"Wang!"

Quentin jolted upright with the velocity of a wounded, terrorized cat, screaming herself awake. Her body heaved and twitched in grotesque, unnatural motions, her eyes widened to the size of serving plates, scurrying up and down the courtyard like a gerbil might timidly survey for predators. Her teeth clenched and foamed at the ridges of her mouth, nostrils stretched far enough they made her naturally hoggish face recede further into boarishness, and still the whites of her eyes grew larger than that.

"Wang?" she shouted again, though this time the screeching volume was cut by the feeble tone of confusion. The legionnaires and Black Hundreds were useless in these fits - nervous episodes that were growing more and more frequent time wore on – so the women officers (and there were many now), found themselves rushing up to the conference table from their ancillary positions seated against the wall, trying their best to calm their leader's frayed nerves before the outburst grew too violent.

"Worry not, your worship," Mila said, smiling sweetly as she brushed Pan's hair from her haggard face. "The traitor is dead, and you did kill him. He's no threat to anyone now... thanks to you."

The other ladies chimed in, all jostling to rub their hands against her hollow cheeks, her trembling hands or her shaking shoulders. They cooed softly, all the while watching in carefully guarded apprehension to see if their shivering charge was about to swing in mood, throw them away and grab the pistol at her belt: a move with which they were now all painfully familiar. Thankfully, Quentin seemed not to bristle under their presence, but looked at Mila in seemingly genuine affection.

"No, Tribune Chen, the thanks are thine. Thou always know how to reassure us when we need it most."

Mila's rise from chattel-cart to imperial officer might have incomprehensibly meteoric in any ordinary circumstances, but given the number of titles and posts that had been raining down from the sky in the last few chaotic weeks, she was hardly unique. That was what now allowed "Tribune Chen" to blend in amongst the crowd so effortlessly.

Strangely enough, though she had avoided being shipped off to the bawdyhouses with the rest of her fellow passengers to the colony, one of her first trips into the city had been to brothel, not as a barmaid this time, however, though that time as a client. Valentina had furnished her with a surprising heavy purse, and she had spent more than a few taels to find herself an actress, not just one of beauty and poise, but of real, palpable, believable talent: a woman with a strong head on her shoulders. That had been difficult to find in Vitharr, but here in the colony, where the strict Vidar Cassians mores were more relaxed, such ladies were abundant, and Mila had scraped the cream of the crop.

The actress had been utterly convincing, -a vengeful prostitute turned smuggler just looking for some way to chasten a Party that had failed to pay its debts- and she had played it perfectly. Maybe the situation had been too tense to probably vet her. Maybe the Legion had been too desperate for good news to seriously challenge the story they were given. Maybe they were just willing to move in whatever direction still gave them hope, no matter how unbelievable it may be. The explanation did not matter. All that concerned Mila was that Quentin, the Commandant, had accepted everything she was told, and she had used that information to devastating effect.

The original plan (of which Mila had been sworn to absolute secrecy, even from any other members of the Party itself) had been to betray the Red Jiaren Army, give up their supply depot as a way to build trust with Legion command, slowly allowing Mila to embed a network under their nose and find whoever it was that might know the location of Vitharr's nuclear cache. Imperials tended to be cautious, and so Mila had suspected the governor's troops would use their intelligence to slowly bleed out the revolution, giving her plenty of time to infiltrate even to the deepest ranks of the officer corps. Instead, however, Pan had raised such a ruckus, conjured such a storm, that Mila's timetable had been catapulted ahead beyond even the wildest of expectations.

True, the actress had gone missing. In all the reprisals and murders of Cassians, that could hardly be counted a surprise. Thankfully Mila had much paler skin than most of the Vidar and combined with her ability to speak jiawen flawlessly without accent, she had managed to escape any similar, ominously unknown fate. Quite to the contrary, as the Black Hundreds were openly recruiting women to fill in the gaps while they planned and executed their massive offensive against Wang, Mila had volunteered to join them.

Mila was not quite certain what had befallen the Black Hundreds in their battle with the Red Army, nor really could she discern either the fate of the four legions that had only just recently guarded the colony against such threats. News of military defeats was heavily censored to the public and serving in the military itself garnered nothing better than the rumours available to everyone. The Black legion had been organized so poorly that officers were constantly sending and receiving conflicting reports, and the rank and file ended up even more confused than their civilian counterparts. Whatever the story, however, if the last week or so before the battle had been a disaster, then the battle itself was nothing short of a cataclysm of unthinkable proportions.

It was a catastrophe she was all too willing to exploit.

So many officers had died during the abortive revolution, Legion command (or Quentin herself, or the ranking prefect, some unknown authority anyway) had ordered the remaining units to elect new tribunes to report back to the reclaimed military palace so the Legion could somehow be reconstituted from the top down. The elections were totally ad hoc and sporadic, with units of various sizes often appointing multiple, competing representatives, leaders who more often than not murdered each other before ever even reaching their commanders. It was exactly the sort of chaos that just begged Mila to take advantage of it.

So, she had strode up to Legion headquarters, and explained she was Chen Wenying, a recent immigrant from the Home Worlds who had been elected tribune of the Thirty-Fourth Century. Whether or not such a century already had a representative or if it even existed at all was never once discussed or interrogated. She was taken at face value and within days found herself seated with the most senior officers still left on the planet.

The Legion's sudden acceptance of even complete amateurs into its ranks was hardly an accident, however. While the Black Hundreds had spent the first week or two travelling house to house, murdering the Cassian men and raping their wives, those that were left (almost all women), had been saddled with the immense task of cleaning up. They had repaired the military palace, re-established the city's defences and built massive internment camps for all the Reds and Cassians who had managed to survive, and those were just the strictly, undeniably military tasks.

Pan, while she was somehow proclaimed governor at the height of the chaos, never relinquished her command, choosing instead of become governor-general, and so the civil administration, the Black Hundreds and the Legion all found themselves commanded by the same person, their work and jurisdictions suddenly overlapping.

Civilian orders were issued to military officers and martial commands trusted to civilian authorities and not any small number of people began plucking multiple, incompatible titles from thin air, taking inspiration from the titular creativity of their leader.

With no central delegation of authority whatsoever, every officer took on every possible post often duelling to the death to keep it. Centurions began collecting bridge tolls. Procurement officers requisitioned ammunition stores, and customs agents started arming their own anti-smuggling units. Death squads started issuing liquor licenses, in league with legionnaires who would offer to protect unlicensed businesses ... for a small fee.

Pan became the focal point of a fiercely storming hurricane of officials who all regularly entreated, pleaded with and intimidated her into revoking the credentials of whomever had last petitioned her, entrusting instead absolute authority to them. Access to the governor-general became so privileged, in fact, whatever faction happened to be in her presence at any given moment had a habit of guarding the gateways leading to her person with their very lives.

A core group of women (Mila among them) stayed free of the bloodbath, choosing to keep diligently cleaning up the city while the men slowly murdered themselves to extinction, and they slowly proved themselves to be the only ones capable of re-establishing anything even resembling order. Little by little, Quentin's court was pruned and sculpted, and the survivors, as if plucked from some horrific simulation of Darwinian blood-sport, slowly formed around that stable core of support staff.

Mila wished she had brought over an entire squadron of party agents. In the complete and utter turmoil that had befallen the colony, she could have incorporated each and every one of them into Legion command. At the very least, the episode was proving to be a perfect demonstration of the jiaren's revolutionary potential. Their army might have been put down, but the women who remained were well on their way to defeating the patriarchy in much the same way the Cassians themselves had done it. It was just unfortunate that after two weeks of Pan's continuous begging, the Black Hundreds finally halted the killings and regrouped within the Legion structure.

Now, though they were regulated to the far tables and wall seating within the newly renovated military palace courtyard, those women officers were never leaving the room. They had won their place, and no matter the griping of the Black Hundreds or the Legion officers, so long as the governor-general remained in their debt, they were never going to leave. For the first time in a long time, Mila felt she was back on the right side of history, and that brought a buoyancy to her soul she had once thought lost forever.

The same, however, could not be said for the governor-general. By the time Legion Command, the gubernatorial administration and the Black Hundreds had agreed to stop tossing her around amongst themselves, she was nearly unrecognizable to those who had been barred from seeing her in those bloody, chaotic weeks.

Her friends found her wearing the hide of the old Quentin like an oversized cloak, draped awkwardly off her brittle bones, all the fat and grizzle of her enormous body burned away in the crucible of those terrifying days. Her eyes were nearly bleeding from redness, purple welts swelling up beneath them pulling her skin all the down to her cheek. She had been unable to sleep all those two weeks: continuous, copious doses of opium the only nutrition that ever crossed her lips.

Mila and the women officers had attended to her, tried to nurse her back to something more closely resembling health, but it was immediately made clear to all why the men around her had found her so easily manipulable in the aftermath of Red Army's defeat. In her moments of lucidity and calmness, she seemed to grasp quite clearly the enormity of the challenges facing her, and she could invent meaningful, even clever solutions. But such moments were few and far between.

The slightest noise, change in environment or even unexpected of events could trigger a complete digression into the worst forms of insanity. She screamed. She cried. She yelled uncontrollably for hours at a time. She could not remember where or when she was, drivelling all the while about utter nonsense that make even an abstract poet with a four-year's vocabulary blush. Sometimes, she would be found hiding under her bedframe all day with her hands tucked over her ears evidently awaiting the impact of invisible artillery fire and, in the worst episodes, if disturbed, she would take whatever blunt instrument laid closest to her and bludgeon her most unlucky attendant near the point of death.

Even in those briefest of times when Quentin returned to some stance of normalcy, her focus seemed to be becoming increasingly more esoteric and obsessive. Reports of a massive army massing at Vitharr's capital for invasion of the colony had reached her at exactly the same time that the first cases of an unknown virus had been discovered amongst the interned Cassian population, and yet Pan concerned herself almost entirely with the latter while making no mention or plan against the former. Everyday she asked for new reports on the number infected, the specific ancestral breakdown of the afflicted's DNA (were they were more Cassian or jiaren?) as well as death and critical condition statistics broken down to the most minute demographic level, and she often asked for these several times a day having forgotten in the course of an episode in the afternoon that she had first been briefed in the morning.

All this time as she poured over disease statistics, Kang's army presumably grew closer, but she never once convened a meeting of Legion command on the subject. Mila had heard the officers grumbling about it more than once. She and the other women were already repairing the city walls just in case, and she knew the Black Hundreds and Legion officers were undoubtably already forming their own, mutually exclusive defensive plans far away from the governor-general's oversight.

There was little doubt in her mind that the city would fall to the first half-organized force that besieged it. If she was going to retrieve the warheads, then, she would need to do it quickly.

The meeting had already dragged on for many hours in the indiscriminately dispersed conversation to which all Pan's staff were now becoming accustomed - long, sporadic rants on various topics punctuated by various eccentric ministrations that never quite led to a point while also simultaneously giving everyone around the table ample justification to carry out whatever agenda they preferred - when those assembled in the palace courtyard finally met the first piece of information that could actually be called "news".

A centurion (a real one by the looks of him, not a Black Hundreds charlatan) was quickly rushed through the paper doors, standing under the great blue scar in the painted sky dome that now, freshly repaired, once again peered over the courtyard of the military palace. The officer asked to have the floor, pointless as it was to jockey for position in such a blatantly disorderly place, and when the governor-general seemed to point her weary eyes his way, he spoke.

"I bear good news!" He bellowed that all the conference might hear, though Mila saw from the way the Legion staff all straightened their backs and quieted their side chatter that the officers were well aware of what was about to be said. She smelled a conspiracy afoot, and, leaning forward, she hoped she could pick up the scent.

"The Majestic Imperial Legion has proven itself the greatest martial force in all of human history once again, your excellency!" the centurion announced, rather self-important, his nose standing up so stiff it was impossible not be in some way condescending. "Signals division has received word the Third and Fourth Septimi Legions are less than a day's journey from reaching the colony. The mountain pass is in sight!"

"What!" Pan's body, sickly and wobbled as it was, suddenly composed itself in fascinated concentration like a mound of kebab meat pressed against a skewer. She made no effort to hide her shock. Mila did not understand much of why the Legion were absent the colony (it was impossible to ask too many questions without being identified as an obvious outsider), but she did know that no one had expected the legions to return for at least a month or two. If this centurion was to be believed, it had not taken them even three weeks.

"How is this possible?" Their leader moaned, as if it were some personal slight against her. "How could this happen?"

The centurion opened his mouth, clearly preparing himself to answer, but at seeing the Quentin's evident dismay at their fellow's return, the rest of the Legion officers had grown flat-faced and emotionless, and the centurion decided ultimately to hold his tongue. "I know not, your worship. I only know they have arrived."

"Liar!" a man sitting across from the Legion command decried, dressed in enough black leather to appear as if a giant, anthropomorphic oil slick was making the accusation. "I saw the prefect make a gesture on the table. He was ordering the officer not to speak!"

"Shame!" shouted the other black-clad figures, a great many of them plunging their hands to their waists, fingering the blades left holstered there. The Legion officers remained stony and silent in response. They had been stripped of their weapons before entering the courtyard and so appeared defenceless. Knowing the dismal lack of security throughout the military palace, however, Mila knew at least a few of them were bound to keep a pistol or two stashed beneath their uniforms.

"Why the acrimony, my colleagues?" Magistrate Hui stood up from where she and her bureaucrats were sitting across from the governor-general, at the undisputed bottom of the table. She held out her arms in a pretentious display of goodwill, saying, "the return of the Legion is good for all. We are in desperate need of their assistance for the restoration of order."

"What if we like the order as it is?" another voice from the Black Hundreds rang out.

"Yeah, how dare thou insult the governor-general!" cried out his fellow. "She and the Black Legion have already restored order and harmony to all the colony. Show some respect!"

