Kang had never meant to destroy the city, but given no alternative, atomics had surely been the most humane way to do it.

Revolts and local uprisings had risen all across the country long before the Gretwalder's reappearance, but his unexpected and inexplicable unveiling at Lundenvarr had only exacerbated the situation. Still, though the country rose now against him, and Kang's armies had become inundated by disease, their supply lines in shambles, his automated nuclear arsenal remained perfectly intact: ready for a demonstration.

The strike against the Legion had been a secret, a carefully guarded one, carried out far away in the deserted isles of the Vitharr tropics. Though Cuthbert and his ecclesiastics preached as voraciously as they could, painting awesome portraits of Kang's heavenly might, of his harnessing the very power of the holy star, a pulpit can only ever convey so much. With a people who treated televisions as suspiciously magical luxuries, whose barely literate upper classes were less than one in ten, the message of this magnificent achievement went unheeded.

There were no images of mushroom clouds to fawn upon, no testimonies of survivors to republish, no videos of the great fiery orb to fill the common folk with dread. Though their god now walked among them, the Vidar refused to look.

And so, he resolved to turn their gaze.

It was Nipponorr, the island just off Vitharr's east coast that was to stage the great awakening. The island's populace had refused their monthly tribute, claiming the local Walder had inflated their crop yield numbers to win favour at Kang's court. The Gretwalden's ten percent share was, in truth, more akin to eighty, and with their bellies empty and growling, they had taken to their Walder's manor pitchforks and torches in hand to have their fill.

Plausible as their story might have been, it was nevertheless not to be tolerated. Kang had come to realize nearly every fact at his disposal was little more than a flight of fancy, an ink-stain he mistaken for a statistic. Still, though his earlier ambitions had been built on somewhat flimsy foundations questionable foundation, there could be no excuse for redirection now.

The governor Ci Xiao had been quite clear in her book:

Nothing on earth is ever quite as true as it is on paper,

But the wise ruler always acts as if the paper world where the real one

And silences the earth wherever it might disagree.

Nipponorr was small, sparsely populated, just far enough way to prevent an unpredictable fallout but close enough to be missed. There had been no point on the earth more ready for the silencing than that.

Unfortunately, it was only after the bomb had dropped, however - fifteen thousand lives extinguished as one might wet a candle - that Kang was forced to acknowledge just how enormous the gulf between the world of his unflinchingly optimistic reports and the world of nightmarish reality had grown.

It was not just his army that had shattered into a myriad, uncountable pieces, but the communications links, the roadways, the rail-lines, the shipping lanes, and the markets too had all been ground to dust. Just about everything that could break had already been broken, and being still trapped in his bunker, it had just taken Kang longer for the news to reach him.

Unable to find work, to find food, to find hope, the whole population had been reduced to digging through the dirt with their bare hands, just trying to scrounge up enough dead roots and edible grasses to survive. There was no one left to look at the sky and see the hellfire their king rained down upon them in an impotent display of rapidly waning power.

No one traveled. No one wrote stories to their local papers, arguing over petty disagreements in the opinion columns. No made tuned to their favourite radio station or waited anxiously each night to watch the television news. And so, no one, when Kang did destroy that island, could be bothered to recognize it had happened. The threat, through sheer force of ignorance, had been entirely neutralized, and now that every other instrument had decayed in his very hands, their tyrant stood denuded and vulnerable.

That fact, unlike the destruction of Nipponorr, had been recognized all too quickly.

Revolts began propping up faster than even a million arsenals could have silenced, and rumours of Aeplerad's return had only spurned them further. Kang felt himself baited into ever larger conflicts, ever greater demonstrations of his rancour, devastations of this country in whose service he had supposedly been sworn. First an island off the coast had been the target of his wrath, then a town in the dessert, next a city by the mountains.

Then, finally, it had been Lundenvarr, twenty million people, situated on an agrarian delta that fed hundreds of millions more. A fifth of Vitharr's population lay tightly bundled near that city and the massive river over which it forded, overlooking the great northern ocean, and though they had not all died in the blast, Kang was under no illusions what his strike would mean for the region.

He had told himself to use the imperial mindset, to accept the planet as it was: a steppingstone, a resource, a well to be tapped as necessary and dried if so needed. It was the uranium he wanted, the weapons and power it could bring him. The people, the backwards, ignorant, idiot-minded masses who could not be bended to their knees without legs being cut from under them, they were nothing to him.

But believing a premise and forcing oneself to act upon it are two entirely separate things.

It was much the same way before Kang had joined the Legion, when he was bullied as a child, teased and abused to no end for his race, for his being Jiaren and noticeably so in a Vidar neighbourhood more prideful of its pure-blooded nature than most. He had always told himself then, no matter what, no matter how times he was hit, how many times he was spat on or slapped about, he could always make it stop. If it ever became too much, he could do the one thing his enemies could not; he could kill.

His bullies' hesitancy, their uncertainty of purpose had been an obvious and unchanging weakness, and it was a weakness he could (he had told himself) exploit at any moment. They always moved in packs, never engaged but with overwhelming numbers. And whenever they would start to pick away him, it was always the thinnest, the scrawniest, the most wretched among them who would laugh the loudest, cackle the harshest and punch the hardest. They were desperate to be accepted, to win the protection of the group and in so doing, conquer a devilish society that would never even allow them to survive alone.

Kang had no such concerns. The Vidar held on faith that even the slightest infraction against the moral order would jeopardize their future in paradise: a lush, garden planet filled sumptuously with every type of earthly and spiritual pleasure, cast away over a cosmic triviality. Though the young Kang Shawn had tried so fervently to blend in among the Cassians, accept their customs and pass unnoticed by them, it was that belief, in the existence of his soul - its immortality, its singularity, the importance of its preservation from evil – that always kept him irreparably apart.

He had lived his whole life a renegade, relying on no one but himself for every scrap and morsel, and when he fought, he fought not for acceptance, but purely for the difference of life and death. And so, he told himself, over and over, accepting pummeling after pummeling, his adolescent body skinned bleeding and raw, "just you keep it up, then you'll see. One more punch, just you dare. It'll be your last. You beat the dog; you get the fangs."

Despite the pleasure his ruminations on the dismemberment of his childhood foes may have given him, when the Legion had finally demand he do it – taking the life of another – the act had lacked even the faintest inkling of catharsis. It had been cold, impersonal, almost entirely without feeling, a single missile fired by a single button and one minute later, the troublesome village or town or whatever unimportant landmark had been no more. Cleaning and dismantling the battery afterwards had occupied more space in his mind. What once had been a passion was rendered tedium.

And so, that had been that. Kang could certainly kill if he wanted to, but it meant nothing, it could mean nothing, and perhaps the profundity and inescapability of that emptiness, the weight of continuously mounting pressure with no hope any release, perhaps that had turned out to be the most terrifying thing of all. Because worse than merely burning cities and their inhabitants to ember, worse than condemning millions to long, miserable deaths of radioactive cancers and burns, worse than starving an entire nation to fill a cave with atomic weapons he now seriously doubted he could ever use, Kang had committed the gravest sin of all: he had failed to enjoy it.

It was not just a failure to enjoy the downfall of his enemies that beset him now, but that the destruction of one enemy now only led to the breeding of another. The Keepers had abandoned him, and now they laid scattered amongst the ashes of Lundenvarr, true, but Edgar and the others had only been the first to leave him, not the last. Bit by bit, piece by the piece, the country was prying itself from his grip, and even his most loyal partisans had no interest in watching and waiting as the bombs fell on them one by one.

So long as the rebellions appeared one at a time, the insurrections could be stopped in a flash, but if they rose all at once, there would be nothing left to incinerate. And so, of course, Kang still locked in his bunker, his orders now not being issued much farther than to his dining hall on the composition of lunch and supper, his lieutenants had removed themselves all at once. Even Cuthbert ignored him now, supposedly chasing a phantom Alfred all through reaches of Thunorr, though Kang knew the truth well enough. Cuthbert still had the only thing left in Vitharr that might yet still call itself an army, and with each passing day, Kang could feel it growing closer, hunting him, smelling out those missiles that might make him more than a simple Prince-Bishop of a failed state.

Still, the ailing despot would have preferred seeing Cuthbert at the gates of arsenal that morning instead of the mysterious black standards and enormous portraits of the Yongle Emperor floating menacingly towards him.

By the time the force had been discovered, it was too late for his rockets to deployed. Kang's spies, a network that had once stitched together the whole of Septimi, all nine thousand kilometres wide, could no longer warn him of an invasion just outside his door. Kang still kept a host to defend him, and it would be many hours yet before this unknown 'Black Legion' would imperil his bunker, but such thoughts gave him cold comfort now. Time has little meaning when one can only use it to wallow and fret.

That was how, as his mind began to crumble in itself, every anxiety and paranoia bubbling away in a cacophony of silent whispers only he could hear and be tormented by, Kang was left haggling with the woman he had once threatened to destroy: Valentina, Chairwoman of the Septimi Party Committee.

"We know you possess an army, Valentina."

It pained him to be so coy, but he had little option now. His intelligence reports were unreliable, but he guessed the Party banners had attracted more than few tens of thousands. If he could coax them out, guard the capital from the countless insurrections popping up around him, he might just be able to summon enough troops to beat back the legionnaires. He only needed somewhere to retreat, somehow to recalculate, regroup, a solid base from which to stage a reclamation. It was all too much, from too many places and nearly all at once. He just needed a front, a stable foundation, a base of support, a reliable ally. Any branch that could halt his tumble down the tree.

The radio replied with static, but Kang could sense her listening on the other end, biding her time, waiting to strike when the moment was its most opportune.

So, tactician that he was, he deigned to strike first.

"I can destroy it, thou witch!" he threatened the receiver. "Field thy forces now or let them burn in flames!"

"So that is thy bargain, eh?" The radio cackled back. "Let our partisans die defending thy hubris or see them dead by thy vengeance?"

Kang bit his lip, but with each glance at his viewscreen, he saw the black ships advance ever nearer. "It need not be so," he responded, "but it can be if it must."

Again, Valentina waited, letting the prickling silence speak for her.

"We can save you, Lord Kang," the party woman finally spoke, "but there is only one trade we wish to make."

"Name it!" Kang griped, losing for several precious moments such sense of composure even the woman at the other end of the line, seeing him not could scarce miss the distinctions of panic on his voice.

"The bombs, all of them."

Kang was livid.

"Thou shall have them all when they shower thee in fiery death!" he roared.

"We both know who shall meet their grave first."

"I can ensure we meet it both all the same."

Kang's threat was cold, merciless, and he said it with such conviction that even he was not sure if he truly meant it. Was he truly willing to unleash his arsenal rather than have it captured? At this rate he felt he might do it just from spite. The smug satisfaction of knowing that Valentina would spend her last moments just as distraught as he, that did soften the edges of his fate in a certain way. Much as the childhood foes he had once envisaged meeting their grisly ends, thinking the same of the cadre managed to ease the fright just as it threatened most to overtake him.

Yes, he thought. Perhaps I will do it. Just for that sake if nothing else. I can kill. I know it. It is my power, the only one I truly have left: my indifference.

Valentina did not wait long enough for him to wallow in his satisfaction, however. "Send the missiles if thou must. We have long since moved our locations; thou would eradicate an empty hollow."

Kang stood up, hollering in the radio. "Impossible! Thou lie!" he snapped. "You could never have accomplished such a feat without our knowing."

Even through the static, he could still make out the mirthless guffaws of his opponent. "What does it matter, little Shawn-Shawn. I know thou have way to tell. The world is lost. All is shadow to thee now. If we hide, it is to shield ourselves from the Emperor. We were never concerned with the likes of thee!"

"Enough!"

"Your weapons, Kang! Thy weapons for thy life."

Kang leaned over his desk and moaned through the most painful tears of his existence.

"A thousand," he said, "I shall give thee a thousand."

There was only laughter.

"It matters not, Kang," was the only reply. "Now it is only a matter of waiting. Thou shall call us again, and this time, this time thy will beg on thy hands and knees for us to save you of these weapons. They are thy necktie, Kang, the ascot that separates thee from the rabble whence thou came, true, but it's a necktie that can so easily be thy noose."

The man's hands played unconsciously at a tightness welling around his throat.

"Be careful thou call us next before thou hang."

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"It was fifty thousand years ago, perhaps to this very day, that the species homo impericus rose to prominence on the planet Terra, and just as the homo sapiens did once conquer its degenerate cousins - homo neanderthalensis, homo erectus and numerous others now lost to the sands of time - today it is us, we the imperial man who shall end the terrible reign of the barbarian blight, the pretenders to the human mantel: homo Cassius!"

