the strength to kiss her back.

Alfred's meagre band of VLF rebels watched as the rest of the Party ships landed amidst the steady spew of missiles arcing out across the sky from seemingly every corner of the globe. It was the first time in any of their lives they had witnessed the true extremes of human might and devastation.

It would not be the last.