"How ... is ... this ... possible?" Pan repeated, the rest of the world flashing by her at such a rapid pace that she had to stretch the syllables of her words as far out as possible before she could even hold them in her mind.

The officers remained silent; the centurion only repeated his previous denial, "it was not explained, your excellency." This time, however, an officer from the Black Hundreds strode up towards his master, touched her lightly on the shoulder, and, surprisingly, she turned back to him in instant recognition. He leaned down and whispered into her ear, and though no one in that massive, sprawling room could hear a word of what was said, Mila could read his lips just fine.

"I know what happened," the man told Quentin, looking up quickly to the legionnaires to ensure they could not hear before continuing. "There is only one possibility. The Legion has left their artillery behind. They dropped their heavy weapons, their baggage, anything weighing them down and made a run for the mountains. That is what happened, your worship. They're helpless, your worship. That is my guess; that is why the officers are afraid to admit it. They're helpless."

Quentin leaned back and laughed, a hideous, coughing cackle that rattled even the collective brittle countenance of the Legion command.

"Close the mountain passes," she instructed, a serious, almost convincing look of sanity returning to her features. "Do not allow a single foreign soldier within a thousand li of the city until we have searched the entire Legion for any sign of the barbarian plague."

"Prefect Petain." The black-suited man awkwardly rose from his chair, clearly unprepared for his governor-general's address. He was thin and wiry, with scrawny, nearly gaunt-seeming cheeks, in stark contrast to his other, more muscular paramilitary colleagues. His bones seemed like little more than stalks of dried straw, and his scrappy, emaciated grey hair had been almost entirely banished from his body except for a pathetically small, though aggressively prominent tuft right at his forehead that he had grown out to such absurd lengths it nearly covered his eyes as he stood. He brushed those strands from his face as he made an effort to stand at attention, pressing in his rounded spectacles (suspiciously similar in style to Quentin's own) closer to his eyes.

"Prefect, we were colleagues once at the university, and we esteem thy knowledge of all illnesses, both home and foreign, to be of the highest of all attainable to mankind. Take the Black Hundreds with thee, and we know thou shall cleanse our forces of the barbarian scourge."

"Your worship!" Another prefect, a real prefect this time, stood up to object. "The Legion must protest in the strongest possible of all terms. We did not liberate the Home Empire time and time again to be cast off as 'foreigners' and left to freeze at the gates!"

"Oh?" Quentin inquired, her voice both breathlessly disinterested and decidedly trenchant, chin now resting on an outstretched fist. "Perhaps we should apologize. After all, most legionnaires are good, honest, loyal-hearted imperials. That is true."

She shrugged, sighing deeply. "Oh well, you have our deepest sorrows. We misspoke. Let the Legion pass after all."

"Excuse me, your excellency?" Petain was just about to sit when he found himself angled upwards once again, confusion whittled from the chalky, spindly wood of his features. The objecting Legion prefect opposite him did not understand how to react either, his breath seemed caught in some kind of sudden shock at having won so easily.

Quentin gestured to Petain, frustratedly waving him to sit down, clearly showing he had nothing about which to worry. "Wait! Just a moment..." she mused. "I remembered something."

Like an owl might do having no need to worry about breaking its neck from the spasmodic jerk, Pan snapped her gaze back towards the legionnaires and shouted, "Oh, wait! How of silly of me! How is it I could have forgotten? It isn't just the Legion out there, banging at our gates, asking to let them in. No, no, no. There are thousands, maybe even still tens of thousands of auxiliaries begging admittance too! Now, Prefect, if thou can be so kind, could thou repeat for us once again how there are no foreigners in our glorious, our majestic imperial Legion?"

The legionnaire just gritted his teeth, standing in silence. Pan snickered, clearly taking great, sadistic joy in watching his discomfort.

"Really, nothing at all to say, our good officer? The sudden vacuum of an unexpected silence, how strange it is to hear it." She rolled her eyes, chuckling again to herself. "You legionnaires think your silence does you good, but we know already all that you could say anyways, whether you put words to it or not. We know. We know your armies are full of barbarians, filled to the brims with foreigners, filthy, unwashed, smelling, child-beating, wife-raping foreigners who in all likelihood brought this plague to Septimi from one of their dung-infested, backwards, crumbling planets. We know it, our good officers. We know it, and we will not allow a single one of your muck-ridden friends to sicken our beautiful colony. We will not allow it!"

"Petain," she said, returning back to dark side of the courtyard, her severe features devoid of the psychotic pleasure in which she had reveled mere moments ago. "Leave to the mountains immediately. Update me regularly until the legions have all been thoroughly cleansed."

The prefect nodded, signalled something that seemed like it might have been a salute (at the very least an attempt at a salute), and stood tall once again with the rest of his comrades as Pan rose. "Meeting adjourned."

The legionnaires on the other side of the table and Hui's bureaucrats at the bottom remained seated, and several looks passed between them and Mila's corps of female officers sitting along the walls. For a moment it seemed as if their eyes had made some pact; Mila could see immediately which officers had smuggled in arms, and she watched as their shoulders tightened, preparing for battle.

All it took, though, was the Black Hundreds more antagonistically rattling their sabres before the whole scheme tottered and collapsed in on itself. Unlike their opponents, they were all armed and clearly the ascendant faction. At the very least, Mila knew it was a fight in which she would not get involved.

She made the first move and left, hearing gratefully the rest of her colleagues along the wall follow her. As always, the governor-general's words and deeds were appalling. It had been three weeks of such things, and they still managed to shock and offend her each time, but if Pan was going to destroy two imperial legions all by herself, there was no point stopping her. The Party could not have asked for a better collaboration, intentional or not.

It was just when Mila had strolled out far beyond her colleagues, trying to grab some handle on her thoughts within the still lush, though regrowing forest of the palace biodome when she felt the many sets of hands grab her at the mouth, ankles, neck and waist, pulling her down.

Her eyes were covered before she even hit the ground, and she did not even remain conscious long enough to feel the cords tighten around her wrists. It had all just been leaves and butterflies and quiet ponds one moment, then complete black the next.

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Assembling the Vidar Liberation Army was likely the greatest logistical feat Edgar or any Keeper of the Scrolls had ever attempted in all the long, storied history of Vitharr. It also turned out to be among the most futile.

What little food had actually been planted now rotted back into the earth as every train car in the country was requisitioned to transport troops and weaponry, leaving shipments of fertilizer and pesticides to catch fire in the summer heat and harvested crops to putrefy in piles of unmoved mush. The nation's once abundant electrical capacity, fueled by its remarkable wealth of uranium had now been almost diverted entirely to refining that most precious of metals into weapons, silencing the hum of air conditioners and refrigerators just as they were most needed.

Just as it had been in the Gretwalder's failed invasion of the Northern territories as well, every shipping tanker unlucky enough to have ever landed at Vitharr was recommissioned into an intercontinental troop carrier. After the last ship had sank to the bottom of the harbour, however, the price demanded for this fleet had entirely emptied Kang's coffers. It stretched his credit about as far the jiaren merchants would let it, and there would be no other loans forthcoming.

How unfortunate it was then, that almost immediately after the state had been more or less formally bankrupted, the first cases of a ferocious plague suddenly appeared in Hellastharr, followed quickly by reports that would soon stretch all the way down the isthmus and finally bleed into the main continent itself. No matter the volume nor intensity of Edgar's protests, Kang refused to acknowledge the threat, even the virus managed to worm its way deep beneath the ground, infecting the leader in his bunker himself. The army had to be assembled as a national priority, and once Kang recovered with barely a few coughs, he became more resolved to that fact than ever.

The virus itself did not seem particularly deadly. Anyone with access to the nearly magical imperial medicines recovered from it before even knowing they had taken ill (Edgar assumed this had been the source of the rumours that jiaren were immune from the virus). In the countryside, however, where whatever hospitals had existed (and there were not many) were now undersupplied and on the verge of collapse and where the average peasant by some calculations was living on fewer than eleven hundred calories a day, the deaths were piling up quickly. Now, food was rotting in the field not because there were no railcars to ship it, but because there were no serfs left to harvest it.

Still, in face of everything, with privileged access to transportation, medicine, food and supplies, the army managed to muster, and four hundred thousand soldiers had arranged themselves under the Eight-Pointed Star banners, loading themselves over the course of weeks into the waiting transports. It was the largest host Vitharr had ever seen, and unlike the significantly smaller expedition the Gretwalder had launched to the North, this one failed even to leave the harbour.

The tight cramped quarters of the container ships where myriad soldiers from every corner of the country mingled, supped and relieved themselves proved an impossibly precipitous breeding ground for the disease. The fleet had only been loaded up to seventy percent capacity by the time every ship had become infected, and still Kang refused to stop ordering more soldiers aboard. So, the ships had continued loading, even as the number of boarders became quickly outpaced by the number of sick floated away to field hospitals (and the dead just tossed into the waters).

Even with a mountain of medicines, there was a severe shortage of trained physicians and the long, thin shape of the tanker ships made for excellent bottle necks. In the early days, when infections were low, enough patients could be triaged and sent back that the situation looked manageable. It was only when the ships reached full capacity - at the same time that infections peaked - that the medical bays became entirely overwhelmed, and the ships were transformed into little more than sealed, iron coffins.

Every doctor and nurse on every ship became incapacitated with sickness. Every case immediately much worse, much more fatal, and now even the minor symptoms led to chaos. Every mess-hall became infected and with no replacement cooks, the crew stopped eating. All the janitors and cleaning staff fell ill, and suddenly the soldiers found themselves trapped in their vomit and shit, their rancid body fluids now poisoning the very water they drank.

Air filtration systems became clogged, drains were backed-up, electrical circuits burned out. The dead began piling up, and no one came to move them, meaning their decaying, putrid corpses only infested the fleet further. The smartest found some way to cut through their ship's hull and then plunge into the frigid harbour below, hoping they could make it ashore before the hypothermia hit them. About four hundred of the sixteen hundred or so who had tried that had survived. It sounded like terrible odds until one remembered that as of now, anyway, it was unclear now how many, if any, of the soldiers still left onboard were alive.

Thus, as Edgar reviewed the Keepers, the Vidar ministers now gathered around him, he was hardly surprised to be greeted by a sea of grim faces.

They had been discussing it for hours, and still they were no closer to deciding what was to be done with the ships. Kang and Cuthbert both had refused to acknowledge the invasion was doomed, but at the same time they had ordered the ministers to find some way to save as many soldiers as possible. The swimmers had already infected the capital, however; that was confirmed. The army needed to be treated on land if any would survive, but almost no one was willing to take such a chance.

Barclay, the Keeper of Industry, stylish orange tunic draped over his shoulders like a rug, let his tunic fall even further to his back as he leaned against the table, ranting.

"Have thou heard what those leaching, blood-sucking jiaren merchants are doing now? You all know it! They sell vaccines, little elixirs of immortality that defend against the virus, but at prices so exorbitant, one has to sell themselves out of house and home just to purchase a single dose. And why not? We will all surely die without it, so of course they can charge whatever they like."

"But these vaccines, they are very fragile. They only have a shelf life of two to three days after being first produced, so when people cannot afford them, the merchants just let the vials go to waste, unwilling to administer to even the neediest of our dying peasants. No, they would rather pay to guard the vaccines while they slowly dissipate and rot before letting a single vial into the hands of an unpaying customer."

"They're leaches, absolutely every one of them, and they deserved everything we did to them. I have my problems with Kang, for certain, but that is not one of them. I would have been worse to those people, I tell you. Far worse. They deserve worse."

"But thou did purchase a vial for thine own self, correct?" asked Harden, another Keeper and minister for agriculture, seemingly quite genuinely concerned.

"Of course! I'm the Keeper of Industry. How could I not?"

Edgar grumbled, twisting at the folds of his sleeves as he thought. "But now it is different. Now it is important - nay, imperative! – it is imperative we obtain this vaccines for more than just us five! If we are the core of the state, then let us say that without these medicines, the state is impotent. Utterly impotent. All the obedience in the world is worthless if are none left to obey us."

"And that is only if, in the first place, there is any obedience to speak," the Keeper of the Chest coughed, rubbing his willowy fist against weathered strands of a white, wiry beard. "I will not say it myself," he shrugged, "but our creditors certainly are blathering. No one accepts the Gretwalden Committee of Emergency Protectorate. Are the people placated by the reinstatement of the Old Beliefs? Maybe so, for a time, but not enough to see through this disaster. The merchants are not budging; they will not allow any purchase of vaccines on bonds - they don't expect the government to last long enough to cash them."

"Scandalous!" Wyndam, the Keeper of Health proclaimed, feigning shock with a dramatic hand clasping at his open mouth.

The Keeper of the Chest rolled his eyes, "I am only reporting what I have heard. Thou know I could never show such disloyalty to our leader myself."

Edgar shook his head. "No, that much is taken for granted. We here are all profoundly loyal to the country. Through thick and thin, through good times and ill, our hearts are sworn to Vitharr, our beloved homeland, and that devotion is forever and inexorable. Of this fact, I do not have the slightest doubt."

Barclay narrowed his eyes in suspicion. "With such phrasing, it becomes almost impossible not to mention the absence of our esteemed colleague, the Keeper of Peace."

"Is there any surprise?" Wyndam responded sardonically, sighing in exasperation as he did so. "This is nothing if not a martial problem. How many doctors do you think I had under my employ before the purges began? More than enough, I tell you. More than enough, even in the face of everything, more than enough. And how many were jiaren? Eighty, ninety percent: if they weren't born in the colony, they certainly were educated there. And then, one day, 'the Peace is Kept' by removing all of them."

"Our country is not a small one. Almost a billion humans, the last time we bothered counting, and we went in the stroke of a pen from over a million doctors to just under two hundred thousand. And with whom did Kang choose to replace all those missing hospital managers, supply experts and medical college deans? Qualified applicants? No, none are left! They are all cronies, all sycophants, all personally indebted to the leader without the faintest understanding of their position."