The whole of the conference room cheered with wild abandon at the woman's exclamation. Wu looked through the crowd now thronging about their newly proclaimed leader, the Praetorian Governor Pan Quentin, searching for any familiar faces. Nearly a quarter of the petty officers in the fleet had been selected by the new legion herself for the occasion, and now well over a hundred people packed a room that was meant to never seat more than forty. Wu could recognize some of the captains by the wispy tops of their heads, but besides a single greying patchwork there and a white cloud over bald skies there, he was almost entirely alone.

Nelson was nowhere to be seen, once again absented from what should have been "everyone". Inside the more conspiratorial side of the commandant's mind, Wu guessed the answer might be quite obvious. The woman had taken charge of every ship in their miniature armada, and with all the captains on her side, there was no need of an admiral to divide their loyalties.

That it had been Nelson's idea to spare her life at all meant nothing to her. That Wu still commanded two legions back on the colony absolutely did. So long as they remained on Septimi, and Pan needed his voice to command them, he would remain alive, her hostage. Nelson, he feared, having the lost the respect of his captains, was long since gained the comradeship of an airlock.

Then again, Wu had never lived through a mutiny. Perhaps he was sensationalizing. He had yet to see anything himself; after all.

If she had been so motivated (and the governor's recollections of her colonial atrocities certainly suggested she would be) this new Praetorian Governor could have spent her first hours in office force-marching a whole legion of political enemies towards their final space walk. Instead, even the anxious Wu was made to note how much had stayed its same, calm, usual self. Everyone was taking the same orders from the same people with the same level of obedience in reply.

It was hardly reasonable to expect otherwise, Wu thought. As with everything, the melodramas and bitter struggles that dominated one's personal life could seem so grand in scale, so epic in proportion that the fate of the universe itself hung on their every minutest detail, whereas for most everyone else, they would be nothing less than a passing curiosity. From his experience as a cog within the great machines of state, Wu had come to see it was no different in the brutally crafted stage play which overlorded mankind.

No fewer than three separate people had claimed to lead the disparate little fleet over the course of less than a week, and yet the fierce clashes in the boardrooms and bridge had been entirely obscured by an eerie, continuous normality everywhere else. Rather than destroy the chain of command outright, Pan had merely inserted herself inside it. That position seemed fine enough for everyone, no matter how dangerously Nelson and Wu now floated just above her needlepoint.

Still, it was difficult to look upon that woman and imagine the travesties of which the governor accused her. The virus had been horrific, certainly, but only in its scale, and though Wu would have a very different opinion in peace time, when at war, no one can be faulted for their ambition. A terrible enemy sometimes required terrible methods to be overcame.

"Very good, our most loyal companions." Pan finally concluded, her voice echoing in an unnervingly perceptible delay from the speakers all along the edges of the room. She raised her fists and stood up from her chair so that the whole assembly could see her, arousing in them a triumphant applause loud enough to block out entirely that once omnipresent hum of the frigate. She abandoned her microphone, screeching will all her might as she waved her claws about in the pained yet joyful fashion of the pyrrhically victorious, but the rest of her speech was lost to the officers' frenzy.

The crowd continued to mingle, not realizing that the Praetorian Governor's discourse had come to an end, and she was trying to signal them away. It was only after a few of the black-cloaked officers – faceless dark splotches Quentin had been ferrying up to Eternal Phoenix with all possible haste – began pushing through the mob, grabbing people here and there, selecting whom to stay and whom to go, that the centurions and tribunes finally took their leave.

The memory of the congregation lingered on in the salon long after all the petty officers had left, and for Wu and the captains, it somehow only made their sudden isolation ever the more daunting and undeniable. It was just Pan and the six of them, sharing that now suddenly deadened room; the usual litany of first officers, intelligence chiefs, signals specialists and other supplicants commissioned men like Wu kept adhered to themselves like royal retinues was entirely forbidden. Not even the commandant's chief of staff had been allowed entry to this, the real meeting. The walls were empty save the black-hooded, unidentifiable guardsmen who clung to it, and Sangui doubted they would dare add much to the general conversation.

"Ha!" A shriek burst forth.

All looked towards the Praetorian Governor, but she offered no indication of laugh or scream; her expression seemed puzzlingly prepared for both. Acting like nothing had happened, she smirked, sat down once again, and demanded, "Jiang, thou must have new sensor readings. What say them of the Cassian armada?"

The captain pulled at his collar: clearly not good news. The absence of anyone beneath him to bear the brunt now made itself more than apparent. No one to blame but himself.

Pan did not take the silence well. "Is it destroyed or not, Jiang?"

The man dipped his head, perhaps recognized how pathetic it seemed and lifted it again. Somehow, he still managed to speak without ever once making eye contact with his new master. "Our instruments are not so precise, your honour," he wriggled uncomfortably with every utterance, like the words were being pulled from his mouth like teeth. "We can see some debris, yes, and cannot detect any movement within a significant distance of the impact zone."

He swallowed, wincing as he began, "but-."

"But what?" Pan asked, tilting her head, inquisitively.

There was nothing inherently menacing in the question, but the hollow, emotionless timbre of her voice only proved the more disquieting. Jiang reverberated in his chair, stuttering, "but..., but..., but-."

"But they could have warped away," the commandant put his colleague out of his misery.

Quentin folded her hands together, twisting her knuckles absentmindedly. "What?" she asked sharply, her eyes fluttering to the ceiling.

"I said...," Wu could not hide the bafflement in his tone, "they might have wa-."

"Not thee!" Pan cursed, turning her head back towards the upper right corner of the room.

No one dared make a sound.

"Oh, I see," she replied, responding to nothing but the ship's own thrumming in the background.

Now Wu was beginning to become concerned. He leaned forward, keeping his tone as low and delicate as possible. "My lady, if I may-."

"He says it is impossible." Quentin announced, as if stating an incontrovertible matter of fact.

"What?" Wu asked, sharing a glance with the three captains opposite him on the table. "Who?"

Their leader scoffed, shaking her head at their obvious incompetence. "Barbarians with Faster-Than-Light capabilities. Impossible!"

Wu shrugged. "Our absent friend, Nelson once said the same about their industry, that the Cassians could field no more than fix or six ships at most. They launched almost seventy." He raised his palms. "It costs us nothing to over-estimate the barbarians now. Under-estimation could mean our demise."

The Praetorian Governor seemed to contemplate this a moment, her enormous head nearly swirling about like a wheel around the axel of her neck before she finally nodded. "I completely agree."

The woman erupted from her chair in an explosion of physical energy powerful enough to rock the table from whence she came nearly off its bolts. She raced around the conference room, shouting between wheezing, racing breaths, the nervous eyes of her captains following her as she did so. "We ... must ... raise ... the ... or-bital ... can-non!"

Wu stood, chiefly in protest, though genuine distress was beginning to flood over him as well. "Your honour, this cannot be news to you; it is not yet complete!"

Pan only fulminated further. "I know you legionnaires play us for fools, dragging out every task to its most profitable conclusion," she snarled. "Give a day, you take a day. Give a century, and you'll take two. You work only as hard as my whip."

Some of the captains chuckled at this.

Quentin smiled, though her right shoulder jerked upwards in a volent jab, seemingly without any sense of control from its owner, and her face twitched unconvincingly between humour and fury.

"Ha! And while we're at it!" she said, as if delivering the punchline of a joke. "Hehe!" she sniggered, then smashed the table in front of her, screaming with an unexpectable maliciousness, "where is my Black Legion?"

The yowl had forced nearly everyone to the very back of their seats as the sonic blast propelled their stupefied forms. Wu could feel the first droplets of anxious sweat moistening on his brow, threatening an unsettling drop down his face, but he still feigned ignorance as long as possible.

"I know not what you ask, your-."

Pan did not even allow him to even complete the honorific. "Are my soldiers at the colony building the orbital cannon with the other legions or not?"

Wu dove his fidgeting fingers beneath the table, knowing his hands' frightful tremors would surely give him away. "I was never aware of their being reassigned, your honour," he insisted, damning the hurried pace, the pleading tone, the suddenly too culpable-sounding note in his voice.

"Wang lies!" The woman cursed.

She grabbed her teapot like the disks she had once been made to throw about in her former, girlish life, and drew it back behind her in a heavy swing. The lycée had schooled her well, for even after decades of ill practice, the discus struck the wood just before the commandant's face, spraying not just him but his entire wing of the table in a lacerating mist of steam and porcelain.

"I kill thee, Wang!" Pan cried again, standing from her seat again and wailing, her words bitingly acrimonious yet somehow replete with sorrow.

"I...," a sob choaked her. The next word no more than a whisper, "kill... thee!"

The commandant rolled about the ground, pressing together through bleeding fingers the flaming remnants of his shattered face. His moans were low-pitched and belaboured, agony muted only by the countless shards of porcelain lodged below the lip and into his larynx. His head was a studded onion slowly simmering under a fire no one could be bothered to extinguish.

The captain seated next him winced as he now held his own hand beneath the table, gripping it tight at the wrist. Cutting off blood circulation might perhaps spare him the pain of the tiny cuts and burns he had suffered, allowing the man to keep his composure. His comrade at the end of the table merely brushed the spatter off his uniform, hiding perfectly the irritable stinging still clutching at his chest. None turned towards the fallen Wu; their heads remained exactly where they were, downcast and alone.

"We shall have no more Wangs!" Pan made the declaration as seriously as one might denounce the very fate of Heaven, yet there is no one in the room, save (only perhaps) herself, who understood its meaning. She snapped at her own guardsmen, calling louder so that she could be heard over the squeals of the fallen commandant, "bring them in at once!"

The doors opened and a train of five women, all clad in nearly identical, leathery black fashion to their leader marched quickly into the room, their boots clacking with tense, uneven steps, but walking with a defined, even prominent purpose. The men watched, as captivated as they were afraid. More than a few wondered what sort of perverted fantasies their leader might expect of them, though all knew that as long as their colleague lay whimpering on the ground, their compliance could have no limits.

"I will not have another Wang," Pan muttered to herself.

The newcomers stopped once each of them was standing resolutely behind some pre-chosen captain, hovering mere inches from their heads.

"Gentlemen," Quentin began, her chin now pressed firmly into her neck, slurring her words absurdly as she spoke. "I shall have you meet your new seconds."

"Seconds?" Jiang asked, turning around to meet the unfeeling eyes of the rough-hewn, middle-aged lady behind him. "Your honour, we already have-."

"No more Wangs!" The Praetorian Governor interjected. "We won't have it! I say! We will not have it."

The captains bristled, each of them barely able to disguise to contempt for the one that stood behind them. "But what does that mean, your honour?" one asked.

"That from now until the end of time itself, your every command, your every assignment, your every word, every thought and perhaps even every shit will be watched and reported upon by these officers, here," Quentin pointed. "Even as the colony crumbled around me, Reds popping out from every hole, socialists massacring civilians to start some sort of 'race riot', these women before you proved to be the only people capable weaving that fractured city back together."

She nodded, somehow entirely formal and composed. "I trust they can do so again now."

"Of course, my lady," one of the women replied.

"No more Wangs!" another called out.

The rest spat, on cue.

The men dared a few wayward glances to one another. There was nothing but confusion painted on all of them, confusion and sheer, uninhibited dread.

"It was them who told me of my missing legion." Pan cracked her knuckles. "I want you captains to bring them back."

"That is entirely a Legion matter, your honour," Jiang pled. "We have absolutely no control over-."

Quentin merely held up a finger, spewing, "toot, toot!" and silencing the man before even having to interrupt this time. "That is not what I like to hear, Captain Jiang. How sad would it be to have thy second write such an unfavourable report on her very first installment, no?"

"We cannot give orders to Legion off-."

"Shall I order in more tea?" Pan barked.

No one knew what could be said to that.

"Hmm," Quentin cooed, shrugging her shoulders as if surprised by the quiet reception. She turned to other side of the table. "While Jiang is out scouring the wastes of Septimi for my Black Legion, I will have the rest of you bring the cannon up into orbit immediately."

One of the captains gulped. He had seen this woman's reaction to the commandant's criticism and knew he need tread as carefully as he could, but in such a matter it was impossible to stay silent. When faced with sheer suicide, a teapot to the chin might seem preferable.

"Is that truly safe, Governing Praetor?" he asked, confounding the invented title. "If the enemy remains intact but obscured to us, this is precisely the vulnerability which they may be awaiting."

As worried as the captain may have been, the more he talked, the less he felt the haranguing presence behind him, the more the momentum of his words carried him onwards. "Say they have developed FTL capabilities, these barbarians, surely, an unready cannon dragged into orbit by two, perhaps three defenceless frigates, would prove the best possible opportunity to strike!"