"I spend most of the time at the ministry screaming into a void. I shout with all my might, but not a soul understands my directions. And so, our hospitals are little more open-air graveyards, and we watch a what should be in all rights a minor epidemic wreak havoc like it is the wrath of the Stars themselves."

Harden shifted his head back and forth like a pendulum, weighing the question. "I will not withhold my own doubts as the competency of the Kang's militia, but I have to admit they have their uses. The Chest might take as many peanuts and soybeans as they like – the imperial market will always eat more, and we will always desire the cash, it seems - but we have long since passed the point where we can obtain these foodstuffs willingly."

"I do not want to speak too grimly, but our options have been confounded. Given we cannot tax the foreign merchants, the state depends on these agricultural products. It does not matter how many days the peasants go without food or how many bullets might need be wasted on our people to yield their submission, the state cannot exist without that food, and the food will not be taken without the army, without Kang."

"And how long will it last?" Edgard cried out, his exhaustion and stress finally compelling his true feelings from him. "Every day I hear reports of towns, villages, cities even, places once filled with fifty, sixty, a hundred thousand people, and they have just disappeared. Every single man, woman and child... wiped away. I hear of communities descended into cannibalism, of Old Believers selling the virginity of young girls as a cure to plague, of ordinary folk going naked, selling the very clothes off their back for food the one day and then everything below the waist for medicine the next."

"Every day, I hear such things, and every day I try to forget them. I know that Kang has forbidden us from counting the dead, but how long can news of such things truly stay hidden? How long until the collapse becomes obvious, until the veneer is totally shattered, and the people realize they are all better off going on their own? We just lost one army to the sea; there's one way to violently pacify this nation now: we'll need each and every drowned man to rise from the waters, if not more."

"So, we are leaving them?" Barclay asked, his question met by grim winces from all those around him.

Edgar bit his lip, not wanting to make himself say the words, but brought by the desperation of circumstance to say them all the same. "Yes. We have no choice."

"We cannot throw good money after bad," Wyndam nodded in agreement.

"But...," Harden stuttered, his breath heaving in light, panicky respirations. "That means...."

"It's our heads next." Barclay finished the statement for him.

Edgar nodded, his cheeks fluttering as he tried with all the strength in his poor, depleted body to withhold the onslaught of nervous. "Yes." He said finally, barely audible to the others in attendance.

A great moment of silence passed over the five as they hung their heads in dejection. It was only Wyndam who kept his back upright, and spoke after an awkward minute had passed, and he had grown too impatient not to speak. "Edgar," he nudged, probing just deep enough for the most cursory of responses. "Are thou going to ask or must I bring him up myself?"

Edgar still stared at the floor, too afraid to speak.

"He's still alive, thou know," Wyndam added, prompting only the briefest of worried glances from the Keeper.

"What buffoonery is this?" Barclay asked, rather pointedly folding his arms and leaning backwards in annoyance. "Speak more clearly."

Wyndam waited a few more moments, staring attentively at the still silent, unnaturally still Edgar, before he decided to accept answering alone. "The Gretwalder is not dead as you all suspected, nor quite as dire as even the public was led to believe. Though Kang ordered him killed the day he entered the hospital – yes, it's true, but not act so shocked. We all know our leader to be such a man – he has instead been kept secretly by me, suspended in a perfectly controlled coma, our final insurance policy, just in case it was so needed."

"This is treasonous!" The Keeper of Agriculture gripped the table, eyes flashing in fear and anger. "We cannot hear another word. If this is not forgotten immediately, it will bury us deeper than even the most intrepid demons of Blackhell dare travel."

Barclay slammed the table. "Learn thyself some logic if thou truly has no hope for courage," he shouted at the trebling minister. "We all know well enough who will be blamed for this. We are the only ones from the Gretwalder's service still left. That we are still living at all is a miracle itself. Given any excuse to do away with us, we can be entirely certain as to the eventual outcome. Like those men trapped in the docks, we all either sink or swim together."

Edgar folded his hands together over his mouth and breathed through his nose, still barely able to process the thoughts racing uncontrollably through his head. "I need everyone to know, before I say this, I am not advocating any form of treachery." He sighed. "I am not suggesting in any way a course of action. No that is not my intention here, and any attempt to construe it otherwise will be met with vehement denial by me, you can all be assured."

"But..." he breathed deeply before looking towards the Keeper of Health, "if hypothetically the Gretwalder were still living..., would it be possible for him to escape and gather any supporters together before being seized by Kang?"

Wyndham's teeth clattered together in a painful grimace. "It is an open question, my lord. Though Kang's loyalists are useless at managing the hospitals or delivering care to a dying populace, they are enormously competent at sending him messages. If, any of this was to occur, and the Gretwalder finally awoke from his coma, it is challenging for imagine Kang would remain ignorant of it for any great length of time."

"Well, I am glad our miserably inadequate infrastructure is now given its moment of redemption!" Barclay laughed. "Every wire, line and cord in this country is either bursting into flames already or threatening to do so at any minute. I know thou wish not to suggest any action, Edgar, but allow me to worsen the scenario further, for I suggest, that should the Gretwalder come back to life somehow, it would be quite likely (perhaps it is impossible for it not to be so) for a total outage of all power and communications to occur in whatever region he might be residing. We have been experiencing them all across the country; it seems only natural it would happen there too – not that I have any idea where 'there' is."

The man chuckled to himself, as Edgar stood from his chair and leaned his arms against the table, moving his feet back as if he were almost trying to make himself parallel to the ground. Staring down at the floor this way, he inhaled and exhaled several times in slow, calming, rhythmic patterns, before retracing his steps to straighten his back.

"I think we, then, know what to do." He began. "Wyndam, thou can 'predict' the day the Gretwalder might most likely remain consciousness, and as members of the Gretwalden Committee of Emergency Protectorate, loyal and dutiful, all of us, it is clearly our responsibility to prepare for such an eventuality. Now, I know Kang has replaced or reworked or rerouted much of the upper echelons of our departments, but the best we can do is ready who we can. We ready who can, absolutely everyone that we can and if the day should come, we spring into action. Do all understand? We spring into action, and ensure Vitharr, proud, independent, beautiful Vitharr remains free of tyrants ever more. Do all understand?"

They all nodded, their faces pale and daunted. It was only Harden who, now biting ever more anxiously at his nails, bothered to ask, "Is Aeplerad truly worth all this?"

Edgar shook his head, laughing bitterly to himself and under his breath. "In all honesty, Harden, I do not know. I had never known a crueler master ... until I met our current one."

"A rock and a hard place," Wyndam mused, "just like every other decision of consequence mankind has ever made."

"A devil we knew over the devil we wish we didn't," Barclay chimed in.

"Let the one feast upon the flesh of the other," Edgar whispered to himself. "Only a devil can defeat another devil now."

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"Unhand me this instant!"

Mila had heard a door creak open, and felt herself plopped into a chair, with her voice echoing around just enough to know she was in a small, but not entirely cramped room. More importantly, there likely was an audience at whom she could yell.

And so, that is precisely what she did.

"I am Tribune Chen of the Thirty-Fourth Century!" she wailed as a blindfold was untied from around her head. "Release me at once or so face the fearsome fury of the imperial Legion!"

"Strange," she heard the reply just as her vision was restored. "Forgive me I cannot seem to be fully intimidated by a century that does not, in reality, exist."

Though the voice was all but alien to her, Mila recognized the face instantly. It was so quickly, in fact, that she worried for a moment she might have betrayed the recognition, imploding her cover-story before it had even been enumerated. For sitting at small stone table across from her was none other Lady Xi Ciao, the disgraced former governor herself, and though she was not dressed as exotically as all the photos in which Mila had come to know her, her identity was undeniable. The woman might have been reduced to a simple shenyi silk robe embroidered with fine, gilded cubist images of distorted, abstracted forests and seascapes, but she still wore her garments like it was a heavy gown of pure spun gold, her self-satisfied smile never once leaving her reddened, painted lips.

In the corner of the room sat a squat Cassian man, short and compacted like Mila herself, but every inch of his skin covered in white powder and eyes covered with unnaturally sheened emerald contacts to hide his (likely) blue irises. A silver chain of overlarge loops welded together clearly more for style than actual servitude tethered his leather collar to a leash the governor held under the table.

It was clear to Mila this man was her slave, a "gender traitor" as they called them on Cassia Prime: men who had been too soft or too cowardly to fight in the wars that had extinguished most of their brethren but also too implacable to accept their place in the Party's new Order. They had found value in their rarity, selling themselves to imperial masters as little more than a collector's item, a human trophy which testified to the owner's taste and sophistication.

"What is the meaning of this?" Mila demanded, ensuring she never so much as made eye-contact with the slave, lest she break her imperial character. "I demand to know who thou are and why thou have imprisoned me here."

The governor exhaled through her nostrils, just slightly amused. "Thy jiawen is excellent. I cannot help in remarking it, but even so, my dear 'tribune', thou cannot maintain the ruse indefinitely."

Mila tried her best to keep a straight face as she tugged covertly at the bonds on her wrists and feet. "I truly have not the faintest idea what thou could possible mean."

"It certainly did take longer than I wanted," Lady Ci continued, shifting her attention as she slid a manilla tag folder across the table using just the tips of her two longest fingers, "but even with me losing my post and the general state of anarchy that has befallen this place, I still needed to take the time to be sure, and, after these few weeks, I am."

Xiao flopped open the folder, showing her captive a thick stack of photographs inside. "We found thy actress quite quickly, but do not worry thyself too gravely. Thou made no error in trusting her. She never told us anything... at least, not willingly, anyway. Sadly, for a Legion officer, thou seemed strangely unaccustomed to the capabilities of our Haruspex. We emptied her mind, and after that, her compliance was irrelevant. Which brings us," she tapped the first photo, clearly of Mila offering a purse of coins to the frame's point-of-view, "here."

"Even with thy face downloaded from the brain of thy actress, it would have been quite difficult to find thee, had thou done had one would expect a distressed, former Party smuggler on the run to do: remain anonymous. But that is not what happened. Thou assumed an identity who managed (how I will never understand, but thou did manage it) to claw all the way up to this new 'governor-general's' inner circle. How unfortunate, then, that just so happened to be one the place I have planted the preponderance of my agents. Thou were recognized immediately."

The governor lowered her pointy chin onto a bridge of impeccably manicured fingers and stared deeply into the eyes of her prey, displaying the faux compassion of a master Go player celebrating the futile counterattacks of an amateur opponent. "So, little sister, now that this 'Tribune Chen' has been disposed with, perhaps thou can venture a new, hopefully more honest introduction."

Mila decided it was time to change tactics. She immediately began crying, moaning in some imagined agony as a torrent of tears rushed down her face, and her breathing became sporadic and belaboured, bordering on hyper-ventilation. She whimpered about as pitifully as a dying puppy sobbing against the onslaught of a cold, berating rain and her eyes grew frenzied with panic and fear.

"I am sorry," she sputtered, her words fast and stammering, intentionally trying to sound nervous. "I know I should have not impersonated the tribune, I know it. But how can thou blame me? How can anyone blame me? My name is Ethel. That is me, my born name, and you're right. I am pale; it's true. I speak good jiawen, but I am a Vidar, through and through. I was born in Vitharr; I worked a brothel in the capital, and that's where I learned your tongue. Look into the records, if you thou have them, you will find it. It is true! Ethel was there!"

"I am Vidar. That is why I was made to hire the actress. Thou surely must understand? After all that has happened to my kind, all the killings, the burnings, the ..." she lowered her voice, shaking as if she could not even force herself to say the word, "the rapes." She shuddered. "I could not show myself. Even after the Party defrauded me, even after those long bitter daydreams filled with vengeance, even after I voyaged to the colony to have my satisfaction, I was afraid to show my face, and history did prove me right, did it not? History did prove me right!"

"I am sorry, whoever thou might be. I am so deeply, profoundly sorry to have deceived thee, but I had no other choice. One must defend their interests! I had to join the butchers lest risk butchery myself. What can be the crime here? I have no interest to despoil the Empire, only a desire to remain alive. Can thou at least see the honesty in that?"

The governor leaned back from the table, locked eyes with her slave and then, in an accent infinitely more clear and better versed than Mila thought any foreigner could possibly hope to achieve, she began speaking to him in Old Cassian.

"So, Ilya" she said, almost collegially, "is it that inevitable slide into senility now fully upon me, or did I not detect just the slightest touch of Cassia Prime on the lips of our dear guest?"

The slave, Ilya, laughed in a grating, high-pitched, sarcastic voice. "Oh, my darling mistress," he fawned, "she did not even have to open her mouth. That tinge of green beneath her hide, it has Prime written all over it. Not like us unblemished Cassia Luna beauties. No, the memories of those toxic, industrial clouds never fully leave the Primaries below, no matter how hard one wishes to scrub them all away."

Mila snapped her head back and forth between the two captors in quick, studied movements, tilting her ear in the same way the Vidar did when listening to Old Cassian, picking out the few words and sounds that were still familiar to them, trying their best to remember their childhood days pouring over the Revelations and its multitudes of antiquated phrases still very much in use on the Inner Worlds. Though she knew the tear-stained bewilderment and frustration splayed across her visage should have been convincing, the governor met it only with further amusement.

"Oh, my delicious little barbarian, thou truly are a sight to behold!" Xiao quipped, clapping her hands together. "I, for one, would never be able to bring myself to such humiliation for no apparent benefit, so I have little choice but to applaud a brilliant performance when I see it. However, I should not toy with thee any longer; the cruelty is straining even my notoriously flexible definition of fun."