Pan only smiled. "And if they attack, what better person than me to defend you." The woman snickered, "we have the weapon, you know it. The virus to destroy their very race. Whatever remains of those Hamites now, let us lure them to us and in so doing entice them to their grave."

She stood. "You have your orders. I want that cannon off the ground by day's end. Now, see it done."

With their leader gone, leaving them alone in the company of their seconds, the captains could only wonder, perhaps they had should have chosen tea instead.

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"But why, Ilya? How?"

The slave prostrated himself on hands and knees, speaking to the cold, metal floor not just to signify his submission, but also to avoid the indignant glare of his mistress. Choking, his voice strained and weak, he asked, "can you truly still not see it was an act of love?"

That, indeed, was proving rather difficult for the deposed governor to see, flittering through the forcefield of her holding cell.

"Love," she said, jumping up from her perch against the airlock. The word was caustic, scorching in her mouth. "A thousand poxes on thy house, Cassian! That is my love for thee. May thy lineage be cursed for a hundred generations! May thy daughters be barren, thy sons bear no fruit! May thy-."

Ilya slid to his knees. Even in being contrite, he had long since outgrown any tolerance for castigation. "This was a courtesy, my lady. I need not have come, and I did not come to seek thy reproach, no matter how deserving of it I may be."

"Then why, by Heaven's name are thou here?" Xiao hissed.

"Because I know your mind, my Ci Xiao!" the man protested, having his arms as close to the field as he dared without inviting its electric reprisal. "I know how you puzzle and muse, how your mind obsesses over failure, replaying over the same events again and again, retreading and re-examining every memory and datum in that magnificent head of yours until you have driven yourself mad trying to find the solution."

His face softened, the faint outlines of a smile creeping up on him, but it was no look the governor could recognize. Instead, it was a smile one might offer the house cat after cleaning up its unspeakable mess outside the litterbox. "I am here to explain it, Xiao, because I know, a grandmaster like yourself, even when defeated, you need an explanation. I am here to tell you how it came to be, and how there was nothing thou could have done any differently. So, you can stop, stop thinking, stop puzzling, stop torturing yourself with unrealized possibilities. You did the best you could, and you have failed. Now please, my lady, enjoy the rest, and we can plot your return once this business is done."

Ci was livid. "No!" she yelled, more than loud enough for Ilya to wish himself deaf. "I did not spend an entire lifetime – more than an entire lifetime – being patronized by every manner of man only to be shuffled away into my transparent cage and talked down upon by the likes of," her finger stabbed the barrier, not caring how it pricked and numbed, "thee!"

"Your worship!" Ilya objected. "There is no one more ready to celebrate your intellect than myself, but you must come to see, my lady, this is not your time, not your place. And just as those who serve the crown sometimes must disobey the head that wears it, so too have I, in deposing you, also acted in your own interest. I have saved you from yourself."

"I shall cut out the tongue that dare speak such traitorous drivel!" the governor screamed.

Ilya only shook his head. "No, you will not, Ci Xiao, and that is why I have spared you, spared you of this," he held his hands aloft before him, weighted as they were with the imagined blood of his entire race, "this terrible business."

Xiao scowled. "And to think," she said, her tone low but acerbic, "after all we shared, all we learned and experienced together, through all the dreams we dreamt and passions we enlivened, it would end this way, just another man casting doubt on a woman of ambition, telling her she has not the balls to succeed."

"This is not a question of balls, but a matter of the soul, Xiao-Xiao!"

"Curse thee!" she spat, the saliva bursting into a pocket of steam on its impact with the field. "Enough of thy primitive superstit-."

"Will, then," Ilya put forth, massaging his frustrated temple, "you have not the will, my lady, the will to do what may be necessary: to murder an entire race. Is it truly so wrong for me to spare you of that?"

"But why spare just my conscience, Ilya?" Ci pleaded, her mood swinging sharply, grasping at any sign of reluctance on his part. "Do you Cassians not believe that an act is evil no matter who commits it? Release me, Ilya! Together, we can convince the fleet of Pan's immoral designs. Let me go as thou did for her, and we can find another way before it is too late!"

The slave could only sniff, smirking wistfully as he remembered. "It is always the same with you, my lady. Always the same. You curse, you scream, you make your grand debut upon the stage, upturn every apple cart, ruffle every feather, and yet, when time comes to settle the scores, you never find the courage to draw the knife."

"Thou know not of what thou speak."

"Hmm, it is that so?" Ilya interrogated, his cheekbones upraised and severe. "What your strategy, then, when you insulted the Emperor's ministers, berated and humiliated them one by one until the entire cabinet was against you, but never moved quite fast enough to replace them? What was the plan in upending the Vidar customs, forcing their rituals to suit your tastes, but then never interceding when they defied you? Where was the brilliance in holding our legions to the colony, letting them run rampant and wreck terrible devastation in their idleness while Kang thumbed his nose at us, building a nuclear arsenal-."

"What would you have me do, Ilya?" the woman begged, "let the legions loose upon one population instead of another?" She shook her head, defiantly. "No, the blockade was correct. It was simple, but biting, never cost a single imperial their li-."

"It. Did. Not. Work!" Ilya tightened his hands into fists, wanting almost to strangle the woman before him in his exasperation. "This is always your way, Ci Xiao; you want to educate, not discipline. You claim politics renders all acquaintances as strangers, but deep down, you are still that little merchant's daughter with whom none of the other girls ever wanted to play. You plan to make allies, but you really want friends, and Septimi ... that just is not this game, Xiao. It is not your game."

"The Emperor – the Joint Chiefs really – wanted half this planet's male population subjugated, its moons converted to a giant orbital defence platform. With that as your purpose, were you ever destined to make friends?" He winced, the words coming out harsher than he had ever wanted. "Come back when this world is civilized, my lady, when the people are ours and ours alone. Then, you can make this a paradise, but now, at this moment, it is not your time."

"I must admit, I find it rather odd," Ci sniggered, "hearing the barbarian call the imperial people, his 'own'."

Ilya sighed, nodding. "After a million lifetimes of misery on Cassia Luna condemning your people as 'Empire', I think of it now like any other imperial, 'Home'." He sniffed, biting the corner of his mouth, "but loving my adopted home blinds me not to the foundation on which it sits."

"Our culture!" Xiao professed. "It is our culture! That is how I converted thee, Ilya. Did I ever so much as touch the whip? No! It was books and songs, food and pleasure, poetry and debate, that was how I brought thee in, and that is how our Empire has always welcomed the barbarians."

Ilya just laughed. "You delude yourself."

Ci shrugged. "Perhaps, but is it truly so evil to wish peace over war, order over chaos?"

The man took to his feet now, denouncing that which laid before him. "Order is chaos! Chaos controlled, concentrated, diverted where the order sees it fit. You concern yourself so thoroughly with preserving some ethereal, cosmic balance, with preserving what exists, you cannot destroy what begs destruction. You constantly gather kindling yet always hope another might strike the match. Sometimes, though, if we do not light the brush at a moment of our choosing, we lose the whole forest to chance."

Ilya brushed his tunic and began walking to the exit. "It is done, Ci Xiao. The fire is set. Let us return once its course is taken." He gave his final words looking through the closing of the door. "We can rebuild, my love. We can rebuild."

It was not Xiao's first time having lost a post. It was not the first time she had lost a servant. It was not even her first time having lost her freedom. And yet, even though there was nothing in the loss in any way truly novel, there was another first still buried achingly in this experience, her first glimpse of true devastation.

Ci fell to her knees and cried, weeping a long, howling groan of despair the likes of which she had never cried before. In times such as these it was almost a natural instinct to reach for her orange cubes of happiness, but this was a sorrow, a loss that no crate, shipload nor even mountain of opium could ever hope to erase. This, she knew, was a sickness who had only one cure - a noose - and in her mind, she began the one last, final puzzle.

Try as she might to find an alternative, it was the only thought left that gave any resemblance of pleasure. Any ponderance on the past, any hope of the future, it filled her only with premonitions of dread or the profound shame of failure. Ilya was right. Her mind could not help but replay her every failure, revisit her every mistake, agonize over every detail until the obsession became so torturous, she could beg and shout into the empty cell for it to end.

....for her to end.

Xiao began to rummage through the tiny metal room, scrounging with the look of a crazed cast-away, surrounded by water and yet having nothing in the world to drink.

There was Prisha, the girl in her fourth form. She had only ever wanted to play, to laugh, to share secrets, but something in her attitude was too friendly, too artificial, too secretly contemptuous. The lass had cried so wretchedly, discovering too late that the sweet-faced, lonely merchant's daughter who would never hurt a fly could stab with insults more cutting than any blade. Even then, she had been able to spot vulnerabilities with hawk-eyed precision.

For all the metal in the room, nothing gleamed quite sharply enough. There was nothing there to cut a wrist, open a vein.

It was Zheng she thought of next. He had been so handsome and well-kempt in his prefect's uniform, polished buttons and shined boots shimmering nearly as beautifully as the white gold necklace he had bought her to propose. But he had been too earnest, too eager, helped too much by her counsel and her introductions to higher government circles. He owed her too much, and she could never tell the difference on his face between his gratitude and his affection. So, she feared would lose them both and left herself, not waiting for the day his appreciation would run out on its own.

Perhaps her tunic might do. She could strip herself and the use the cloth as a garrote. No support beams or bunkbed to hoist the rope, unfortunately. No counterweight to hold it tight either.

Then, of course, there could only be Ilya. That had been fine enough, she supposed. A truly pathetic, downtrodden, irredeemable man who had so much for which to thank her she had though his loyalty above all reproach. Finally, she had found a man to excuse her of everything, someone who could not criticize nor contradict her no matter the infraction. Here was a man to wait patiently as she plotted the nights away, to watch unjealously as she gave herself to pretty-faced strangers and strong-armed rogues, to sit silently as filled her lungs with tangerine-coloured, rancid smoke. But it was always just a little too much. It had been exactly what she wanted, and now that it was over, all it had left her was profoundly unsatisfied.

The airlock, maybe. If she could just find some way to shimmy it open, even just a smidge, creating some sort of opening, the pressure differential would cause her to implode eventually. That, or freeze to death from exposure to the cold, unfeeling vacuum. It was the only embrace she for which she longed now.

"You know," a familiar voice spoke through a crack near the airlock, "you are not wrong. There could be another way."

"Ethel?" the governor asked, surprised enough to wonder if her mind truly had become lost to her. "Are thou still here?" She crawled and put her ear right up against the uncomfortably chill tin sheet. "Has the Haruspex not come for thee?"

A morose chuckle, "I was wondering what the delay might be myself. Then I heard you and the traitor, and I am starting to understand the level of dysfunction into which this ship must have fallen."

"I thought these cells were meant to be sound proofed, preventing prisoners from speaking with their peers." Xiao looked up, scanning the walls for other hairline fractures or more visible scars that could bleed through the sound.

"Nothing is ever quite as secure as we plan it to be."

The lady rolled her eyes. "That is something I need not hear to understand."

Another laugh was heard, this time with something even approaching mirth. "I can empathize. The life of a spy is one blotted with little else but betrayal." Mila's tone changed, then, becoming much darker, harsher to the ear, "I still have my doubts, however."

"Doubts? What about?"

From the other side came a scoff, "Thou know precisely what. The prized slave betrays the master? The Haruspex conveniently waylaid? The governor and the spy somehow bunked together? It is all too perfect to be true, just an act on your part, another theatric to drain me of whatever you can get."

Ci could not stop a small tear as it trickled down the wavering dignity of her face. "I used to think the same way, Ethel, about all people, all of the time. Their motives were always ulterior, were always keeping secrets. It cost me, little sister. Perhaps in ways I can only see now with any clarity, but undoubtedly it cost me. More than I can ever imagine."

The wall did not respond. Oh no, Xiao thought. She really had been conversing with the ether.

The tears multiplied, rushing down faster, her breathing becoming ragged and heaving. She was no longer just thinking of suicide; she felt as though she were dying already.

"I just...," she lamented, wheezing with every word, "I do not understand how it turned it out this way. What did I do wrong? Where did I stumble? For what does Heaven now punish me so?"

"Thou spent a lifetime dedicated to the subjugation of others, and yet still thyself unable to see thy own errors?" the wall replied.

"What is this empty moralizing!" Ci slapped a hand against the airlock. "Thou would judge as if I had the choice between coercion or no coercion, submission or liberty, but no such stark choice has ever presented itself – not to anyone, and not to me. When it comes to coercion, you can have less and you can have more, but you can never have none. I chose less, and thou heard thyself the price I have paid for it!"

"Less coercion is not freedom."

"Thou want freedom?" The governor snapped, sneering to no one but her own reflection on the airlock's plexiglass view into empty space. "I am not so sure the results will please. Let us have this freedom, let us allow the children to see the misery we have wrought onto this cosmos and ask them then if they wish to be born. No? Thou have not the stomach for it? Thou wonder whom, having foreknowledge of what depravities have befallen our species, would still choose existence on this mortal plane?"

She jeered. "Strange, for all the Party's talk of freedom, they will still force a newborn into this world, kicking and screaming against their clutches, never to be returned until death. I never had the heart to do that to another. I only kept the family that chose to keep me, and yet now I am addressed as tyrant."

"This is the deadly apathy of imperial logic, the wall declared, unmoved. You disprove the perfect, and so forever refuse to move even slightly towards the good."

"It is not just the babies, Ethel. By Yongle's name, we are always children in this world, no matter our age; every decision is made for us, every conversation is talked over our heads. The very instant someone aspires to their own destiny, Heaven itself will furiously demand their genuflection."

"Where was I was ever asked my choice? Where could I express my freedom? Fifty thousand years ago, when Old Terra elevated the first Emperor to the Dragon Throne, was it I who selected Him and chose to found this empire? When the first primate wandered out from his tree and onto the savannah, was it my decision to stand on two legs and wander the earth killing all other human species until only my own remained? When the first the single celled organisms decided to merge into something more complex, was I ever asked if I wished to stay an amoeba? Perhaps I would have been happier, true, but the option was not presented, and we cannot retrace our steps once the course is set."

Mila scoffed. "This is just Master Deng's Confucian-Aristotelian Synthesis: that the universe is fundamentally ordered to demand a certain natural hierarchy, that we must accept the unappealing reality instead of striving for chan-."

"Do not think thou can ever condescend to me, Cassian!" the governor shouted against the wall. "This is not what I mean in the slightest. Thou think I worship at the altar 'mother nature'? Foul beast!" she spat. "The woman cost me my breasts, and I curse her all the more for it. Yet, for all my cursing, for all my wiles and conniving, for all our collective strength and innovation, can any of us escape her grasp?"

Ci began to pace, talking with her hands rafting through the air, lecturing against the reinforced metal bulkhead. "Say we can leave, rebuild, extricate ourselves from all the consequences of the past - all the injustices, all the evils, all the terrible misdeeds past, present and future - what sort of freedom would we enjoy? Freedom from want? From fear? From despair? No! Nature will insure it all without charge, no oppression of mankind required."

"It is the same tired argument, trotted out for millennia, now used to justify-."

"No, Ethel, it is not!" Xiao slammed against partition, causing a ripple of rusty clanking and high-pitched screeching as the iron careened and writhed from the pressure. "Where the Ancients erred was in their arbitrary division of mankind into slaves and masters. The truth is far more depressing, and it cannot ever be used to justify anything beyond the most minimal of our own pathetic survival. The truth, Ethel, is that there no natural-born masters at all. We are, instead, all slaves."

"Thou cannot allow the cold, dispassionate, capitalist, material logic overtake thee, Ci Xiao! Thou are human! Thou have free will! Thou can see right from wrong and build upon the right. It is in thy power still, my lady!"

Xiao only shook her head. "If even in his freest state man is still a slave to nature, does it not imply that by his nature man is a slave?"

"Thou did turn a phrase, governor. Do not take it for prophetic insight." The remark was as cold as the metal which divided them.

"And how are your lines any more helpful? 'Thou are human. Thou have free will.' Your Party persecutes the Old Believers yet parrots the same lines, with the single redaction of the word 'soul'. Thou told me what imperials fear most about thy people is that you act like you believe what you say, and that is entirely the case; it terrifies us. But it does not frighten us because we think you are right and we are wrong. We know from personal experience that our doubt tempers us, and we fear by instinct the unfettered violence the true fanatic can wreck in pursuit of his delusions."

"The miseries you have wrought upon my people are not delusions."

Ci shrugged. "No, but were the roles reversed, it is nothing you would not have done to us. Considering how the Party suppresses your own people, I might be vindicated in guessing we treated thee far better."

"Ha!" the wall openly scorned her. "Thou think us so evil, so cultish, so indoctrinated, and yet here thou sit, after suffering a life of hardship at the hands of thy fellows, and thou still cannot but extoll their virtues. Thou were bullied for having been born the offspring of a merchant, yet thou still yearned to win thy tormentors as friends. Thou were harassed and inhibited for the fact of thy gender, yet thou still dressed thyself each day impeccably to the highest womanly standards and accepted every ordeal with the expected womanly (silent) grace. Thou were deposed not once but twice for refusing to permit the full-scale slaughter of my peoples, and yet thou still defend those who deposed thee? Who among us here is programmed, governor?"

"There is no alternative!"

"It is labelled on all thy maps, my lady: The Cassian Order! The All-Cassian Party which alone can unite the human race!"

"It is your alternative which makes the Empire the evil that it is!"

Mila's voice soured. "Thou truly are no different than the worst of them." There was rough, guttural sloshing sound of the spy hacking up a drop of hateful bile.

Xiao shook her head as vigorously as she could. "Just think, Ethel. Only think. Thy nation is a universe parallel to ours, one whose moral actions and ethical decisions can but only negate our own. We are faced now with only two choices: to make ourselves the worse by better some abstract (and ungrateful) concept of humanity, or to better ourselves at your expense. The first is morally good, perhaps, but it can be prosperous through reciprocal action. The second puts ourselves ahead, regardless of your countervailing. And we know you face the same choices, see the same set of circumstances."

"How, then, can any one of us ever choose the good, when it is sure to be used to the other's advantage? Every good from one shall be negated by the evil of the other. The assumed bad intentions of the adversary will always excuse heinous actions from both players. So long as the impasse persists, any and all parties baring any grievous against moral progress whatsoever can always protest, 'if our enemies can do it, why cannot we?'"

"That is why I support our Empire, despite the Empire having so rarely so supported me. It is not moral, it is not right, true, but that is only to say it disunified, it is beset with enemies. Only when there is total control can there be total morality."

There was long, contemplative silence that followed.

Finally, Mila grasped tentatively outwards with the first tendrils of what seemed sincere curiosity. "If only one can win, governor, why not let it be us? Why not the side that values a woman with talents like yours rather than one which seeks constantly to keep thee in thy place?"

These barbarians were quick studies. In only a few months of their first meeting, she was already flipping the original offer on its face. But the delivery was too earnest, the stakes pegged inexplicably high. Why would the spy care so deeply that Xiao denounce her state? They were both locked away, each as helpless as the other. Was it merely the Cassian obsession with conversion - the harvest of souls - or did the cold air on Ci's fingertips - the hairline fracture in the wall now hissing air the cell next door, made only larger and louder from her striking it - did that hint at a greater motive?

"Thou truly did think quite ill of me, little sister. Think thou really I would betray my people for nothing more than personal gain."

"No, Ci Xiao. It is quite the opposite. I think thou only wish to help, but thou have exhausted all other avenues for assistance here."

The governor traced the line with her index finger, crouching and pondering the thoughts that wall must hide. "Ethel," she asked, "thou said before that no prison is ever quite as secure as it seems."

"Indeed," was the only, nebulous answer.

"Think thou there be, should we work as one, a way in which we might free ourselves of this vile brig?"

"Risk and reward, governor. Is that not an imperial motto? Thou have presented the risk, now furnish us with a reward."

"Leaving with thy mind still intact is not reward enough?"

"Thou said it thyself, the good action which helps us both cannot be played. One must always take advantage of the other."

Xiao fumed. "Thou stubborn, fanatical bitch! Will thou truly prefer to die than help an imperial escape alongside thee?"

"If it improves the position of my Party, absolutely, my lady. In a heartbeat."

"Damn thee!" Ci slammed the wall again, but the flimsy bulkhead only creaked in response, augmenting her frustration further. It was so close now, the escape so possible. It could not be surrendered at this hour. It was too late. They had gone too far. Just a few coordinated shoves from Mila's side, and the wall would be torn, the metal freed for the two of them to shield themselves and with that, they could pass the electric barriers.

"I'll give it up!" Xiao pleaded.

"What is that, exactly?"

The governor swallowed hard, the bitter taste of freedom curdling in her mouth, "the arsenal. I shall tell you the location of the arsenal."

The wall replied this time with no words at all, only a kick, but a kick was all that was needed.

≤≥≥≤≤≥≤≥≥≤≤≥≤≥≥≤≤≥≤≥≥≤≤≥≤≥≥≤≤≥

Precious days had already been lost before the imperial fleet had even begun dragging the orbital cannon up from the surface of Septimi, and they were never to be recovered. All for which anyone could hope now was that the time would not be needed later.

It was idle fantasy.

Pan, for her part, was beginning to think quite differently about the whole affair. Rather than toppling her new regime in catastrophe, the crisis was proving a moment of clarity.

The imperial way was not to deny authority, not to balk at it or defy it openly, but to object through inaction. Unwanted orders somehow were never carried out; undesired outcomes always met unexpected obstacles, unanticipated delays. The raising of the cannon had been no different, but the thankfully, the object itself mattered little to Quentin.

All the captains thought it was a stupid, perhaps suicidal idea, launching the thing half-finished, and depending on the hour (and which voices elected to whisper menacing taunts directly into her paranoid head), she might have even been inclined to agree. The move was an imbecilic one but sorting out who was and who was not loyal enough to carry out even the most idiotic of her commands was all - unbeknownst to the commanders, of course – rehearsing a more important juxtaposition in that dark and simmering mind: that which would separate the living and the dead. Every excuse was insubordination; each delay a defiance, and as more and more of her supporters kept arriving from the colony, more and more opportunities to disempower (and disembowel) her retractors presented themselves.

It was only Jiang who truly any worried her, but she had responded tactically enough, keeping a watchful eye on him and the flagship, moving the bulk of her remaining forces to the Eternal Phoenix. If only that damnable Wu had not sent the Black Legion off to whatever sideshow excursion he and the governor had dreamed up, the problem would never have presented itself. The captain's head would already be severed from his body, and one of Pan's black-coated crusaders would take his place.

She scowled at the thought. A teapot had been too good for that man. Boiling him into tea himself, now there was an idea! Forcing the captains to each share the drink lest they sit silent as Wu himself had once command her to do, such happy thoughts could not but bring out smiles to her lips.

The commandant still remained, however, and with him, time enough to explore such pleasures.

The scarred man's two cherished legions had been away to chase the disappeared Black Hundreds, wresting the colony back into her control. With her flag firmly planted, and no one left to wedge it out, the marines and mobile legionnaires still left in the fleet found each day more of their colleagues adopting the black armbands signifying their true allegiance. The stories of her exploits against the Cassians on Septimi had long since spread far past the officers' quarters, growing and exaggerating with every retelling, and Quentin knew - as she hoped the other commanders did as well – that if any so much as considered doing onto her as she had done to Ci and Ci to Zheng before her, the fleet would sooner tear itself than see a third usurper.

"Status?" she asked, barely waiting for the elevator doors to open before she thrust herself onto the bridge. "Is the cannon in orbit yet?"

A whole flurry of eyes darted in all directions across the bridge. Her question had been directed to no one in particular, and so everyone watched everyone else, hoping another would be the unlucky first to break the bad news.

It was Huang, the woman Pan had charged with the oversight of Jiang, who finally spoke for the collective, "not as yet, your honour." Her head swayed slightly from side to side, weighing carefully what she might say next. "We have faced some... difficulties in linking the Preternatural Fire, the Xuanzang and the Lawgiver together, though they have now been resolved. The ships are all harnessed and will complete the raising in six to eight-."

The viewscreen flashed an iridescent white so fast and so violently that the bridge's internal lighting was immediately reduced to its barest, dark red emergency lanterns, the screen blocking all but the infrared spectrum – the ship's natural response to supernovae. Interlocking rings of brilliant orange suddenly appeared on the blackened backdrop. Slowly, they dissipated heat, growing larger as they shifted colours, first to green, then purple than fading to black, almost as if a dancing quartet of infant stars had chosen there and then to rupture all at once. It was only Jiang's snarling that could sever the crew's transcendental fixation the heavenly fireworks.

"Action stations," he announced over the warning klaxons, holding his mouth to the receiver to repeat, "actions stations!" He moved up from his command board and began pacing the bridge. "Sensors, report!"

"A moment, sir," one of the officers called back. "A new field of incredible electric-magnetic energy has materialized. It is... several light seconds in diameter. Multiple signatures are being detected... just trying to form to a count now...."

"Hurry thyself, thou egg!" Quentin lashed at the man.

The captain walked up to Pan and held a decided tentative hand to her shoulder, whispering in her ear, "we cannot hurry physics, my lady."