The governor stiffened her expression, and she began addressing Mila far less as a trivial amusement and much more like a defenceless woman knotted tightly to a chair in the bottom of a cold, stone dungeon. "Thou see, I was already well aware of thy escapades within the capital's brothels. Once all the imperials were purged from the Vitharr administration, they fled here to the colony, to me, with all their documents and kompromat. Through them, your exploits practically became common knowledge."

Lady Ci flipped to another photograph, this one of Mila dressed in an almost transparent lace and chiffon tunic, seated between the deceased Walder Karl deVihorr on her right and the merchant Song on her left. Mila did her best to keep her face as still and nonreactive as possible, but even then, there must have been a flinch, as something spurned the governor to reassure her.

"Do not worry, now. Thy cover was still concealed, even in those days. Thou have no reason to doubt thy abilities just yet: Kang and his agents never suspected thee for a moment. The Walders, on the other hand, they were a jealous lot, - a hopelessly divided, infighting, grumbling, disunited, multi-headed monstrosity - and wherever one Walder goes, a host of spies from rival houses are always sure to follow."

The governor grinned, winking at her own cleverness. "Now, the Walders never realized the part by thee played in all of this. To them, thou were just some whore who happened to stumble upon a conspiracy between Song and Vihorr, and that is precisely how it would have stayed had thy face not appeared in the mind of that poor, liquidated actress. Now that I have found thee here, however, it is hard not to imagine thy hand in both Song's sudden turning to the Party and Karl deVihorr's assassination of the Gretwalder. Can I prove either of these theories? No, but their existence (and thine) remains remarkably compelling."

Mila sighed, realizing the gig was up. It was only then, unfortunately, that she felt the trickle of blood pooling down her throat, and she became aware of the gaping hole in her mouth. She tongued that crevasse and realized almost instantly what had been done in her unconsciousness: the governor had drilled the cyanide pill, her own only remaining avenue of escape, right out of her bleeding, pain-tingling teeth. It was now that she came to fully appreciate just how much trouble into which she had fallen.

"Why play this game?" Mila asked, switching now to Old Cassian herself. "If thy Haruspex can truly leverage all the contents of my mind, why not furnish it here and have done with me? This torture bears no purpose, so let us spare our precious time. What purpose is there to wasting even a single breath on petty questions thou can at any time answer?"

Lady Ci nodded in mockingly serious contemplation, but the edges of her grin never fully left her face. "I could indeed do exactly that," she mused, "but what a loss that would be: to have the Party's greatest spy in my grasp, here at the nadir of my fortune, and merely grind to jelly such a valuable mind as thine."

"Thou must understand, dear partisan, the Haruspex will always be an option (and remember it well next time thou weigh the costs of dishonesty), but there is much more trust to be extinguished before we reach that final resort. It works in dreams, that curious device, designed to meld itself with the subconscious of our legionnaires, and even then, for many, it burrows under their skulls and nibbles at the brain, its appetite growing only more vociferous with time. When one extracts memories, however, - when we link the Haruspex to the conscious mind of a subject - well, whatever is taken can never be returned. I did not misspeak when I said thy actress had been 'liquidated'. I only hope thy purse of silver was to her fair recompense."

Mila pulled harder at her bounds, barely caring now if the governor saw her struggling.

"If thou think I will betray the Party, Ci," she declared resolutely, ignoring for a moment the absurdity of making such declarations in bondage, "know it will never happen. I'll happily endure any agony, accept any punishment or grasp the tentacles of thy Haruspex as it unfurls the very fabric of my mind before I do that."

"An odd thing to say for someone who was already invaluable in foiling a revolution here on Septimi – I think you call it 'Cassia Quartus', no?" The governor rubbed her hands together, deep in thought. "Regardless, though, I am glad we can drop the veneer a little. Thou know myself as well I know thee; so let us finally be equals in this discourse, 'Ethel'.

"Perhaps this is the first thing thou can help me understand. I want to know, if thou truly were on Party business, why have that actress pose as a smuggler? Why sell out your own Red Army? You had us nearly at the breach, and it was thy information (or that of thy actress I should say) that quenched the uprising. Try as I might, I cannot understand it. What could, to a party founded on revolution, be more valuable than just that, but this time not even amongst your own kind, but within the imperials ourselves? What impetus is there to forsake the Party's raison-d'etre, their highest goal in all the universe?"

"Or, alternatively, does thou truly harbour some vendetta with thy former masters? In which case, I understand giving us the location of the supply depot, but it cannot explain why thou infiltrated Legion command instead biding thy time in obscurity." She chuckled. "I would be lying if I did not say the curiosity is eating me alive!"

What was this woman's game? Mila thought to herself. Was this some tactic? Was she merely pretending to have no knowledge of the nuclear arsenal, hoping that Mila would be lulled into some false sense of security and thus eventually reveal her network within the colony? Given there was no network to undercover, she would be bitterly disappointed, but Mila knew her only hope of survival was to hint at whatever the governor was probing for, and that was exactly what she would do.

"I love the Party, my lady; that much is true, and it will always remain so. That is why I still spy for them, why I still implanted myself as a tribune in the new governor-general's service. But our chairwoman here on Cassia Quartus doubts my commitment, denies my loyalty and questions my love. She imprisoned and tortured the only man for whom I have ever felt more than antipathy and banished me from her cause. I sold out the Red Jiaren Army to satisfy my quarrel with her, Lady Ci, not to betray the revolution, never to betray the revolution. That is why I still embedded myself in the Legion. I hate our leader, but I love the Party, and I want to serve it as best I can, in whatever way I can."

The governor raised her eyebrows. "This lover of thine must be quite a fellow if he can have thee subvert thy conditioning. Yet despite all the Party has done to thee, despite all the peril in which is has all but abandoned thee, thou still find thyself with nothing but compassion for the its cause." She winced. "If only our Legion had a tenth part of such devotion. Our Empire would not just be eternal; it would stretch beyond the horizons of the universe itself!"

An almost scandalised smile returned to her lips. "And who is this man of whom thou speak, if I may ask? Another Walder or wealthy socialite whom thou did convert to the revolutionary cause? I simply must know."

It was with that girlish giggle that Mila came to understand the puzzling expressions the governor had been forming throughout the interview. This was not an interrogation, nor was the lady acting in anyway antagonistically. It could have been act, but something within Mila knew it had to be genuine: the governor did not despise Lyudmila for her duplicity, she admired her for it. She wanted her to brag, to gossip, to tell of her exploits, not so much in service of some higher purpose, but to evaluate her skills, to see if Mila truly was the equal in cunning that Xiao still believed she herself possessed.

Mila bit her lip, pretending to be weighing whether or not to tell, though, of course, she had already made up her mind well beforehand. "Well, it is not something I truly wish to share, my lady. Our love is a very private affair, it has to be. The last person who learned of it had my beau locked away, and I fear, for my not having kept it secret, I have now condemned him forever."

"Dear Heaven!" Ilya shouted from the corner. "Just tell us, good woman. Even I grow curious, and I usually can attend my mistress for more than thirty seconds without falling victim to a bored slumber."

Mila looked up to the governor, her eyes wide in fascination. She decided the suspense had been built up long enough, and she relented. "His name is Alfred, a commander in the VLF."

The governor was so aghast she instinctively reverted to jiawen. "I tend not to respect those women who sell their little white chickens to catapult themselves up the social ladder, but thou, my dear, thou have found a price far exceeding whore market in the cosmos. A walder, a merchant and now even a commander in the most fundamentalist terror cell on the planet! That is a conquest of truly inhuman proportions, and yet thou still found time to infiltrate the Legion on the side. It seems even my highest of celebrations would under-estimate you, good tribune. You are by not far just Septimi's greatest spy; I'll put you in the running for the title for the universe of as well!"

The woman breathed a deep and heavy sigh, containing her excitement before she returned to Old Cassian. "'Ethel,' little sister, I have a proposal for thee. Talents like thine are far too useful to waste, though, remember, and remember it well, do not cooperate, and I can waste them at any time I want. I have no doubt thou have a great number of secrets pertaining to the Party, and its business here on Cassia Quartus, but up to and until the point I am reinstated as governor of this planet, those truly do not concern me."

"Thy cover as tribune under Pan Quentin, however, and, more importantly, the trust thou has seemed to garner with her in just a few short weeks, that certainly is of interest. Work with me, spill her secrets and undermine her efforts, and not only will thy assistance propel us into the governorship, I have a feeling thy abilities could win me once again a seat in the Emperor's cabinet. Help me, serve me, and I will not fulfil on some vague aspiration of societal change as your Party is wont to promise and scant to deliver, but I will personally grant all thy deepest and most sincere yearnings and ambitions. Tell me what thou desire, Ethel, and be certain it shall be realized!"

In truth, having spent a life sacrificing for the greater good, it was nearly an impossible question to contemplate, much less answer. The governor betrayed her imperial bias all too easily by the profanely casual nature in which she broached the subject. Regardless, though, Mila knew the only way she would ever even have a hope of discovering something as elusive as a "desire" now was to break the ties that still bound her to Valentina. If she was to uncover her own ambitions, she needed to live by her own will. She decided to drop the act, and just admit that, "I want Alfred."

The governor's whole demeanour seemed to flatten at this, her smile slowly upturning into a bemused frown. "Ethel, little sister, I can understand thy fascination with this man. To be sure, I understand. These religious fanatics are always amusing, I know it well. There is nothing more pleasing in all the world than plucking those pathetic, sexually repressed creatures straight from their celibate little cradles and corrupting them so thoroughly, so profoundly, that they wait on thee hand and foot for the rest of thy life. Why, that is exactly the case of our lovely, Ilya here."

"My adoring, obedient slave. He used to have a flock of his own servants and minders back Home when I was an imperial minister. Ilya had a different palace for every day of the week and month of the year. Then, even when I lost it at all, found myself tossed aside on this desolate hellscape, did he ever complain once? No, he followed his charge, affixed his collar to his neck and crawled after me like an obedient little puppy. Oh, it warms my cheeks just to think of it!"

"No, it is nothing like that," Mila interjected, the monologue already boring torturous holes under her skin, though she attempted to hide her discomfort.

"A fine turtle's head, then?" Ci asked, employing another jiawen euphemism her conversation partner could not possibly comprehend. "Of that, I can also understand the appeal as well, though I will admit my admiration is fading. But trust in me, no matter how well he pleases thee, come back with me to the Home Worlds, and I can find men whose anatomical features confounds even the most adventurous of imaginations."

Mila sighed. "No, it is not even that. I do not fully understand thy speech, but I can guess at its meaning. We have not done that, if that is to be understood."

"Sex?" Ilya asked, him and his master both raising their eyebrows nearly at the same time.

Mila nodded.

"Dear, dear, dear," Xiao consoled her. "Thou are but young, I can see it. How young exactly?"

The Cassian woman quickly performed the calculations in her head, rolling her eyeballs slightly up as she did so, converting her years into Terran ones. "I am twenty-six, my lady, though I would hesitate before judging too much on that fact alone. In truth, before I was half this age, I had seen things that-."

Lady Ci raised her hand, silencing her immediately. "And how many lovers have thou taken in the past?"

Mila found herself taken aback as much by the question as the interruption. No one on Cassia Prime ever spoke as openly as this, and she had never been trained to expect any different with the imperials as well. Her usually flawless jiawen began to stutter.

"I, I... What would thou mean? I am a spy, and a spy's bedroom is their primary place of work. That is how we are meant to treat it anyways." She grimaced, her cheeks reddening. "I know thou might call me a 'slut' for doing it, but Alfred does not see it that way, I promise thee. He understands the dictates of my position as well as I do."

"It's not my body that need be unspoiled in his eyes, but my soul, and that is clean, dear governor, that is clean. That is why I cannot betray the Party! That is why I must still recover my beloved! I have a debt to pay, a conscious to redeem. I cannot let the ruin of my chastity be the ruin of my character, lest all be for naught and the sacrifice be no longer worthwhile."

Xiao eyes had glazed; she seemed to be only vaguely interested in a topic that had fascinated her mere moments ago. "So, what I can gather is, though thou have taken a great many bedfellows, thou has known no real 'lovers' in the more platonic sense. And now, this Alfred, the first man to have shown thee any true form of kindness, any concern for thee beyond the state of thy genitalia, thou feel some allegiance, some debt, some unbreakable bond betwixt you? Is that correct?"

Mila bit her lip, but she was compelled to give a single, guilt-stricken nod.

The governor sighed, a long, wistful exhalation that seemed to have been held in her lungs over the course of years. "Ethel, I know thou are young, and this man is thy first, and no matter how much I say or persist in demonstrating otherwise, nothing will ever controvert the simple fact that the first flights of young passion burn with a glorious brilliance unlike the heat of any forge or flash of supernovae."

"But it is fleeting, Ethel. It is ephemeral, and in the end, no matter how much thou yearn for it now, I promise no pig-headed, scripture-quoting, high priest of violent superstition – especially one thou have still yet to bed - will ever be enough to keep thee occupied forever."

She shrugged her shoulders. "I know it is not something thou wish to hear, but thou can do better, Ethel. Thou can do better for thyself. Leave Alfred to his cage: it was always that or the battlefield for him; there are no other options for his kind of barbarian. While he is trapped on Septimi praying to silent stars, we shall reign in Heaven, conquering them instead."

The spy crossed her arms. It was pointless to pretend she held any firm conviction one way or another, but she would not surrender to such patronizing either. Besides, she could sense enough that if she backed down now, the governor might lose even further interest in her. So, she persisted.

"No," Mila rejected, flatly. "I will trade information with you, yes. I will undermine Pan, certainly. But I will only do it that thou may free him. That must be thy promise, my lady. It is my solemn oath to you: my service for his freedom."

Whatever remnants of a bored smile had still found themselves bound to the governor's lips now abandoned her entirely. Though she only released a single twitch, a barely noticeable shifting of the mouth, Mila could tell she had miscalculated, perhaps even gravely so. Ci was livid.