"Unhand me!" the woman commanded, loud enough that the whole took nervous interest. "I shall not be patronized by the empty-headed excuses of sniveling cowards."

"Receiving a transmission," the signals officer reported, shifting their attention elsewhere.

"From whom?" the quarreling Praetorian Governor and captain both asked at once.

"Twenty-six contacts!" the sensors shouted out. "All Cassian, one transport, six frigates and nineteen cruisers."

"What!" Jiang rushed towards the sensors console, unable to hide his alarm.

Twenty-six, Pan thought. So, her attack had not destroyed all of them. No, she had injured them just enough to enflame their passions, to render them the maimed, ferocious animal she always knew they had been.

As much as the woman thought she should experience a least of modicum of fear, if even only on an intellectual level, nothing of the sort emerged. Instead, the excitement had filtered out everything else, and as the adrenaline rushed through the leader's veins, she began to waltz about, an almost delighted expression unmistakably painted across her features. What had once been a shamefully corpulent body that had weighed her down all her life was now carried on a bed of clouds, soaring towards what could only be inevitable victory.

Quentin leapt towards the signals section "Their message," she asked, fluttering her fingers in a demanding gesture, "give it to me."

The signals officer hesitated. By right, he needed to encrypt and pass messages to his senior prefect in another section of the ship, who would then send the communication to the ship's Executive Officer and from him to the captain if need arose. Giving anything to Quentin now would flagrantly breach the once indisputable chain of command, and yet, seeing the black stained sashes tied to the arms of the three other men manning his console, he knew he had little alternative.

The officer cut the communique from the printer with a pen knife and presented it in a shrunken kowtow to that terrible presence towering over him.

Quentin did not only examine the contents of the letter. She read the faces of the people staring up at her, hoping to steal an unnoticed glance as was too fixated on the page. Their anxiety was palpable, their apprehension almost delicious in its purity. She luxuriated in it.

"I do not know what it means, Captain!" she heard the sensors officer cry out. "The readings make no sense. I see four points of either zero density or infinite density." The man was frantically flipping through a laminated binder thicker than his own perspiring head, many thousands of pages in length. "I'm endeavouring to ascertain if we are or not equipped with an event horizon monitor, but they are so many damnable modules in this fucking thing!"

Have they created their own black holes? Pan wondered. Did the barbarians adulterate the warping technology so badly that they now wrought aberrations worse than even themselves onto the cosmos?

The communique itself betrayed no sense of such urgency, however. It was nothing more than a simple call for truce and dialogue. They clearly thought they had the imperials in their maw and now were looking to extract whatever they could from them. Pan, of course, had other aspirations

Quentin scribbled a few characters onto a notepad and gave it to the signals officer to encrypt and send on to the Cassians: Dialogue possible. Where should we negotiate? She might as well keep them talking as long as possible, just long enough to prepare the coup de grace.

Pan grabbed a receiver from the signals console and told one of the black-banded staff to open a wide channel to the entire fleet. She noticed the look of disquiet that immediately washed over Jiang's face as she held the telephone to her head but chose to ignore it. It was too late to buy his fidelity, anyway. She would have to win the favour of those below him now

"Brothers and sisters of the Imperial Race," she began, "rejoice, for the great test of civilizations is now upon us! Somehow, despite their feeble minds and wicked spirits, the Hamite wretches have discovered the ability to travel faster than the speed of light. Today, they threaten Septimi, and if we allow these monsters to grow and prosper, tomorrow they will threaten our beloved Home."

Pan hesitated, seeing the signals officer leave her side, but soon she continued, undeterred.

"I want you all to think on your mothers, your grand-mothers, your most vulnerable and your most loved. Think of our forefathers who toiled on the Dyson Sphere, whose millennia of work now lies in the barbarian path. Think of the cities we call home, the farmlands which feed us, and imagine those soaring towers bent low and those rice paddies devoured in flames. Think of sons to be killed and daughters defiled, the horror found and innocence lost. Think of all this and come to one horrific yet inescapable conclusion."

She gripped the receiver, seizing it like a juiced lemon. "We are the Song before Kublai, Valens before Adrianople. We stand at the precipice of history, and it is our choice now what our sacred registers shall read forever henceforth. Shall it be written that in the great hour of need, we rose to the challenge and fought with every scrap of vigour to vanquish mankind's mortal foes? Or shall we say that we dulled our blades, yielded the chase and chose to shake hands with savages even as they squeezed blood from us?"

Turning around slightly, the telephone still in hand, Quentin saw the captain conferring privately with the signals man, their hands covering their mouths.

"It is not a choice, my brethren. It is a calling, as clear and distinct as my voice in your ears now. It is the same call which beckons the ewe to swaddle her newborn lamb, the same call which forces farm-dogs to bark away the encroaching fox, and it is the same call we must obey now: a call to defend our nation, our people, and our civilized way of life."

She made one last glance to Jiang, whose hands seemed to be fumbling with the controls of his command console before finishing, "we must destroy the barbarians! Ready all weapons! Prepare for imminent battle! We must..."

Pan stopped, no longer hearing her voice echoed from the corridors outside. The expression on her face soured to a look of vengeful disdain, and it was all directed at Jiang.

"Short circuit," the captain stated, standing straight and saluting in crisp fashion, his perfectly still lips sluicing off even the slightest hint of emotion. "My apologies, your honour. We shall have our communications array functioning again quite soon, I can assure you."

It was impossible, as the Praetorian Governor lumbered over to his position, for Jiang not to remark the enormity of what was moving towards him, and somehow, no matter how massive the giant might have been, every single solitary pound was swollen with ire.

"I care not for your damnable array!" she berated him. "I need only our weapons at the ready, to be fired at my command."

The bridge crew bearing the black bands began to hurry about their stations, pressing buttons, oiling instruments, and stretching muscles, but the remainder of the officers stood noticeably clear of their consoles, waiting on the captain's direction. More of than a few of the unmarked ones were confronting the black-clad officers directly, undoing whatever their opponents did, sabotaging any preparations, and a spate of petty, mocking disputes began to ring out from all corners of the bridge. Gradually, the bitter whispers began to grow in volume.

Jiang kept his face flat and voice low, not wanting to be overheard. "Please, your excellency, I know tempers are short and time is of the essence, but I think we should discuss this with the other captains and determine an effective counter-."

"Are thou deaf?" Pan demanded, purposefully loud enough for everyone to hear. "My orders could not have been clear, captain. Any failure to comply will taken as mutiny and reprimanded as such!"

Huang stepped closer to her master, her fingers clutching a dagger strapped at her belt.

Jiang puffed up his chest, appealing to the watchful eyes of his crew just as much as the Praetorian Governor now was. "We cannot fire upon the Cassians, your honour! The moons, the planet, even our own ships might be forfeit at this range. I will not condemn my men to death over a single colony and stockpile of uranium!"

"Hear, hear!" one of the captain's men cried, pushing a Pan loyalist away from his station.

"Then surrender their lives in defence of their race!" Quentin shouted back, her words surfacing the man in furious spittle.

The black-dressed man punched the officer in the face, drawing in a small crowd to witness the struggle, though a level above the fray, Jiang and Pan were far too concentrated on one another now to give attention to anything else. The captain only took a telephone from the bank at his console, holding his head low. "I will consult the other captains."

Quentin tore the device from his hand and slammed it back down. "No, thou are not. Jiang, thou are relieved of duty." She nodded towards two black-garbed marines at the sides of the elevator. "Guards, see that the captain is confined to quarters until further notice." She snapped her fingers overhead, summoning the second. "Huang, I hereby appoint thee acting Captain of the flagship Eternal Phoenix. I command thee to make ready for battle and-."

A group of bridge crew lunged at the guards, tackling them to the ground just before the marines could lay so much as a hand upon their captain. Not wasting a moment of his freedom, Jiang leapt for a side door, only just crossing into the threshold before Huang's blade, tossed from across the room found itself lodged in his knee.

As he fell to the ground, still crawling away, Jiang screamed with such shrill intensity that for some time Pan did not notice the warm, viscous liquid that had spattered onto her shoulder. She turned, seeing the signals officer with a fibre cable at Huang's neck, garroting her with such ferocity that blood was spewing from the woman's mouth in a crimson macabre geyser. A shot rang out across the bridge, its reverberations stifling the pandemonium entirely even as it carried on soundlessly before Quentin's eyes, a bullet nearly grazing her before knocking back another assailant just as he was about to strangle her as well.

The captain limped slowly away, a crush of his loyal officers cornering themselves to defend his retreat. The black-marked men advanced slowly towards them, knifes and other weapons now being distributed among them as more guards poured through the elevator doors.

Pan curled into the foetal position, her hands over her ears barely muffling the rifle-bursts as man after man charged towards her and found themselves blasted to pieces. Spurts of blood, clumps of brain, bits of intestine mingled with wires and computer screens, coating the consoles and littering the floor in human wreckage. Behind her, Jiang's officers, unarmed and linking hands not only to block the captain's escape but perhaps also to comfort themselves in the face of the slaughter, defiantly met their fate singing the Legion's battle hymns as blanket of hot lead dismembered them piecemeal.

And through it all, through all the screaming and the confusion, through the gore and grotesqueness, through the misery and chaos, all their leader, their hope, the savour of their species could do was hold her hands to her skull and yowl, "Wang! Wang! Wang!"

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Corpses were strewn about the hallway, the discarded like the brutalized relics of a demon's dollhouse. The bodies were posed like ghoulish mannequins displaying the wildest limits of the human anatomy. Their feet pointed in two opposite directions. Their arms were pulled out from their sockets, their heads twisted as if to examine their now triangular spines. Even those still living kept deathly silent; they gawked at the governor, drowning in their own bodies' fluids.

Lyudmila Ivanovna was midway through snapping the neck of the last cell guard when she heard Ci step out behind here. She stood, wheeling around to face the lady, her foot placed keenly on the dying man's throat. As much as Xiao wanted to speak, her words seemed stolen by the horrible moist gasping sound of the guard struggling with all his pitiable might for one last harrowing breath.

"Do not regard me so contemptibly, Ci Xiao," Mila adjured. Her face had grown so gravely serious, the governor could no longer tell if it were a request or a command. "Thou wished us free, and I have done the work to free us. The travails of a spy are not always glamorous."

There was nothing the lady could even contemplate in reply. In that moment, the eyes of the dying man – huge, swollen, glowing white with bulging veins gushing from his skull, staring desperately towards her, begging loud enough to deafen yet not capable of a single word, pleading for just one more merciful second of life – compelled her so strongly she could do nothing but look emptily back, powerless to respond.

The Cassian removed her foot, the grisly matter satisfied. "I am sorry," Mila said, though to whom she apologized was unclear, "truly, I am."

"My ... ship," the governor enunciated, the syllables with every utterance seeming to echo endlessly through the caverns of her brain. "We ... must, m..., m..., mus-."

"Show me," Mila commanded, grabbing Xiao's hand. Ci did not ask from where the slimy, warm substance that dripped red down her fingers had come, and she had no interest in ever learning. For now, they only had to run.

Only chaos awaited them ahead. Jiang's voice blasted intermittently through the loudspeakers, crying for those still loyal to the Emperor and His Legion to take up arms against the Black Hundreds, only for an alternative set of speakers to blare Pan's demands countering his own. Mingled with the cries of havoc and screams of agony echoing seemingly from all directions, gunshots popped off sometimes in the distance, sometimes disturbingly close. The rumblings of grenades and flashbangs shuddered the bulkheads like miniature earthquakes in space; the frigate was consumed in cacophony.

Mila and the governor ran past a recruit battering his superior with a centurion's cudgel. They averted their eyes as a crowd of black-garbed officers pulled noose around the neck of a dark-skinned auxiliary. They squeezed tight against the walls, avoiding the wrath of a throng of kitchen slaves gleefully mutilating their sous chef, scarlet staining his white satin culinary uniform.

Xiao dove to the ground, a bullet nearly piercing her leg. Mila whirled about, tearing an electrical panel off the wall, and she wielded the freshly shorn metal in defence of the woman prone before her. The incoming assailants ignored the pair, however, and charged down an intersecting corridor, a smattering of concussive salvoes and high-pitched yowls following the storm of their thundering jackboots.

The frigate's hangar had found itself suddenly the centre of the battle, with both sides rushing to commandeer the space-fighters stationed therein. While some undoubtedly wished to flee and others longed to charge the Cassians and die protecting the imperial fleet, both found themselves at the mercy of the slim minority that chose to pilot their craft about the hangar itself, launching their missiles and laser cannons at one another within the confines of the increasingly battered ship.

A stray rocket slammed against a docking hydrogen cell refueler, and the crush of combatants beating on one another air-hoses, oxygen tanks and bare hands to gain admittance halted momentarily, watching. Mila and the governor were stopped suddenly near the crowd forming along the entrance of the hangar, all dazzled as a fireball erupted through the dock.

Those warriors trapped on inside now ran back to the glass doors, battering against them with frantic fists as the fire crept on their backs, scorching them to cinders as they pleaded for the doors to open. The traffic controller, growing nervous at the size of the blaze - or perhaps the control tower had become the site of another insurrection - opened the system of layered airlocks all at once, and the inferno along with each and everyone one of the screaming men, whether they be ash or not was tossed into the extinguisher of space.

Mila pulled the governor by her hand, gripping her palm tightly to keep the blood flowing. She needed to prevent the lady from succumbing to shock, and the spy thrust her into a luckily unoccupied changing pod, sealing it shut. They had no choice now but to don their own vacuum-suits and make one final break for Xiao's ship. Staying on the frigate one moment longer than necessary would spell certain doom; the clanging on the chamber's hatch to escape the clamour outside left no room for doubt.

Even before she had lifted the vacuum suit from its perch, Ci had spotted a stream of yellow liquid pouring from one of the steel lockers. Despite crawling as far back into the storage compartment as he could, the suit could not entirely hide the whimpering form stuck inside, and his pale, terrified face whispered imploringly for the governor to keep him hidden. Xiao could see the man had soiled himself, and he was shivering now as much in cold as he was in fear.

The lady made a quick look over her shoulder to ensure her companion had not seen. She, then, noticing a towel - crisply folded, but now long forgotten - laying on the changing room's bench, tossed the linen into the locker for the man to warm himself and shut it once again.

"Defective," she said to Cassian, whose head had turned from the sound. "Saw a hole in it."

Mila nodded. "One can survive a small hole, if necessary, but all the better to avoid it if we can." She turned back to fastening her suit.

It was only after the two were dressed and scanning the shelf of oxygen tanks that they realized the critical flaw in their plan. Save one single, lonely tank, the shelves laid entirely bare, the rest no doubt requisitioned as blunt-force instruments.

"Can thou hold thy breath long enough to reach thy ship?" Mila asked.

The governor was petrified, her throat already clamping up, anticipating the coming asphyxiation. "Why must I be the one without air?"

The spy almost snarled in annoyance. "Forego thy grievances, governor. Neither of us are breathing this day."

Xiao's mind, sharp as it was, could conjure nothing in reply, and she was given no time to think further.

Mila began fishing through the room's janitorial supplies used to clean the soiled suits, and she retrieved a plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol along with a few microfibre rags. Still equipped with the broken electrical box and its sharp, jagged metal, she ran the bottle up and down along it, turning it all around to cut long, thin scars through which the plastic leaked a small mist of flammable vapours. With one gloved hand absentmindedly stuffing the rags down the contraption's neck, the other blindly searched the supply closet for anything that might spark a flame.

Her face lit in serendipitous delight, fingers clutched against a discarded cigarette lighter.

"Is thy mask secure?" she asked the governor.

Xiao nodded with more than a slight feeling of trepidation, unsure why the question had been asked with such urgency.

Mila only smiled, saying, "good. Pressurize on my signal."

She lit the plume of rags and held her hand on the hatch leading out towards the hangar entrance. Looking over her shoulder, Mila gestured for the governor to stand opposite her on the threshold. "Press thyself tightly to the bulkhead," she commanded, the putrid smoke of the flaming microfibre reaching Ci before the words did.

The lady had just barely taken her position before Mila opened unsealed the chamber. Immediately the crowd outside took notice, and all those not caught up in the immediate fray – whether they be the bludgeoners or the bludgeoned – turned furious eyes in their direction. Mila met their gaze with the improvised explosive tossed into the hallway, quickly exchanging the flaming bottle for gunfire that came within mere inches of cleaving off her head.

Breathing one final time as deeply she could, Mila bit her tongue in anticipation and then signalled to pressurize.

A knife-wielding arm rushed into the changing room, stabbing wildly through the door. With the oxygen tank held firmly in both hands, Mila swung it down upon the limb with all possible force, snapping it back and dispatching the owner into the corridor. Spotting the growing fire from its fluttering of spoiled lime-coloured smoke, she flung the oxygen tank toward it, cowered back behind the wall, and allowed physics to clear the remaining attackers for her.

The effect was exactly as intended. An explosion not only tore through the bodies piled about the entrance, but it blew open the doors to the hangar itself. The vacuum, now unleashed upon the ship and rapacious in its appetite, immediately sucked away any whom had managed to survive the initial blast.

Mila magnetized her boots and indicated for the governor to do the same. Xiao, however, was now entirely too overcome with fright to move her thin, frail fingers, and Mila was forced to activate the lady's magnets herself, dragging the governor behind her as she raced towards Ci's yacht. No matter how hard she pulled, however, she could tell the woman would never make the trek before the air left in their suits had burned away.

She stopped for a moment, examining the row upon endless rows of liners, freighters and seized merchant vessels of all possible shapes and sizes.

Mila tapped her radio. "Where is thy ship?" she asked.

All the governor could manage was a faint motion towards a sleekly curved, yellow quill-shaped vessel roughly half a kilometre in the distance. Nothing nearby it seemed quite luxurious enough for a woman of her stature, but there would be no chance to clarify. Mila could already spot a troupe of vacuum-suited marines entering the hangar after them, and they were readying their weapons to fire.

Without any time to reconsider, she hoisted Xiao over her shoulders and ran with as much haste as could be brought forth from her already throbbing squat little legs. In the silence of the vacuum, every bolt overhead came as a surprise, devoid entirely of any cracks or bursts to foretell their arrival. Hearing nothing else, Mila's ears flooded with the increasingly anxious, erratic beating of her heart and the ragged, raspy strain of her breathing. With every metre, her heart pumped faster, her lungs depleted more, and her thighs seemed ready to buckle from under her. Then, just as the racing woman thought she had reached the pinnacle of her suffering, the peak past which there was no possibility she could withstand any more, a wandering bullet found the skin along her knee, and her last precious breaths of oxygen leaked away into the cosmos.

Mila could not tell if the lead had passed through or remained lodged within her, and she could not afford to find out. As the whistling of wind leaving her the rupture in her suit began to thunder in her eardrums, she felt her limbs now openly betraying her, coldness icing up her extremities and freezing more and more of her flesh with every step. Condensation formed and then crystalized against her visor, blocking her view and tunneling it further.

But the yacht was close now, so tantalizing close, and the leaking air, for all the damage it was doing in the long-term was propelling her forward, compensating somewhat for the growing lethargy in her muscles. All it would take was one final push, one more shot of adrenaline, one more burst of courage, one more-.

An entire row of fuel tanks behind her exploded into fireless bubbles of scrap, shrapnel showering all around her. The marines were not only lobbing grenades at her, but also at one another, catching the pair in the crossfire.

Mila stamped up the landing of Ci's ship, praying to whatever entity might dare to listen, as a hail of hot slag descended upon them, mangling only the suits, but singeing the very skin inside. The spy collapsed against the railing of the yacht, unable to climb even another step against the onslaught, her battered body utterly and completely spent.

The marines had almost intercepted them now, and the last thing Mila could remember seeing was their guns brandished, preparing to exact a terrible vengeance for the fate of their departed colleagues. Just as the murderous band had nearly taken up the Cassian's whole field of vision, however, her eyes fluttered open, breathing returned and she could hear sounds besides the throbbing of her own collapsing heart.

The ship had recognized its master and allowed them entry. A few bullets clattered against the hull, but clearly the governor had paid well for its shielding. Inside the yacht, the barrage was no more than a nuisance. Mila almost felt compelled to cheer.

It did not take long for that sense of elation to burn away into aching and pain, however. "Stars damn it all to Blackhell!" Mila cursed, selecting an ancient invective that would earn one an extended stay in the mind-negation tanks on Cassia Prime.

After plucking the dozen or so still-burning shards of metal from her skin, she turned over to help the governor. Mila could only remove a few before she saw the first sparks of life return to Ci's face, however, and her frustration overtook her. Pulling the last scrap away, she turned instead to castigation.

"What sort of savagery has befallen your people, Xiao?" she screamed. "What horror is this? What barbarism passes for humanity on this ship?"

The governor was still far too fatigued to form any words of her own, but she could think well enough, and in her head, she responded, a frown forming over her stunned, gossamer face.

Do not think you would be so different in our place. That is the cruelty of empire; it makes barbarians of us all.

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The black-coated warriors had begun their assault.

These were not like any legion Cuthbert had ever seen, though what he had seen amounted only to a few pictures from the books he had carried off from the raids on the few rich northern Walders. There were also the suspiciously ornate features of the Gretwalden tapestry depicting the Vitharr submission before the Hongwu Emperor, which, though never seen by Cuthbert personally, held such a tight grip over the collective imagination of the planet nearly every Vidar could describe it as if from their own memory.

In every image, the legionnaires wore blue suits and sharp sashes of delicate silk or tartan, standing in perfect, geometric formation with a resolute quality of majestic power all about them. These black figures trotting slowly up the tropical mountains held nothing of that splendour.

Cuthbert had hardly believed Alfred when the deserter had first told him the whereabouts of Kang's arsenal. There had been little to be gained from believing him, regardless, and so he would have given free reign to skepticism but almost to a man the VLF commanders had seemed quite convinced in Alfred's tale. Some were so fervent in their empty-eyed conviction, that the Prince-Bishop had wondered to himself if Alfred and especially the Party woman who accompanied him might enticed some evil spirit to possess the wayward souls.

Wanting neither to run afoul of dark magic nor the shifting winds of an incredibly unstable VLF leadership, Cuthbert had found it prudent to indulge his fellow generals. A simple voyage out to the equator on the ships the Vidar had so lovingly tithed him for his numerous ecclesiastical ventures, and Cuthbert would be able to prove his nemesis false, spike his head upon the bow and unite Thunorr and the VLF once again under him.

It was not until the clear ocean skies had parted in a plague of buzzing, mechanical mosquitoes that Cuthbert's doubts had begun to be unwound. For all his life the Revelations had been little more than an antiquated mistranslation of fanciful tales cynically deployed to keep the fervour of his fanatics alight, for it was cheaper to pay in dreams than it was in gold. Yet upon seeing that sight, upon witnessing the apocalyptic clouds of oily black smog that seemed to smear the very heavens themselves an ashen grey, Cuthbert had felt some strange compulsion within him: the same awe that had overwhelmed him the first time he had seen Kang's rockets lined one after the other stretching beyond the horizon.

He fell to his knees and recited the scriptures like any common lunatic, for, after all, lunacy is the only sane response to staring at the face of God.

Perhaps that was why, then, even after he had abandoned them, after he betrayed their prince, stolen the jiaren prisoners and then lost himself to the captivity of those Party witches, the commanders could not help but he swayed by Alfred. It was he, after all, he and he alone who dared stare back into that mechanical abyss, who looked upon the deadly imperial skies not with meekness and submission, but an impenetrable defiance.

He would have to be cautious, Cuthbert had thought to himself, then. Trapped in the mountains, surrounded on all sides by ice and enemies, a brave man with Alfred's skill and determination would be limited to raiding the occasional village no one had thought to raze before, but with a world cracking open in front of him, an army of zealots at his back and a mechanical Gretwalder always ready to be wound up on command, such a man could empires forge.

A good knife between the ribs would insure against it, however, and Cuthbert was already preparing just for such a case, should anyone leave these islands alive.

But the imperial chimeras had not dropped hellfire and annihilation from the sky like in the legends of old. Instead, the metallic swarm had rained a deluge of ships, shimmering steel vessels cushioned in massive, inflated tubes to insulate their landing upon the choppy waters. After their descent, the cushions had no longer served any purpose, however, and so now the island where Cuthbert had stowed away to hide his forces – along with every other island in its whole extended archipelago – was clogged with the enormous plastic refuse, white and yellow striped sheets large enough to wrap around an entire beach, clinging to the craggy rock formations of the island bay, for all of eternity never to let go.

The black-flagged ships had been deposited some distance from Kang's fortress, – some might say even a suspicious distance – and not for the last time Cuthbert grew skeptical again of Alfred's claims. But each day he strode towards the summit of the island mountain and looked out with his telescope at the tiny speck Alfred had sworn the arsenal to be, he saw the fleet of imperial ships drawing ever closer.

It was a caution, Cuthbert realized, nay, perhaps even fear! Kang's attack had chastened them after all, and even for all their rumbling and bluster, even with their rivers of plastics and oceans of ships, the Emperor clearly did not have legions to spare. It seemed to him now that Alfred might have been prescient after all. Not only did they have a chance, but if they conducted themselves well, it would prove perhaps to be a good chance.