"Ethel, little sister, as much I might like thee, perhaps even, as much I might see a great deal of myself – my younger, brasher self – in thee, I need to make one point absolutely, precisely, excruciatingly clear: thou are my enemy, and I will treat thee so if needed. This negotiation is not a right, it is a favour. I am not suggesting we trade; merely promising that thou shall be compensated. If I at some point it is in my interest to rescue dear Alfred, then he can be your prize. If it is the favour of Heaven that I returned to the imperial Palace, far greater things than him will in thy future be; that is an assurance."

She leaned in so close to Mila now that she could smell the thick, almost debilitating scent of opium smoke still fresh on her breath. "But, Ethel, I need not be so generous if I do not wish it. Thou have learned - undoubtedly, in her service, more thoroughly than me – that Pan is not one to be crossed lightly. And, thou know (I am almost certain) those two things in all the world she hates the most: Cassians ... and Reds. Thou are both, my dear spy. Thou are a most precarious, impish, irreverent medley of the two, little sister."

"I know that, and I have yet to smite thee with the worst of our imperial tortures and torments. Do thou think our governor-general, knowing the same, would treat thee likewise? Because that is the alternative, Ethel. Do not serve. Do not take my offer; this means nothing to me. It will, however, cost thou dearly, and no matter how strong thy faith in the protection of thy party, I can well assure you, Pan and her minions are more than capable of seeing that faith shattered like a pane of aged glass."

Mila did not even flinch. It was a barely a threat at this point. There was no pain, no matter how excruciating or terrifying that could not pale in comparison to the depths of Party training. It was in times like these, times when the first etchings of doubt began nimble away at the soft interior of her mind that Mila knew an axiom would provide sullen comfort and gentle guidance.

"The mind is but an instrument," she quoted. "With practice and tuning, it will play any note one likes."

The governor could not help but burst into a fit of laughter, guffaws so powerful, giggling so vigorously she had to clutch at her chest to keep herself from choking. Mila had to keep herself from barring her teeth in disgust; the rank indignation and mockery of Party doctrine was difficult to stomach, and it amazed her how one as self-obsessed and seemingly intelligent as the governor could fail to see its genius. Such ignorance from a Vidar peasant could be tolerated, but from a literata like her, it was positively infuriating.

Once she had gathered herself again, Xiao asked, "Thou read jiawen characters, correct?"

"Of course," Mila frowned, somewhat irritated with the question.

"Can thou make out the font on the poster behind me?"

Lady Ci pointed to a small, faded purple page pasted to the plain, chipped stone walls that marked in highly stylized but still legible language: One's mind is his instrument. If he practices well and tunes it, he will play any melody.

"I don't understand," the Cassian was dumbfounded. "Why are there Party quotations translated in jiawen at all, and why here in the colony?"

"Oh this?" the governor asked, pointing back to the poster in mock confusion before laughing once more. "This is likely hanging up in every interrogation booth throughout the whole of the Empire. It is a very popular saying, but the words were ours long before the Party appropriated it as its own. Why, it was an imperial poet who coined the phrase, Gi Hao, I believe, some would fourteen, fifteen even, thousand years ago. The records are not known, but his poetry certainly is."

Mila was speechless.

"In truth," Xiao continued, grinning again, "there is still a great deal thou have yet to learn about thy Party, little sister. I might not convince thee to betray it overnight, but I can plant at least the very first seedlings of doubt, and once we begin to water and nourish them, I have the most tremendous hopes for how they might grow."

"I...," Mila found her tongue catching in her throat at the same time her words were adhering to the very membrane of her mind, unable to pull together even the most tentative of phrases. "I still do not ... comprehend the source of this ... of this, this, this similitude."

The governor smirked, the kindness and playful interest she had shown before replaced entirely with a cunning, toying, almost perverse look that sharpened her smile to the sheerness of crocodile teeth. "Oh, there are a great many 'similitudes' to find if thou invested thyself in finding them. It has been fascinating these many years watching your Party mature from a most humble infancy, pruning with every new purge, growing with each new conquest and transforming with every new revolution. It was such a very different group in those early days; I think if thou had known it then, it would now be rendered onto thee almost unrecognizable."

"This is a trick," Mila nearly shouted it, more to convince herself than to startle the governor. Xia resumed, despite the outburst.

"I can understand thy hesitancy, but it is true," she said. "Did thou think I learned to speak Cassian under the esteemed tutelage of the slave?" Xiao positively cackled at the thought. "Ilya could hardly converse with a pig on the topic of mud. Relying on him, I still would have been lucky to acquire the diction of a child."

At this, the lady howled with laughter, slapping her knee as she did so. Even in the face of his master's remonstrations, however, the slave never wavered for a moment. Ilya remained just as snide and statuesque as he had been before, the white of his face and stillness of his body closely mirroring that of a corpse.

When she had collected herself, the governor continued. "No, my child. I learned my Cassian the hard way, the ethnographic way, embedded in the population. Thou hear the traces of Azhdayagrad on my accent, yes? It is not some performance or character I wish to play, but a tongue hard for which I fought bitterly and struggled much. That was where I served, there on Cassia Prime, as Chief of Staff to the First Cassia Trade Legion - first and only, I might add, now that thy Party no longer allows such a force to exist."

"I do not mean to offend when I say this, and call me romantic if thou will, mythologizing even, but I will always have something of an affinity for the truth. And the truth, in this case, dear, it is not quite as glamorous as thy Party might depict it."

"When thy group first came to my attention it was little more than a reading circle, a book club of dangerous radicals with no serious designs to power, no threat to anyone besides the occasional planting of bombs outside a merchant's home or the assassination of some minor Walder – which is to say, no threat to anyone important."

"At the time, as the Cassian Order was fully, irrevocably on its way to collapse, there was hardly anything all that unique about you. Between the three Inner Worlds and Cassia Luna, I could have counted more than a thousand of such cliques, and those would have been the socialist factions alone. With the Walders battling one another, paying no attention to the swathes of brigands, miscreants and extremists popping up throughout their domains, groups like yours representing every possible political agenda, religious mission, or social aim became ubiquitous."

"I do not expect thee to know this, especially given what Ilya has told me of Party historical censorship, but in those days Azhdayagrad belonged to the Walder Nikolai Alexandrovich, an inept but fiercely reactionary prince whose family had at that point ruled it for many hundreds of year. His house was renowned and powerful, having ameliorated Azhdayagrad in that time from a tiny, insignificant fief to whatever pitiful, continent-bound polity you barbarians still excused for an 'empire' back then. It was impressive (in relative terms), nonetheless, however, and as his rivals calcified and collapsed, he came to control the only half-way functional trading port on your world."

"Yet, that man, that pathetic, small-minded, ignorant man, he was entirely ambivalent to any power but his own, totally bereft of even the most miniscule of ambitions or molecule of adaptability. It mattered little how many chests of silver, arks of slaves or palaces of concubines we deposited onto him, he would not touch but a single banker's note nor give access to even a lonely merchant vessel. Oh, the dreams we had for your planet, Ethel, they oppress my ever-waking nights still to this day, but that prince was steadfast and unwavering: not one tael of imperial investment, not one loan, not one contract, and no exceptions. And, of course, he exacted an importation fee so exorbitant, Mammon himself would be too embarrassed to collect it. I assisted our envoys in entreaty and after entreaty, but he refused to hear reason until, finally, it became all too clear there would be no solution besides his dethronement."

"How unfortunate it was, then, that all the warlording and chaos and general strife of the Inner Worlds had, far from undermining his position, seemed only to bolster it further. As his withering rivals crumbled around him, he consolidated his position, blocking our efforts to develop new starports and severing us from further opportunities of investment. We needed something to challenge him, something to nip at his heels, shake his stability, force him back to negotiate. That, as thou may have guessed to explain to long digression, is what brought my attention to the Cassian Interplanetary Revolutionary Socialist Alliance: what would come to be called, in time, the All Cassian Party."

"And unlike all the other radicals and terrorists bounding about, there was something at least somewhat appealing in you: the women. Here, in this oppressive, backwards, most patriarchal of societies, a planet that forbade women to learn, husbands who kept wives as a slaves, and fathers that traded their daughters as chattel, there somehow grew a Party run by entirely women. And these were not just any women, either, but real, independent thinkers, philosophes of the highest order who were not just reforming their culture, but reimagining the fundamentals of life itself. Most importantly, perhaps, they were doing it all with a proper, imperial education."

"Now, I can see thou believe me not, but just ponder on the evidence before a conclusion is definitively drawn. In those days, as I am sure thou know as well as me, it was firmly illegal for any woman to so much as read a single word. To this very day on Septimi, it is one of the Vidar's most fervent of taboos! If one stuck their nose in a single, solitary book, they would find that novel sparking as kindling at their feet. Such was the case in those days; the Party does not teach otherwise."

"However, does it also not claim its leaders, its first, inspiring, revolutionary leaders were those self-same women: illiterate, soft spoken and unviolated with foreign ideas? How could such a thing be possible? Is not my version of events - that these women were trained by imperial missionaries, studied jiawen at our monasteries and gleaned their first inspiration through our poetry and scholarship - not a little more plausible? Could they have done what they did ignorant and unread as they were? No! And if there were to learn, from whom else could they learn but us? Indeed, not only is it more likely, as a primary witness, I can testify to its truth."

"How could thou!" Mila stabbed out, her bewilderment transformed to anger at being so plucked and prodded at. "Thou speak of events well before thy birth as if thou had a hand in their fruition. Whatever logical conclusions can be drawn from thy account are as worthless as their imaginary foundations. The tale is false. Only a fool would go on debating its postulates?"

A knowing, amused smile crept up one side of the governor's mouth. "That is difficult to explain, being our secret of longevity is well-guarded even in the Empire itself, but I do hope you will trust as I continue my tale that I am not speaking from the experience of others, and that I am not depicting events which occurred before my birth."

"This is not something about which I would lie, Ethel. I may not love it as thou do, but the Party is a subject in which I am also invested, and unlike thee, I chose deliberately to invest myself. I was seduced, little sister. I admit it. In my youth and naiveté, these women appeared to me so fresh, so avant-garde, so impossibly daring in everything they thought, spoke and imagined, that it was impossible not to trip over myself in my heart's delight. This was nothing like the watery, meaningless, bureaucratic blather designed by committee and learned by bayonet point the Party ejaculates now. This was true brilliance, true scholarship, true poetry, thoroughly untainted by the filth of the immoral, imperfect human world in which such beauty might one day be realized. No, back then, the choice was simple: we needed some alternative to Nikolai, so I decided, why not them? Why not give the women a chance? I had spent all my career educating and organizing the various female minds of our Empire; why not expand that project to the barbarians as well?"

"Thou do not have to believe me, and it is not something for which I would take credit outside this room, but in all honesty there probably would never have been any Party at all without my involvement. I turned a book club into an army, a principle into a doctrine, and a dream into a reality. Where they scribbled their manifestoes on birchbark, I had them published and copied hundreds of millions of times. Where they once threw rotted vegetables, I gave them grenades. Where they once planned sleepy protests, I taught them to wage wars. I took a miniscule, insignificant, overlooked faction and funneled enough wealth, weapons and warriors to their cause that in the anarchy of that imploding Order, they emerged a contender. And I did this all in the safety of knowing that although they could now finally unsettle that far too self-assured of a Walder, they would never quite be able to overthrow him."

"And then, of course, the inevitable miscalculation. The mission was successful; Nikolai relented, and I was propelled into the imperial cabinet on the headwinds of a trade more lucrative, more immense and mutually beneficial than any relationship in all imperial history. But the balance was forgotten. My successor in the Trade Legion had no inkling of my arrangement with the Party, and so he halted the shipments of arms and supplies, forcing thy comrades into retreat."

"All they needed to do was bide their time, however. The instant we allowed him to catch his breath, Walder Nikolai closed the ports once again, and now, instead of supporting the Party to quietly pick away at him, the Legion took a more dramatic tack. They invaded his territory outright. The Walder was killed, his army crushed, and the port was now ours forever."

"The Party, as well, was free of their warden and no longer confined to Azhdayagrad. They had no need for me now. No need for anyone. The Empire was too busy extracting every scrap of wealth it could through the starport that it missed the Party slowly, over decades (long, painstaking, gruelling, bloody decades) absorbing all of Cassia Prime around our little colony like flesh-eating bacteria consuming every part of the face except the one, gaping mouth. In time, even those lips would close too, so overwhelming and seemingly unexpected was the Party's final victory."

"Those first leaders, those true revolutionaries who I so admired and respected, they would never had been able to accomplish such a feat. That was, in fact, a primary reason for my electing to support them. But once the Party changed from an idea to a position, from hope to vision, it attracted new, far more politically minded characters, and they changed the Party, Ethel. I know thou will not believe me, but they changed it. More than thou can possibly imagine or even wish to comprehend."

"They compromised. They afforded men membership, then even seats within the General Plenum itself. They stopped promoting a new, genderless, classless, guiltless society, an eccentric but distinct vision, and traded it in for a far more mundane, more circumscribed, more traditional 'anti-patriarchy'. They became deathly afraid to chart their own future and focused entirely on opposing the enemy - of becoming the enemy's exact opposite, in fact. The Party chose not to form its identity by its own desires and visions, but a cagey, reactionary response to a changing cosmos, defining itself strictly in opposition to whatever dared flub its supremacy."

"There are academics who study such things in my society, imperials who claim it was always destined to be this way, that there was never any alternative, that the Party, if it was ever going to unite such a conservative, regressive culture, had no choice but to compromise, to reform, to meet its people in the middle, adopt their superstitions, their backwards beliefs, their discomfort with change and do the best it could within such bitter self-constraints. So, it is said by our intelligentsia, they changed. Rather than annihilating the Cassian conceptions of gender, class and hierarchy, they redefined the roles, they invented new justifications, new relations between old groups, new labels and new costumes. But did they really change that much? Could a Party man travelling back four hundred years, before the Empire, before the collapse of the Cassian Order, could he see any real difference in his ordinary life between the old Order and new? Perhaps not."

Lady Xi wrapped her knuckles together, a look of genuine compassion washing over her. "And this is the Party thou say thou love, Ethel? They are not who they claim to be. Ask thyself, why all the purges? Why all the book burnings, why the propaganda campaigns, why the public displays of allegiance and equally public punishment of the traitors? It is the only way the Party knows to clip the wings of its lie, to trim the weeds before they engorge the flowerbed."

"If the Party is the ultimate arbiter of truth, it must destroy all memory of its past untruths. If the Party can never compromise, it must bury its history of negotiation. If the Party can never err, it must silence all who saw it fail. And it will only get worse, Ethel. Each new conquest, each new settlement, each and every new political experiment, they will all bring more mistakes, more compromises and more false promises, and each in their turn will birth new purges, new revolutions, and new purifications to hide and erase the memory of what came before. It is a cycle that cannot end, little sister: a cycle of horror and violence that only thou and thou alone can break."

"I know thou love the Party, Ethel," Lady Ci's eyes seemed almost to water in affection, "I only ask thou love me more. I was there at the conception, at the beginning, at the time when lies were true and intentions pure and noble. I have dedicated myself to the same principles and ideals to which those first founders, those remarkable heroes dedicated their lives."

"I have trained and equipped a Legion of women, women of all races and creeds, all throughout the Home Worlds, and though I did not educate them in the ways of the sword, I taught them in the ways of Empire, and one day, when we sit beneath the Emperor's hand, when we dictate to the cosmos as though we were the Emperor Himself, we will render onto this world all the Party promises and more. But this time, not just to a simple a collection of backwater planets in the Cassian system, but to more than a trillion human beings spaced across the most immense civilization mankind has ever seen!"

"And there thou return again!" Mila wanted to scream. She would have preferred the torture at this point. "Thou lie as fancifully as thy grandiose, jiaren imagination will allow, and then expect me to betray my people for it."

"No!" The governor's countenance grew brittle and firm. "That is not the case, Ethel. I do not ask thee to work counter to thy Party. I ask thee to work for thine own self. All thy life the Party has demanded sacrifice after sacrifice, devotion after devotion, payment after payment. I only ask, by contrast, that thou commit to thyself, that thou free thy mind, and, in the same way that I once nurtured your Party as it satisfied my own purposes, that we find some way to benefit one another in mutual fashion. Can that truly be so offensive to thee?"

Mila bit her lip. She did not know if her hesitancy in capitulating to the governor's point of view was bred entirely from some conditioning the Party had implanted deep within her long ago or her own still violently thumping struggle to survive. There certainly was a certain cynical performative aspect to her opposition. If she surrendered too quickly, put up too little of a fight, the governor would never believe her conversion, never accept her transformation, and then the project would be moot. Perhaps Lady Ci would prove as stubborn a fisherman as Mila was a fish, and so long she felt her "Ethel" hooked to the line, every pull and tug would only warrant more force and more resistance, an eternal dance to the bitter death of exhaustion only Mila in her absolute clarity could possibly hope to win.

Then again, Mila wondered if this truly was all feigned for the governor's benefit, or if the lady merely excused the airing of her own inner doubts and confusions. Certainly, there was no reason to believe her, but it was pure foolery not to question the Party as well. The institution itself, the idea itself, that was sacred and no matter how crafty and illustrious the governor's words had been, that assumption would not and could not ever be altered. But Mila knew with perfect certainty that even the purest intentions could lead to the most despicable of results, that even the most faithful and devoted servants of the doctrine could miscalculate, overcompensate, render onto the earth a less than perfect realization of their shared vision and thus have to purge, murder and lie in obscuring their flaws. In choosing which facts were too dangerous to know, which histories were too destructive to teach, which alternatives were too radical to allow, mistakes were always bound to be made, and Mila had participated firsthand in the settling of such disputes - almost always with blood.

It was a peculiar discomfort, a unique distress that had plagued her since the very day she stepped foot on Cassia Quartus: that gnawing inability to separate the thoughts and desires of the spy and the person, the real and the unreal. The most compelling performance clearly sprinkled in the most honesty, the most vulnerability, the most indecision and moral quandary, but Mila was always left to wonder, after she had emptied all the pieces of herself into her character, what remained for her? Inevitably, the same answer would crop up time and again, and no matter how much or how often she tried to beat down that impulse, it ate away at her – Alfred ate away at her. He was the only aspect she had kept hidden, the only intention she had all to herself, the only dream she dared not share, even as the Party had tried to wedge itself into the intimate spaces of her being and pluck his name from the very depths of her mind.

He was all she had withheld, and now, if she was to be convincing, if she was succeed, if she was to earn the trust, the respect, perhaps even the admiration of that most duplicitous of persons, he was what she had to sacrifice. It was the final meld of actor to role, and she realized it did not matter to her whether it was Ethel's thoughts or Mila's that now bounced through her head. They wanted the same, the return of Alfred, and they were both willing to do absolutely anything to achieve it.

Mila responded. "Can thou truly be so ignorant to the human soul as that? Can one really believe, as fervently and as steadfastly as thou seem to do, that I could, in all actuality, accept the corruption of my party, the collapse of my moral structure, and just shrug it off, serving only myself? How can thou live in such a world? How can thou exist in a such a space: without form, without purpose, without structure? What good is there in moving left or right, up or down? What good is there in any dimension, if it does not appeal to thee and thee alone? Is there no order to thy universe besides thee thyself, and if so, how can such a universe be but a suffocating prison of nothingness?"

"I must have something, my lady. Something outside myself, something that echoes in the darkness, that hears my sounds, smells my scents, sees my sights. I need something to remind myself that I exist, that I am real, not a figment of my own imagination, swimming in some tank, trapped within the confines of my own delusions. For the longest time that was the Party, and in all honesty, governor, knowing myself, I will still rely on their teachings for the rest of my life, even if I do not obey their cadres. But now, I know a higher loyalty, and though it might not be a loyalty thou care to understand, it is something definitive, someone corporeal, honest and real. It is a mirror into which I can peer and see myself reflected: that man, that commander, that conqueror of my heart, Alfred."

"I will assist thee, governor. I have much to trade already, but I cannot, in perfect conscience, do as thou say, and work in service only of myself. It cannot happen and it will not happen. I cannot better myself at the expense of others. They are just as much a part of me as I am of them, for without them, without their constant reminders that I too am a person, that I too can be loved, that I too am worthy of admiration and affection, I would not be able to live another day."

"So, I will work in thy service, governor, but that is what I must demand. Promise, if I help thee win back thy post, and thou are granted once again dominion over this whole planet as a province of your Empire, thou will find my Alfred and set him free. That is my only compensation, a promise: cheap to the wicked and bankrupting to the good. Which price is it to thee?"

The governor sighed; all her breath had been for naught, but still, even in the light of her failure, she found herself unable but to envy the youth in her passion, wrong-headed and naïve as it may be. She sensed the Cassian already bore a bounty of knowledge ripe for the taking. There was no point in pressing her further and forever losing access to it.

"Very well," Xiao acceded. "I can, and I will make this promise to thee. I cannot explain or justify the tremendous force with which even the weakest of hearts can pull, but I hope in time, thou will come to learn of its limitations."

"For all the love of my position and status, there is no doubt I am happier, healthier, more attuned to nature and more invigorated in life in these moments when I am scheming to power than when I feel the crushing the responsibility of it. The stress, the poor diet, the sleeplessness, it lost me my breasts to cancer and it has trapped me within the pernicious embrace of opium likely until the end of my days. If there was any justice in this world, I would retire and live out eternity surrounded in luxury and hedonistic enjoyment. It is only my love for the work, for the Emperor and for my people that keeps me here."

"So, know it, Ethel. I may not have invented love as I did create your Party, but someone did, someone certainly did, and just like all inventions under Heaven, it is to the benefit of some and the detriment of others. Though this is a vast and perhaps unbridgeable difference between our two cultures, I hope that one day thou will understand what we imperials mean when we say 'love is to be experienced, not worshipped.' The experiencer coils in delight; the worshipper bows in submission. Do not submit to this man, Ethel, and try, with all thy might, to not submit to whatever love, even the strongest of all possible loves, thou might harbour for him. It is worship that will never be repaid.

The Cassian remained silent, biting her lip as she stared blankly back.

The governor scoffed one final time. "Very well, I have made my promise, and I assure thee, once an imperial is put in debt, the account is always paid. Now, have thou anything in exchange for which I have become so indebted?"

Mila hesitated for the sake of propriety, acting conflicted just long enough to not seem too suspicious before answering, "Indeed, though I must ask thou untie me before I speak. A gesture of goodwill if nothing else."

Lady Ci mulled it over slightly, and the spy could notice out of the corner of her vision the woman's muscles tighten slightly as she gripped what Mila could only assume was a pistol hidden underneath the table. Eventually, though, she relented and with a nod of the head, Ilya was sent grumbling over to loosen bounds of his fellow Cassian, freeing her to massage her aching wrists and bloodied ankles.

"Now speak, Ethel!" the governor demanded, her voice raised but hands never moving back into view. "My patience can only wear so thin."

Mila smiled, waving her fingers about as if trying to wring them dry. "My lady, before thou had me kidnapped, the governor-general and her top advisers had heard news of your two legions arriving to the colony at last. They have been halted at the mountain passes, however, and I suspect, given that Pan rules so long as they are absent, they are certainly in grave danger."

The governor smiled, relaxing so much so that Mila could tell she was no longer fingering any gun beneath the table. "I knew this already, little sister, but it is good to hear it verified by thee. Thou chose to tell the truth when thou could just as easily have a told, and that is something I will not forget."

Her brow furrowed as she straightened herself more seriously. "But what is thy connection to this news, Ethel?" she asked. "Can thou travel to the mountain passes thyself?"

Mila frowned. "It is undoubtedly within my power, but I doubt I can join the virologists sent to enforce this new 'quarantine'. If I go, it will take time to have such travel approved given the rather humbled state of our military bureaucracy. I do not think I could arrive before the Legion will be decimated."

The governor hung her head. "In truth, as despicable as it sounds, I came to terms with that army's destruction long ago. So long as thou can travel, however, some value yet can be recovered from their remains. Just arrive before the Prefects, whatever ones are left anyways. They're the only ones with any idea the treasure those legions are carrying, and with any luck, even Pan herself is still unaware of it."

Mila perked up at this. "Treasure? Do thou want me to retrieve something? Steal from the Legions as they freeze in the icy mountains?"

Xiao scoffed. "It is not the stuff of poetry, but with some luck, it can be the song of politics, my dear. Those legions are already dead. There is nothing either of us can do to save them now, but with care, with cunning, we can see them avenged."

"So, yes, Ethel. Those are my instructions, rob their corpses and drain their treasures - one jewel, in particular. What it is bears no relevance to thee, but only know it is carried by a Commandant and his closest lieutenant, and to my knowledge, there is only one left in all of Septimi, the one strapped to the Legate Haig's chest, freezing in the Arctic mountains. Go there, wait until they are all gone and dead, frozen to their very core, and then plunder the command tent, searching for a tiny, red book marked with these."

She pulled a pad from her satchel and drew two characters which meant nothing in and of themselves but when spoken aloud formed a homonym for the jiawen word "eagle." Mila recognized it immediately, though she kept her composure well, scrunching her brow as if she were trying to memorize a phrase completely foreign to her.

Mila had just been making excuses before; she knew in all likelihood traveling to the mountain would be simple and she could go unnoticed. She simply did not want to assist the governor in keeping the legions intact when that was so clearly counter to the Party's interests. But now, it was evident Lady Ci, in her debauchery had not the slightest concern for those forces, those men and all those lives. Numerous and powerful though they were, they still held something she did not, and for that, the governor was more than willing to feed them to the flames of Pan's desire. It was not Haig's troops that Xiao coveted, but his EAGLE: the Legion codebook commanders used to communicate back to the Imperial Joint Chiefs on the Home Worlds.

"Of course," Mila assented, standing up and bowing in such a perfectly studied jiaren gesture even Ilya sneered in jealousy. "I will retrieve it."

There could be no room for debate now. Mila needed that codebook just as much as Ci did. With the nuclear weapons, the Party might easily win a war, but if they could stop messages from leaving the Cassian system altogether, or better, send messages of their own, they might never need to fight one.

With a bargaining chip like that, Mila knew it would be worth more than just Alfred's freedom. It might just be worth her own as well.

≤≥≥≤≤≥≤≥≥≤≤≥≤≥≥≤≤≥≤≥≥≤≤≥≤≥≥≤≤≥

Though Nadia felt more than a tinge of shame by indulging in such materialistic pleasures, after long, hard months of scribbling with pencils on cardboard tables, she could not help but luxuriate in the sensation of sinking into a proper desk and grasping a cold, steel reflective fountain pen. It was a slight transgression, yes, but the cadre still had no choice but surrender to temptation. She laid back in her new padded chair, rubbing her belly and sighing in contentment, contemplating the tremendous changes this Jiaren Red Army had undertaken in such short time.

The bunker was still dreary; even all the decoration in the world could not disguise the overwhelming doldrum nature of endless, garish catwalk and identical iron reinforced tunnels stretching as far as the eye could see. The reopening of trade, however, had meant more supplies, more weapons and foods to stuff the storage rooms and more people to fill the empty space. Now that the Empire could no longer search every ship or confiscate every smuggled container, the Party was sending everything and everyone it could to Cassia Quartus, and with each new influx of soldiers to her barracks and rations into her stomach, Nadia's spirits grew only higher.