Still, there was one element yet to fall into place: the Party. For three days Cuthbert had watched the fleet as it menaced Kang's final refuge, but never in all that time had he or any one of his reconnaissance units reported even the slightest hint of another force in the region. Of course, everyday Kang radioed in orders to crush some city revolt here, quash some peasant army there, and the man made all manner of threats when he was relayed nothing but excuses and denials in return, but Cuthbert no longer the empty words of an openly denuded tyrant.

It was the Party that encroached upon him now. All else be accounted for but them, and it that smallest, most irritable, mind-consuming drop of uncertainty that infuriated him the most.

"Where are thy women, Alfred?" Cuthbert snapped, looking up from his telescope at the sound of the commander's slow, plodding footsteps against the rough mountain stone.

"They are not my women, Cuthbert," he replied, crawling at a steady, deliberate pace, his hands clutching the sides of the rock.

The long hikes up and down these tropical ranges was wearing him down at a faster rate than Alfred could ever have anticipated, exposing the true pains Elena had so carefully extracted from him. Unlike the sparsely forested, meandering outcroppings with their gentle slopes and staircase layers that dominated the northern continent, the mountains here were steep and unforgivingly tall, blanketed with foliage thick enough not just to hide his and Cuthbert's armies but, as Alfred increasingly worried, his own grave as well.

"The Party will come, my Prince-Bishop," he continued, allowing the title to defile his mouth just this once. "The governor's forces are here, so their own are sure to follow."

"From which set of the torturer's lips did thou hear that?" Cuthbert shot back. "The one that lies to you or the in which one you lie?"

Alfred scowled, "Elena, to whom thou so crudely referred, has nothing to do with this. Whatever thoughts she may have planted in my head through her torments, this," he gestured out towards the smudge on the ocean below where Kang kept his lair, "has proven me reliable enough."

"Yes," Cuthbert rolled his eyes, "reliable enough to have caught us in a Party trap!"

"Look around!" Alfred held his arms aloft, directing his gaze towards the dense flora that stretched out for several miles to the plastic-strewn beaches, starting only a few feet below the summit. "If the Party wishes to entrap us here, so be it. There is no better place for us to meet them. A jungle to disguise our forces from all aerial infiltration, to allow our guerillas to freely maneuver and surprise attack at any point of vulnerability. We would destroy them!"

Cuthbert only shook his head. "What the prophet saw in thee, I truly will never comprehend."

Alfred's hands curled into his fists, and no matter how depleted he might feel, he knew he would find the energy to exchange blows with that vile, old man if the need arose. "Careful how thou tread, Cuthbert," he warned. "If this 'friendship' of ours is to outlast the day, we must leave our dealings with Edward behind us."

His opponent only shrugged. "I have no desire to exhume the restful dead, Alfred," he assuaged, "just as thou have no desire to learn the first point of basic logistics!"

It's all well, Alfred told himself. All is fine. We have the cannon. It will all be over soon enough. Take whatever blows are needed now; they will later be met with awful recompense.

Alfred spoke in a slow, pondering pace, saying each word through clenched teeth. "Enlighten me, then."

Cuthbert gave a frustrated growl by way of response. "Why would our opponents ever invest such a place? They could more easily sink our flotilla and let us all starve without ever stepping a foot on-."

The whole mountain shook beneath them. The earth groaned beneath their feet. A plume of smoke was jetting out from Kang's island, griming the heavens with long, ominous streaks of deathly black. Even on that summit more than a hundred kilometres from the conflagration, the smell of burning oil and scorched rubber was slowly beginning to tickle the two men's nostrils.

Cuthbert immediately cut himself short, turning back to his telescope to search out the source of the explosion, and Alfred decided to withdraw his own spyglass also. The sight seemed smudged at first, and it was difficult to make out much of anything, but once Alfred removed his eye from the lens, he saw that the whole sky now had been blotted out with a haze of ash. It was not just any ash, however, the sort that carried only the scent of old tires and fuel, for what the two men smelt now - what they had no choice but to smell as it assaulted their nostrils and crept into their lungs - was the unmistakable, stomach-churning stench of charred flesh.

"Dear stars!" Cuthbert blurted out, his face transfixed in moribund fascination, gripped not entirely by the terror whatever lay behind that lens, but the spectacle of it.

"What is it?" Alfred asked, scurrying over to obtain a better view, but the older man barred him, pushing him back.

"Cynebald! Osgar!" Cuthbert called to the trees below them, and Alfred turned to face the two lackeys as they crawled up the pass to meet them. "Prepare our ships. Make ready for the soonest possible attack!"

"Very well, my lord," the two replied in unison.

The three of them seemed poised to flee when Alfred abruptly halted them, his hand grasped tightly onto Cuthbert's arm. Cynebald and Osgar threw their swords in quick succession, and it was only their master's signal that kept them back.

"We must follow our plan, Cuthbert." Alfred urged. "We had a compact; thou must honour it."

"Honour it thyself, fool!" his captive rebuffed, pulling his arm free with a surprisingly stolid yank from Alfred's feeble grip. "The day is nearly won, and victory will sleep with the Legion."

The mountain shook again, this time as stray meteors and fiery debris arced across the atmosphere, tracing grey paths of desolation punctuated by booming shockwaves from every possible direction.

"Now or never," Cuthbert proclaimed. "They shall capture the arsenal themselves if we do not move this instant."

Alfred swallowed, biting his lip, but he no longer needed a telescope to know his adversary spoke true.

He nodded, quoting from the same passage all the VLF had cited for three generations before every battle and raid, and one which Alfred had mumbled under his breath nearly enough to drive himself to insanity during his imprisonment. "'Let us live victors this day-.'"

"'Or die and find triumph hereafter.'"

As Cuthbert completed the paean, the two men shared just the slightest of sincere compassions, each for a single heartbeat forgetting in that moment their interest to see the other dead. Instead, they saw themselves as they had once been, back before the dealings with the Party, before the collapse of the Gretwalden, before the establishment of Thunorr, back when they were simpler people united in a simpler cause with no reason to think of one another as anything other than brothers. Yet, without the prophet there as he had been in those old days to hold their hearts still, they kept beating, the spell broken, and the two rivals raced back down the trail to rouse their respective troops.

There was no time to lose on something so quaint as humanity.

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It could have been the pleasurable numbness of the opium finally returning to her thankful veins after such a long hiatus or perhaps it was the sheer, enrapturing grandeur of the scene itself, but no matter the cause, Xiao found herself seated at the helm of her craft, staring so captively through the viewscreen that she never even noticed the quick, furtive steps of the spy walking up behind her. The view was so enthralling in fact, that for some time, she took no note either of Mila's fingers creepily encasing her delicate neck.

"Where go we now?" the Cassian asked, not without some hints of intimidation, but the governor was far too crested on her wave of bliss to recognize the shades of malice hidden in that question.

"Far away from here," was all Ci could think to reply. Seeing the battle stretched before her, it seemed the only contemplatable response.

Whatever window for gentlemanly agreement and surrender had longed since passed, and the Cassian fleet was now descending upon its fracturing imperial counterpart. The Party battleships sparkled like gems being slowly turned under a light. Their torpedo bays lit up in sequence, magnetic tracks ejecting sleek, obsidian-coloured missiles to be rendered entirely invisible by the dizzying backdrop of space. Absorbing the blows, entirely on its own yet still defending the imperial armada was the Anath, surrounded by a blur of interceptors swarming outwards to meet the Cassian offence. As the enemy ordinance multiplied on a seemingly exponential scale, the occasional burst of anti-flak gun fire grew to encase the frigate in sparking bubbles where exhaust clouds met the ship's protective EMP field.

Behind the Anath, her three sister ships - linked together in a train nearly seven thousand kilometres in length - continued to slowly pull the orbital cannon up from the planet's surface. A stream of ground-based aircraft rose from the colony as well, surrounding the cable to prevent any stray shot from severing it, but as the train rose higher and higher through the stratosphere, the aged Legion airplanes found themselves unready for the coldness of space, and, like a plague of winged beetles caught suddenly in clouds of noxious gas, their lifeless forms plunged back down to an icy planetary grave.

The half-finished cannon occasionally sputtered gleaming bright arcs of red and azure across the darkness, but they never came quite close enough to reach the Cassians. Instead, some of the more desperate (and deranged) imperial pilots had begun colliding their fighters directly into the Party fleet, and the Cassian vessels, unequipped with any interceptor guns fast enough to compete against imperial hardware, became enveloped in a rolling fire of suicidal implosions. Somewhere along the beleaguered frontline, a Party cruiser was spliced straight in half, its cargo, arms and crew thrust forever into the frigid embrace of eternity.

No, there was no point staying here. Not if they planned to live.

The lady began to plot a course for Tau Ceti into her yacht's autopiloting system, but her fingers were stopped suddenly by Mila's own.

"Have thou no recollection at all of the promise thou made to me, governor?" the spy demanded, her words bitter and antagonistic.

Xiao was too irritated now to feel threatened. "What compact was that, child?" She scoffed. "I gave the location of the arms, true, and that was from nothing but convenience. What thou do with the information is up to thee thyself; I will have no part in this spat of yours."

"'All for the sake of convenience?'" Mila could no longer keep the sense of shocked betrayal from her voice. "I carried thee, Ci Xiao. I carried thee on my very back as shrapnel and grenades fell upon me, as your imperial death squads pursued, as my lungs ran dry of air. I carried thee to thy salvation." She was nearly in tears this point in summating it all. "Thou would not still draw breath but for me!"

Even the opium failed to calm Xiao, and she could not keep a scowl from snaking its way onto her face. "Thou carried me to my ship, Ethel. We escaped together." She chose her next words with the utmost deliberation, though with every syllable she steered her liner further and further from the conflagration all around them. "I, uh .... I will always be ... grateful, uh, for what thou did, Mila. But do not read into my actions something that... was not there."

As much as the governor felt there should have been nothing too surprising in her words, the tremendous hurt they imposed on Mila was impossible to hide. "And what of thy desire to help us, to exact retribution on the Empire that so wronged you?" the Cassian asked, almost stertorous as she did so, "to rebuild, regrow, restart with justice, with fairness, with... freedom?"

There could never be enough pharmacological assistance in all the universe for the governor to sustain such a discourse with any degree of patience. "Has the Party plugged thy ears, Ethel? Have they bored holes through thy skull and rerouted all audio but their own from ever entering thy brain? How many times must I say it: there is no better! There is no 'fresh start', and I have long ago shed any tolerance for thou trying to convince me otherwise."

"Now, I am taking us back to the Home Worlds, where thou can put thy talents to good use, slowly but surely improving the cosmos (like we first discussed back on the colony) or thou can eject thyself into that Heaven-forsaken fray, but those are the only options I shall present!"

"It cannot be!" Mila was beside herself. "Thou cannot think in such a way. After all thou have done, all thou have said, thou would surrender now and continue on the same old failed course. Thou are free, Ci Xiao, at liberty for the first time in thy life: free to do as thou please, to chart a different course, to correct past mistakes."

"There is no other course, little sister." The lady was too tired to shout, but she spoke with the belaboured gravity of one who has examined every possible course and made peace with even the greatest dangers of the route chosen. "Thou think you can defeat our Empire. Fine, be our guest. My people are beset by problems. We are drowning in debt, divided amongst themselves along a myriad cleavages and a million unresolved disputes, and we, perhaps most fatally, we are addicted to infinite growth but doomed to a finite universe. With ailments such a these, perhaps even the smallest, most miniscule puncture your people could manage to poke into it could deflate the whole overblown balloon and the see the Emperor toppled."

"But, be as assured of my words as if it were your Party's Doctrine itself that spake them: you will be no different. Replace the Emperor as thou wish, along with His throne you will inherit all His ailments also, and only the same old remedies will ever be made available to you. The same crises will inevitably arise and the same people, literati like myself, will be brought down to bear upon them."

She thought of the trembling man Mila had suffocated with her foot, and how the Cassian had found the gall to lower herself down to the ghastly corpse and apologize to it. "You might feel more remorseful about doing it, I shall give you that, but, in the end, what difference will that make?"

Mila's face trembled in fury. "It would never happen. I promise thee, governor, not after all we have been through, all we have seen. We would never-."

"It already has!" the governor interrupted. "Remember your history, Ethel. Remember what you were before the disease that is Empire ever afflicted you. There was a time, when I was a still girl, young and inquisitive, and your people were new to us, that the Cassians not just held our fascination, we positively envied you."