It was strange, then, when she found three other members of her clique storming her newly refurbished office one seemingly unimportant afternoon, anxious terror splayed across their nervously twitching faces.

"Comrade Nadia," the ideology cadre began, almost prostrating himself to lend credence to the desperation of his words. "Thou must attend with us at once the current meeting of our committee. A motion on the agent Mila's latest communique is at this very moment soon to be decided."

Nadia shrugged it off. "I understand the concern, comrades, but I absented myself on purpose. Yes, as astonishing as it is that we have obtained a Legion EAGLE, and now can prevent the foreigners any communication with their protectors many stars away, I have little interest in watching our Chairwoman gloat. If this is to be a self-congratulatory session, she may wallow in ecstasy of this most profane of public onanisms, but I will not dirty myself in being voyeur to it."

"No!" one of the women cut in, "thou have it wrong, Nadezhda. This is what we all thought too, but there is one in Valentina's camp, Pyotr, who grew squeamish at the hearing of her true intentions and in confidence expressed them to us."

"She is not going to order Mila to return to us with the codebook," the other woman, the torturer Elena continued. "The Chairwoman plans to send Mila back to the governor, hand her the EAGLE and continue searching for the nuclear cache as before."

"What!" Nadia burst from her seat. Comfortable as it might have been mere moments ago, the news had ejected her from it with the momentum of a rocket. "What could possibly be her reasoning?"

"Pyotr is my friend," the ideology officer answered, "so I ask that thou do not break the seal of secrecy in which he told me this, but he suspects Valentina wants a war, not just a revolution on this planet, not just some border skirmishes or brief encounters, but a full-scale, multi-planetary, (inter-stellar even) war. She has become unsatisfied with waiting for the revolution to slowly spark itself in the Empire, and so she desires to light the flame herself."

Nadia shook her head, steadying herself against the desk as she collected her thoughts before finally replying, "in that case, we had better run."

As the four of them raced through the darkened corridors, now overflowing corridors, jumbling past plain-clothed Cassian officers and uniformed Red Jiaren soldiers alike, a flurry of numbers and tabulations raced through the spreadsheet of Nadia's mind:

The Cassia Quartus Committee sat thirteen members (not including the chair), with Song as on an advisory role – to the constant chagrin of all the other members. Six votes were decidedly hers (including her own); that had been the case for months now. It was only the finding of the seventh that had dogged, especially after Alfred had refused to assist whatsoever.

Pyotr might now be the tipping point; it certainly was useful to hear his sympathies might lay with her faction, but she knew him well enough to know he could not be relied upon. Valentina only controlled four cadres outright - the most supplicating and sycophantic of the group - but though Pyotr might consider himself a swing vote, whenever those four lined together, he would always follow them. Nadia did not entirely blame him; it was profoundly dangerous to vote against the interests of their leader, even if the doctrine of "collective leadership" made it each of their moral duties to do so.

The math was still rushing through Nadia's head as she reached the committee chambers, the calculations unresolved. It was a gamble, but all they needed was any one of the three neutrals to cross over, and victory would be achieved. Maybe one, perhaps two could go along with Valentina, insane and apocalypse as her program was, but all three? It stretched the imagination, and that was enough reassurance for Nadia to throw open the salon doors and interrupt the already assembled committee.

Valentina was understandably shocked. The chamber had already been sealed, but the footmen were politically minded enough to know recognize their potential new master and allow her entry. Party struggles were always like this; once the winds of change began to blow, there was not a nose for miles that could not distinguish its scent. Nadia could barely keep the smile off her face as she saw the chairwoman struggle not to give in to the fury of having her authority thwarted so brazenly.

"I am most terribly sorry," Valentina began, tightening her cheeks into a broad, sarcastic smile and shrugging with feigned sympathy, "but thou have entered this in camera session after the sealing of the chamber, and you three," she pointed at Nadia's compatriots, "you left with Pyotr more than a hour ago."

Nadia followed Valentina's pointing finger and saw the empty seat near the far end of the new, mirror-varnished oaken table. Pyotr had been unreliable after all. Instead of potentially inviting the wrath of either leader, he had decided to flee. A typical man, straight to the core.

The mathematical situation was worsened now too. With the committee down to twelve, Valentina's power to break ties was greatly magnified. She only needed to convince the two swing-voters to back her, and she could have anything they wanted. Meanwhile, Nadia's bloc would have hold together, executing a plan they only ever discussed in the abstract, but never fully practiced. In the often chaotic, internecine blood-sport of Party politics, that could only invite danger.

Nadia did not wait to be portrayed as some interlocutor. Instead, she insulted the chair further and immediately took her empty seat, along with the others in her party.

Valentina nearly shrieked in response, "your names might be on the roll, but you absented yourselves from this meeting! We all know the rules, and it is my job to follow them as impartially as possible." She could not control the self-satisfied smirk that crept up into her teeth as she said, "therefore, I will ask politely once more that you four remove yourselves from the chamber, or I will order you be ejected by force!"

Nadia nodded to the awaiting eyes of her ally, one of the two was sitting at the table legally. With any more need for prompting, she shot up and shouted, "I move that the chair be overruled!"

The deputy chairwoman, herself the second member of Nadia's faction, immediately rushed into action. "Very well. I will second the motion and call it into question."

"Absolutely not!" Valentina screamed back to the woman just beside her, reeling from the betrayals hitting her from all sides. "What sorcery is this? Seconding the very motion on which thou rule? This a blatant slap in the very face of our sacred process."

The deputy was unmoved. "I am afraid the chairwoman cannot comment on matters concerning her own conduct. In any case, I am a deputy, not the chair proper, and so it is fully within my right to vote and adjudicate as need be. I will ask thee remain silent on the question or else have thee escorted from the room by force."

Valentina's face welled in red rage, but she bit her tongue. Her four sycophants all happily did the talking for her, standing and speaking almost in unison. "We object! We move to overrule the deputy chair."

The deputy nodded calmly, serenely even, as if this was the most trivial case in the world. "That is well within your rights, but only after the first dispute against the chair has been resolved to the negative, and Comrade Valentina is restored as head of this meeting. So, if you have an objection, vote 'nay' as the motion is already called to question; otherwise, it will be impossible to ever continue forward."

"Ummmm," Zhenya, one of the neutrals demurred, raising her hand like a hapless schoolgirl. "Might I propose an amendment?"

"I have already called the matter into question-," the deputy stopped, seeing Nadia shake her head. They needed both the neutrals on board, "... but I suppose I can make an exception. Please introduce it quickly, that we may continue with the regular course of our business."

"Outrage!" screamed the Valentinians, thumping the table in frustration, but Zhenya continued, comforting them with a wave of our hand. "This is only to be fair," she said, "but in recognition of the fact that Comrade Nadia did arrive after the closing the chamber, I move that the motion to overrule be amended as follows:

"'that the chair's ruling suspending those who arrived late be sustained, but the ruling forbidding those who stood at roll call but left to be readmitted be overturned.' Furthermore, I move for this meeting Comrade Nadia be allowed to sit in the same capacity as Mister Song, as an observer."

"Seconded," the other neutral spoke.

The deputy called the matter into question. With a shrug, Nadia relented, and her two votes were cast in favour. Valentina's partisans, not receiving any clear signals on how to vote, split themselves apart, and so the motion passed six to two. The amendment was accepted.

After that, the motion to overrule was finally adjudicated, and despite the vociferous objections of the Valentina's faction, the deputy this time decided to vote and break the four-four tie, officially over-ruling the chair. It did not matter, all Nadia needed was to seat her three votes, and then, so long as the neutrals remained swayed by the compromise, Valentina would be powerless to remove them.

"Shame!" one of four in opposition shouted.

"What shame is there?" the other neutral called back. "Is it fair to vote and break ties? Perhaps not, but it is surely just as fair as refusing to let three members take their seats after having left only a short while. Let the balance be restored, and we can continue this meeting in earnest."

Nadia gave Zhenya a little nod, reassuring her the shenanigans were now in the past. That certainly was her hope, at the very least.

"Returning to the item at hand before we were so rudely interrupted," Valentina began, reasserting herself and clenching her fists, glaring towards Nadia as she spoke, "agenda item six: intercepted Legion EAGLE. A motion for agent Lyudmila Ivanovna to continue her mission and transfer the EAGLE to stewardship of Governor Ci has been seconded. Four of the allotted ten minutes for debate has already transpired, so we shall reconvene with a further six minutes of debate. Would any care to speak to the motion?"

Nadia and all her party held up their hands, but the chair made a point of deliberately ignoring them, passing the floor to one of her sycophants sitting to her right.

"Thank you, Madam Chairwoman," she fawned, "and may I say without any shadow of doubt, thy operation to infiltrate the imperial administration is one of the greatest feats ever endeavoured in all the history of our Party. Not only would it be the absolute height of folly to end it now when the cache of nuclear weapons is so close to being uncovered, but it might be nearly treasonous to suggest otherwise!"

"Here, here!" shouted her two fellows, smiting down at the table.

"I will now ask for questions to the speaker." The chair demanded.

Again, Nadia and all her members waved about, wishing to speak, and again they were ignored as Valentina shifted the floor to another of her partisans.

"Many thanks, honorable chairperson," this one blandished. "Further to the comments of my distinguished comrade, I would like to add that there is very little for us as a Party to gain in withholding the EAGLE from Governor Ci. Lyudmila Ivanovna has already sent us a perfect copy of the codebook, meaning we will from now on have no difficulty in deciphering imperial military communiques. Stealing the EAGLE outright would only harm our agent's mission while rendering onto us no new information which we now do not already have."

"Excellent. Good sense indeed," Valentina remarked. "Would the first speaker care to respond to the question?"

"What question?" the torturer Elena turned to the ideology officer and mumbled into his ear, though perfectly loud enough to be audible to all in that confined space. "The brown-noses don't even have the brains to pretend they respect the process."

The Valentinian, still standing, and readying herself to respond to the "question" grew reddened with rage, and shouted back, "thou malicious, hectoring rascal! Do thou think, because it is thy duty to pull fingernails and whip hides in the dungeon that thou can rake with such caustic words in our meeting halls? Though we have all done much in service of the Party, I am being forced to assume thy true loyalty is solely to thy sadistic nature, not to revolution that nature is purported to advance."

That was an insult Elena could not abide, but she had only just launched into what was likely to be a rather spastic diatribe (one commencing with, "thou, witless, unthinking, man-handed bitch") before the chair silenced the dueling pair with the wave of her hand. "For the sake of cooling our respective temperatures, we shall call this portion of the debate to close." She and Nadia together stared down the torturer until the woman finally bit her tongue, crossing her arms and pressing herself as far as possible into the back of her chair like a pouting child. "Do we have another speaker who wishes to present on the motion?"

It was all Nadia could do to contain herself. She was quivering in anticipation, her feet tapping against the floor, nails digging into the flesh beneath her pants. Her clique all held their hands aloft to dispute, and for the third time, Valentina chose to recognize another of her lackeys.

The deputy chair refused to stay silent this time, however. "What sort of debate is this, Comrade Chairwoman," she chided, "where only one side is given license to speak?"

Valentina scrunched her lip into a flat, emotionless line, and, speaking softly to the clerk, apparently completely unmoved, she asked, "please have the minutes note that Comrade Nastasia was interrupted by the deputy chair, and therefore thirty seconds was added to the period of debate."

"What debate?" cried out the ideology officer, pounding at the newly varnished wood beneath his fists. "This is a sham! A travesty of a process!"

"Forty-five seconds will be added in face of recurring interruptions," Valentina continued.

"Let them speak!" Zhenya exhorted, crossing her arms in frustration.

The chairwoman, even in seeing a neutral waver, could only accept so many challenges to her authority. "I am sorry, Comrade Zhenya. Comrade Nastasia has been given the floor. The order cannot be contravened or we will have chao-."

"Thank you, honored chairperson," Nadia stood up, completely ignoring Valentina altogether and bowing towards Zhenya as if she were the true chair of the meeting. "It has been many months since we first established ourselves on this planet, and given that fact, especially in light of just how much has changed since those early, confusing days – changes both predicted and unforeseen – I think there is some value in us reviewing what we as a Party set out to do here."

"Silence!" Valentina shouted, but Nadia kept on speaking, undeterred.

"Because it is not true, as it has been suggested, that there is little to be lost in surrendering the EAGLE back to the governor's possession. No, what is true, what is indisputable, is that there is a very great deal to be lost, that our entire mission, our entire purpose for being here, on this planet could be annulled in this action."

"This is rank insubordination!" Valentina cried.

"Shame!" the Valentinians spat back at her, but Nadia only smiled and continued.

"What is our purpose here? It is to foster revolution! To aid the growth and development of the interplanetary socialist movement that is spontaneously taking root in every corner and every facet of inhabited space. The Vidar Cassians are on the brink of rebellion; everyone can look around and see it, feel it, taste it. The air is electric with revolution, and we need only stay the course to see this planet join its brother in our glorious collective purpose."

"Comrade Nadezhda," the chairwoman cut in. "If thou refuse to cease this indecent charade, I will have the guards remove thee permanently from the premises."

"Here, here!" screamed the Valentinians, now hungering for blood.

"For shame!" replied the Nadians, slamming their fists in fury.

"Let her speak!" the neutrals exclaimed, their voices overwhelmed by nearly everyone now.

And still, Nadia persisted.

"And what is the only place so far to have fallen short? It was our uprising in the colony, our rebellion led at the behest of the imperialist Song. And why did it fail? It succumbed to the wrath of the imperial Legions, the greatest evil in the greatest strength in all the universe – as we all should have expected it would. What can the governor do with her EAGLE? She can call more Legions, more soldiers, more armies like the one that annihilated our darling comrades in the colony and strangle this revolution while it still sleeps soundly in its cradle. With this, there can only be war: war or betrayal of the revolution. There is no alternative."

"This is outrageous!" Song steamed, slamming the table with both hands like a petulant toddler, not even bothering to ask permission to speak. "A personal insult is something I can stomach (I have made to learn how in your ungrateful, female company), but thou have also brushed aside with disgusting, inhuman impassivity the tragedy of our colonial revolution."

Though his face was swelling in red from anger, it seemed for a moment that there were perhaps very genuine (or the very least, incredibly well acted) tears pouring down his puffy eyes. "Have thou not the slightest caring and compassion for the misery of thy fellow men, for my people, my friend, Wang. Have you heard not how they suffer? How the Black Legion marches from home to home, finding people like us, people that do not quite fit their definition of perfect, genetic imperials, and commit unspeakable atrocities upon them? How thou not read the reports of the murders? The rapes? The tortures and flaying? The people burned alive and bodies torn asunder all while townsfolk mingle and gawk? How is it possible, dear comrade, to hear of such things, and simply shake one's head, shrug and sigh that it is better to wait, safer to be cautious, and no great concern while we twiddle our thumbs, hoping this revolution will materialise any day now."

"Preposterous!" One of Nadia's women shouted. "Thou had no difficulty seeing thy jiaren decimated by the VLF, and yet thou reprimanded Alfred for even suggesting they be saved. Spare us now the theatrics of false tears over the failed insurrection of some acquaintance."

"I would think he would rather want a war," the other neutral member mused aloud. "All the easier to peddle his wares to us ... and the Empire undoubtedly as well."

"How dare you!" Song cursed back. "I gave you your vaccines now did I not! And all with barely profit on them at all. By Heaven, I might end up losing money after all the favours I did pay you. And this is the gratitude I receive! Called an idiot and a double-dealer to my face! Here I am, nothing more than a loyal servant of the Party, just as all of you, one who has never in all in his time ever made not even a single move against its interests, and I hope, nay, I demand, but at least the smallest sliver, the tiniest fraction, the one twentieth part of the respect I am owe-."

"Mister Song!" Valentina interjected, slicing in with such icy severity that the merchant went pale, realizing just how far he had overstepped. "Thou have just as much license to speak as the insolent Nadia, and I will have thee removed just as quickly if thou continue."

Song stood stalk-still, stupefied into silence. Cathartic as it was watching the man be forced-fed his just desserts, Nadia knew there something sinister in the chairwoman's willingness to bash her jiaren puppet so publicly as that. It was dirty trick, but Nadia had made pains to deliberately insult the merchant in her speech, knowing that if anything could unite the committee, it was their hatred of that pathetic, roiling man. Now that he had been so castigated, however, the attack had been neutralized; worse even, as Valentina had come out seeming magnanimous, and Nadia now looked petty and childish in her insults by contrast. She had to reassert herself.

"Will thou debate me or not, Chairwoman?" Nadia dared her. "Will thou hide behind lackeys or show some courage in putting words of thine own to our ears and record?"

"I will not be goaded into-."

Nadia did not wait for her opponent to finish, but instead chose to plough forward. "Now, although she is not willing to speak to it herself, I know Comrade Valentina did not recommend us returning the EAGELE out of spite or stupidity. In fact, in many ways, I might commend her for her bravery, because the strategy here is obvious: she wants a war. And she is not the only one! Some days, I am left wishing for the same. It certainly would be faster. It absolutely would be simpler. It would free us from this bunker at many long months hidden beneath the surface of a backwater planet. These are all wonderful things, but do you know what else a war would be? An apocalypse."

Valentina, seeing she could not get the votes to oust Nadia from the room, was finally made to respond. "Comrades, though she continues to speak out of turn, that is not the only reason I will ask you to ignore these previous statements. This dichotomy that Comrade Nadia has presented, this stark division between 'war' and 'revolution', it is a false one. In truth, her goals and mine are the same, just as all of ours' is the same: revolution. But the revolution is not some wonderful, bloodless, exquisite thing onto itself. The revolution is a war against all of mankind for mankind."

"Aha!" Nadia shrieked. "So thou admit it! Thou wish to ignite a conflict."

"I admit nothing," Valentina returned, "other than to serve the revolution, which is, by very definition a conflict. If thou or anyone has difficulties with that, now - after all our hands have already been drenched in so much blood the stain will never wash – now seems a most bizarre time to air those concerns."

Nadia shook her head, pounding the table to emphasize, "but the Presidium, in placing us here, explicitly ordered us not to initiate a war with the Empire."

Valentina just shrugged. "It also asked us to carry out the revolution. We cannot, as I see it, do both. Whatever revolt takes place will be suppressed by the Legions -sooner with the EAGLE, later without-, but inevitably they will come. It is better for us to have the nuclear arsenal on our side when they arrive, one last guarantee on the survival of the interplanetary socialist revolution, when the unavoidable conflict arises."

Nadia was nearly screeching now, her frustration was beginning to boil over. "But the Party has decided, we are not ready. Not yet, at least. And yes, I know that opinion is not universal, even all the way up to the highest chambers of our leadership, and I know that this is a debate we have been having in whispers and mumbles and coded language for years, but now it really counts, now it really matters, and I am putting it on the record: revolution, not war. That is the goal here."

"It might be long. It might be difficult. It may plunge this planet into a chaos the likes of which will churn our stomachs more than anything even the horrors of Cassia Prime ever could, but so long as the Legions stay away, so long as we have the head start and the furor with which to capitalise upon it, the Party will take this planet, and when the Empire finally does decide to return, we can be certain, we will be ready then."

"So how long, then, Nadia?" The chairwoman replied. "How long? How many more dead? How many more tortured, murdered, raped, beaten, burned at the stake? How more blood on our hands? Everyone seated here today has done something terrible, something unspeakable, something that will haunt their memories and plague their nightmares to the end of all time. That is how we won our spot at this table, why we were selected to bring revolution to this planet. There is no and there can be no going back from all that what done together. All I am asking now is one final plunge, one final leap of faith, one final journey into the unknown to make this all worth something."

"And what is that journey, Valentina?" Nadia asked. "Death? Destruction? Complete annihilation? Because that is what it will be. Once the governor requests her legions, we have no know way of knowing if she shall ask for one for one thousand. All we know is, once the Empire starts fighting, it never stops, and it never surrenders. The Empire controls more a dozen star systems sprawling across this galaxy, and they have never in all their history ever ceded a single inch. So, if we are to fight them, it will be a fight to the death, have no doubt about it."

The chairwoman's face hardened with such resolve it appeared for a moment as if her whole body had been grafted from pure cement. "I stand steady to die for our cause. Are thou not?"

Nadia was caught off-guard. It was impossible to contradict such a retort, but they were not just talking about themselves here. They were debating the future of their entire race. How could Valentina and her partisans not see that? It defied explanation, and her confusion and disbelief, Nadia began to hesitate at the just the moment when she so desperately needed to press on.

Valentina took full advantage of her opponent's muteness. She turned to the neutrals and said, "We are far from the only revolutionary committee in the universe. There are hundreds now, scattered on nearly every planet of every system of every Empire, and whereas some such as Nadia and her compatriots might wait a million years for this drying grassland to catch fire on its own, I and every other student of nature, know full well that first to light, a tinder must spark.

"And that is the thing for which I yearn, comrades, not war, but a spark. It is time for the universe to decide: it is socialist or not? Are we right or are we wrong? Shall we live or shall we die? We cannot persist in this state of eternal compromise, of endless waiting, of pointless bloodshed and eternal purges. It is time to render our utopia onto the cosmos or return to the bliss of the void should we fail. There is no fail to persist on this earth in any other state."

"So, that is that. Thou do mean to annihilate us?" Nadia was finally able to regain her tongue. "Ignore the Presidium. Cast aside the plan. Thou cannot bear the things thou have been asked to do, so thou will choose something different. Thou want to blow it all up, bring it all to an end, hoping, after such a short burst of immense destruction, maybe our Party might reign victorious? Thy feet are too bloodied for the rough-hewn trod down the mountain so thou would see us all jump to the bottom instead?"

Valentina merely stared off coldly, letting her steely, unfeeling eyes make all the response for her.

"We have heard all we need to hear, comrades," Nadia straightened out her back, trying to look as imposing and tall – authoritative – as possible. "We cannot entertain this any further. I move to impeach the chairwoman and remove her as a standing member of this committee effective immediately. She has clearly become too dangerous to the continued prosperity of the Party to continue in her current capacity, and new leadership better aligned with the current stated mission of the Party Presidium is desperately needed."

The committee erupted at this. All four of Valentina's voters leaped from their chairs and showered the opposing side in obscenities. The Nadians in turn all jumped from their seats and spat invectives back with the same force, as the neutrals too found themselves on their feet, trying with all their heart to intervene and restore some semblance of order.

"Leftist scum!"

"Rightist cur!"

"Nihilist menace!"

"Reactionary scourge!"

"Cassia Secondus slut!"

"Cassia Prime whore!"

"You mean to betray the revolution!"

"Your Chairwoman already betrayed the revolution!"

Everyone suddenly stopped hurtling insults and turned toward Elena, who had levelled the accusation.

"What are thou saying?" Nadia asked, every muscle in her face working desperately to tell the woman to stop speaking, especially now the two neutrals were staring so intently, but the torturer refused to accept the message. The escalation of rhetoric was becoming personally dangerous. The argument had already reached the point where one faction would keep their jobs, but once accusations of "betraying the revolution" began being tossed around, it was difficult to imagine a scenario where both sides would now keep their heads.

"I heard it with my own two ears," the torturer asserted, standing proud and tall, even as Nadia's signals became much less subtle, with her hands hovering over the woman's shoulders, nearly ready to press her down. "When Lyudmila left the chairwoman said quite clearly, 'betray whomever thou must betray, just find me the weapons.' And then, not but a day after the agent's arrival, the Red Army is crushed, and Mila magically finds her way into the top echelons of Legion command. Surely it cannot only be me who sees the truth of what occurred here, the exchange that was made. The colonial revolution did not die of some natural causes; it was killed by Comrade Valentina Vladimirovna in her pursuit of those blasted, fucking weapons."

"And what is the proof of this, Comrade Elena?" Zhenya demanded, her eyes wide in shock, but growing visibly larger by the second from nothing but pure, unadulterated rage. "This is an incredible accusation. What sort of evidence do thou present to confirm it?"

"Well...." The torturer gulped, the pressure of the moment squeezing her tongue in place.

"Liar!" screamed the sycophants, "slanderer!"

"Even the reports from our agent Lyudmila make no mention any of this," the ideology officer said, breaking with his own bloc.

"But she is the one who sends us the reports," Elena replied, gesturing wildly towards Valentina. "She clearly censors the information so it will not incriminate herself."

"This is slander of the highest order!" the chairwoman cried. "What sort of indecency is this? It profanes the very air in which it is uttered."

"Stop talking!" Nadia hissed into the ear of the torturer beside her.

"She's an imposter!" Elena screamed, nearing the point of hysterical, exasperated outrage, tears of anger pouring out almost joyously after having been bottled up and hidden for so long. "The chairwoman is a fraud, a charlatan, an amoral, half-demonic ingrate whose only love for the revolution lies in its ability to grant her personal power over others. You all know it, and you have all said it. I know; I've even had to torture some of you, and I have heard the secrets you lock away so deep even you yourselves cannot find them. Do not pretend to fool me; it is only yourselves you have left to fool. Comrade Valentina is no leader. She is a despot and a turncoat, and if we allow her to, she will plunge the knife into us all."

"Enough!" Nadia barked, her voice loud and harsh enough to not only cower the torturer but nearly all the partisans on her side of the table.

One of the Valentinians stood. "I move that this body censure Comrade Elena and have her removed from the committee chamber at once!"

"Seconded," Zhenya replied, crossing her arms and scowling as she did so.

Nadia's party did not even time to look towards her to guidance before Valentina called the matter to question. It was passed on voice vote alone, no need even to count. The torturer found herself dragged out of the chamber by the guards standing watch, her comrades watching on with only their horror to outmatch their anger.

With that, the factions were exactly tied: four for Nadia and four for Valentina, with the two neutrals still holding the balance.

Nadia was too nervous to even tap her feet now. Instead, as the chairwoman explained she would oversee the voting on the EAGLE matter before she so much as entertained a motion to unseat her, Nadia could feel all her nervous energy just bottling up inside of her, pressuring and compiling and slowly sinking to her feet to escape into the void. It was a terrible feeling, like she was waiting in line for her own execution.

"Is there a motion to call the question?"

Those four, dour faces turned her, all of them as pale and confused as Nadia's undoubtedly was. She shook her head. Continued debate had only made things worse. It was all up to the two swing-voters now, just as it always had been. They all voted to begin the tally.

If things went badly, if the neutrals turned against them, Nadia had at least hoped one of them would side with her. Let it be a tie; Valentina could break it, but the result would be contentious, unclear. They'd be divided and embittered, but still alive. Just one, that was all they needed. Just one more vote and maybe they could live another day.

Those hopes, even as pitiful and shoestring as they were, could not endure past the voice vote. Nadia could see both Zhenya and other neutral speak against her. The defeat was only made worse when they each voted individually, one by one, standing up to side with Valentina as if their "aye" was a spit in Nadia's face. It was over; Valentina had won.

Nadia barely registered it as the committee then voted to label her and all her faction "unpersons", traitors to the cause and enemies of the interplanetary socialist revolution. She could not blame them, really. Had she won the chairmanship, she would have done exactly the same to them.

That was how the Party had stayed united for all those many years. It did not tolerate dissent. One could criticize all they liked, but unless they had a plan to take power for themselves, those criticisms are always liable to get one killed.

It was a fate Nadia would come to understand more fully when she and her accomplices were marched up to the surface, stood up against a row of nondescript trees and executed by firing squad the very next morning.