"In the Home Worlds, we may have had the most marvelous inventions ever known to man, but machines were expensive, and slaves were cheap, so our marvels grew dusty from ill-use. You Cassians never thought like this (before you met us) and it that spirit in you that so captivated us. You had a different meaning of human life, a different appreciation of the soul and individual, and you were constantly tinkering away, making little improvements, automating tasks, saving human labour, conserving energy, to making life better and more liveable for everyone. I used to lie back in my childhood reading nook and wile the hours away, regaling myself with endless tales of your ingenious mechanical contraptions, your clever works of primitive engineering and all variety of endearing little gadgets and gizmos."

"Now look at you!" She gestured to the battle unfolding before them just as a wave of Cassian ships overtook the Anath and consumed it a hail of missiles. The imperial vessel - perhaps rigged to explode on their fanatical leader's orders or just carrying enough explosive material that a blast became inevitable – erupted into an orb of glowing, hot gas and metal: the heart of a star ripped straight from its insides. The impact was so great that the whole vanguard of the Cassian fleet was blown into it, a flameless pool of energy melting three ships into thin sheets of floating pig-iron.

"Where is the soul out there? Where the preciousness of human life? You have come farther than we ever guessed possible. Your science is impressive; your industry abounds, but to what purpose? Improving the species or seeking its desolation?" She sniffed. "It is our fault, I know. It was us who ground you to our level, we who put the taste of empire in your mouths."

Xiao smiled to herself. "Who knows, though, perhaps your new dynasty could serve to reinvigorate our ossifying state, burning off the fat, introducing new blood, new ideas, rectifying old errors we were too busy to solve ourselves. It is not the first time, either, that a barbarian dynasty has done exactly this; I doubt it would be the last."

"All the more reason to join us, then!" Mila cried out, ignoring for the most part the lady's cynical undertones and pleading, perhaps with a deliberate sense of naiveté, to stab at the governor's long-repressed notions of wonder and opportunity.

It was true, but try as she might, Mila could never pry the real answer from her. There was nothing in the Cassian's logic to be faulted save one tiny false presumption: that the Empire would not lose. What the governor ungratefully did and Mila sadly did not know, could not know was that very instant the Cassian fleet had appeared so suddenly, so surprisingly, their very ingenuity and cunning had cemented their own doom. For Pan, their opponent, Pan the ruthless animal gifted keys to her own charnel house, would, in her animality, have only produced one possible response to the Party outflanking her.

The governor had no doubt in her mind that the very instant that wayward centurion had seen the Party ships appear from their space-warp, she had ordered the virus, that biological weapon of genocidal proportions unleashed upon the planet. Perhaps she had not even waited that long; perhaps Pan had ordered the nasty work begun the very instant she took even the first nervous grips upon the reins of power. Whatever the case may be, neither the outcome of the battle here nor the struggles for control of Septimi could bear any relevance to Xiao's decision now. The fate of the system had already been decided.

The Empire would leave a desert and call it peace.

As the Party unwittingly spread the virus across its worlds, integrating Septimi and its cache of atomic weapons into the Cassian Order, Pan's vengeance would fell their whole society once again. By then, the madness Lyudmila and Ci Xiao had just ever so barely escaped aboard the Eternal Phoenix would seem almost trivial by comparison, confined not to a single place and particular time, but spread across four worlds, multiplied to billions of people and unfolding over the course of years. Whole, decades, even, would come to pass of little else but slaughter.

No, now was not the time to be switching sides. Better to leave now and clean up afterwards than witness the grisly business oneself.

Xiao closed her eyes, trapping the first sentimental currents from escaping to Mila's notice. "It does not matter where we go, little sister. It does not matter what we do or what we wish. It was all decided long ago, and the best we can do is reconcile, making the most of what we have."

"Then live by thy words, governor!" Mila shouted back. "Use thy windows as thy Heaven intended. See that the battle is lost, that Cassia Quartus is ours. Consign thyself to reality and join the victors while thou still can!"

Damn this woman, Xiao thought, is this how the Party performs all its conversions? Is debate nothing but a test of pig-headed tenacity?

She eyed another cube of opium left on a table nearby, meticulously envisioning the process of unwrapping it, cutting it and finally, lighting it, watching as its thick orange vapours graciously washed away her troubles, and for the moment, fantasy kept her just calm enough to speak. "History is not written by the victors, Ethel. It is written by the literate. It matters not who wins to me, for we will always remain no matter the circumstance. We are immortal, and our place astride the throne is fixed."

"Speak thou now in the royal 'we' or the rude, proletarian plural?" Mila sneered.

The governor just laughed, too self-assured to offended. "That is my secret, Ethel, and mine alone."

Mila's face hardened, a singular purpose having now united all warring aspects of herself into a complete, yet terrible serenity. She gripped her hands about the governor's neck, ready to squeeze with every last shred of energy left within her. "I cannot let us leave, your excellency."

"I am too wary to fight, little sister."

A fierce, burning hatred was igniting itself behind the Cassian's choleric eyes. "Succumb, then."

Xiao shrugged. "Kill me if thou must, child. The ship is mine. It will obey no other."

The governor closed her eyes. Not even the slightest desire to struggle remained.

As much as Mila yearned in that moment to strike out and deliver the Lady Ci to her final, long-awaited rest, as the woman lay there in her arms, defenceless and unmoving, she could not find within herself the boundless fury necessary to complete the deed.

"Fuck!" she screamed, gripping at the governor's throat with one hand even as the other had already resolved to uncouple. "Fuck!" She pried herself away, slamming her body against the hull of the ship. Slowly, her despondent form slumped down the inner wall until she had crumbled entirely into a puddle of sobs and moans splayed spinelessly across the finely threaded rug that covered Xiao's floor.

How long she remained there, neither woman was at liberty to know. The opiates of the one and the sorrow of the other stretched time out for both into its most agonizing, all-encompassing despair in which one is subjected simultaneously to the dullness of having far too much as well as the constant and relinquishing anxiety of having not enough.

Eventually, after the aimless weeping, the mournful howls and pathetic whelps of commiseration had cut away all the angst and loss Mila could still make herself feel, her cries began to take shape once again. They formed, as they nearly always did, along that one solid line that had moored her all this time. "Alfred," she wailed. "Oh, my Alfred. What have I done to thee?"

Ci felt almost compelled to lecture the yelping girl, but as the governor opened her eyes again and examined that pitiful barbarian sobbing at her feet, a very different sentiment started to overtake her. As much as the lady fought against it, the feeling could not be ignored, and no matter how she reminded herself over and over that this was a spy before her, an actor, a master of manipulation and toyer of emotions, she could not see that grief, that sorrow, that profound shame of failure as anything other than entirely sincere, and it wracked the governor with lamentation of her own.

To Xiao, it felt as Mila now shed the tears that she had lost the courage to express herself, that she commiserated over the loss of something for which the lady had only ever longed, and it was in that understanding that Lady Ci found she was no longer pitying the Cassian but had begun to pity herself. After all, one cannot mourn the losing of that which they never once had. As miserable as she was, Mila had least experienced something to be truly miserable for. For all her accomplishments, her snatching victories from numerous jaws of defeat, Ci wondered if she had ever even come close to a triumph such as that.

After some time had passed, and the spy had finally ceased her tearful tirade against the governor's rug, Xiao spoke to her in a soft, almost gentle tone, "Listen, Ethel-."

"I will not work for thee or for the Empire, Ci Xiao!" Mila snapped back, her voice raspy and spent, but still irascible enough to burn.

"Just listen, child!" the governor reproached. "I am going to let thee off this ship."

Mila did not react, but instead remained exactly as she was, pressed to the floor.

"Did thou hear me not?" Ci asked, confused.

"A trick," Mila mumbled in reply. "Another trick and another lie. 'Tis but your imperial nature."

Xiao gripped her aching forehead. "Believe me or not, Ethel," she replied, "I shall prepare thy escape pod for return to Septimi all the same."

The governor wobbled slightly as she rose from her captain's chair, but still diligently began her work. It was not until the pod had been nearly prepped for launch that she heard the Cassian walk up behind her to inspect the craft for herself.

"Has it a radio?" she inquired.

Something to share the location of Kang's arsenal, no doubt, the governor thought. "It does," Xiao confirmed, "though it comes with something else as well."

The lady walked back to the helm and typed a private code into the command console. The captain's chair slid away in response, revealing a shining, though entirely unmarked metal tin, shaped something like a milk-can though carrying a technology far more powerful than its humble countenance would otherwise betray.

"A haruspex!" Mila's tired, reddened eyes were suddenly brought to life again.

Ci rolled her eyes. "Thou could at least pretend not to know it, make us feel our secrets are somewhat safeguarded yet."

Mila only smiled, and in that smile, Xiao found just a little glimmer of something she might call her own kind of joy as well. "But why, my lady? What changed thy mind."

Ci ignored the question for the moment as she squatted, lifting the heavy device from her legs so as not to tax a backbone she knew could never handle the strain. Once it was safely deposited inside the capsule, she turned back to Mila.

Placing a reassuring but still strident hand upon the Cassian's shoulder, Lady Ci spoke. "This is not a gift for the Party, Ethel. It is a gift for thee. With this, thou need not wait for the Party codebreakers or whatever technicians and cadres you people would employ to access Kang's arsenal. The haruspex can see into the future, try every possible combination Kang could have used to protect his computers, and deliver any code to thee personally."

"But," Xiao swallowed hard, not wanting to deliver this part of the news but knowing she could not leave it out, "it cannot act alone. The haruspex always demands a human host."

Mila's elation suddenly turned to something graver, her face stiffening and growing uncertain. "Is what thou told me," she asked, biting her tongue in hesitation, "that the machine will corrupt the mind of any who consciously host it.... Was that a lie?"

The governor shook her head. "I may have overstated it for effect, but the risk is very real, little sister. It is a cost thou must weigh, and I wish I had something else which upon thee I could bestow, but alas," she held up her arms, "my vaults are laid bare."

"All I know is, Ethel, if thou wield not the Haruspex, if thou cannot strike thy own bargains on thy own terms, then thy masters will never look upon thee as anything more than a pawn to their larger ends. They will keep Alfred to themselves and use the both of you until you are nothing more than stewed meat peeling off the bone."

Mila looked at the governor, her gaze unsteady and, perhaps for the first time ever, consigned to her own ignorance about what lay ahead. "How can thou possibly know such a thing?"

"Because, little sister," the lady sighed, "that is what I would do."

Reluctantly, still not quite certain the governor had not merely rigged some sort of jettison tube to eject her out into space forever, Mila took her seat inside the pod. The two were far too embittered to share anything which might resemble an embrace, but that did not stop the Lady Ci from brushing Mila's cheek just ever so slightly as she helped the Cassian strap herself down.

"Will thou tell me thy real name before we part?" Xiao asked, "or am I to always know thee by a pseudonym, 'Ethel?'"

Mila chuckled, though it was empty now of the true mirth that had rushed through her after seeing the haruspex. "That depends," she replied, "will thou tell me thy true age?"

The governor glanced down, seemingly contemplating, though in truth, there was not even the tiniest calculation to be made. It was all act, done in the hopes that Mila might think the decision had been harder than it really was.

She smirked, and in that, Mila had her answer. "Perhaps next time, your worship?" the Cassian asked.

Ci nodded. "Next time."

"Goodbye, Lady Ci," Mila called, as sweetly as a little girl might sing goodnight to her mother.

"Goodbye, Ethel," Xiao replied, sealing the craft.

Perhaps there is hope after all, the governor thought to herself as she watched the pod shoot down towards the planet. Even the worst scenarios, had not Pan said still ten percent of the Cassian population would live? Ten percent and haruspex..., no, ten percent and a leader who could survive melding with the haruspex! That would be worth a chance - a narrow chance and not a sure bet at survival by any stretch of the imagination, but it would be something.

With the haruspex, fortune would always be on their side. What they did with such fortunes would be entirely up to them.

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"The cannons, Elena! We have no choice," Alfred hollered, no longer caring whether he was overheard or not. "We must deploy the cannons."

"Be silent!" The woman's quiet tongue was still loud enough in his ear to lacerate with every harsh, stinging sound. "The time is not ripe." Elena pressed herself so close to Alfred now that even through the added layers of gory filth the battle had already won him, he could feel her intrusively hot breath uninvited upon his skin. "As Cuthbert yet lives, we must still heed the plan."

No matter the tenor of Elena's words nor the abject terror she still wielded over him, that most primitive, panicked compulsion, that solitary instinct to survive above all else, screeched within him in a pitch more grating than a wall of steaming kettles. And every muscle-tensing stab at his nerves only served to deepen his conviction. At best, Elena was wrong. At worst, she may have ensnared them.

For every blood-curdling scream of murder Alfred heard from the battle overhead, his ears were equally tormented by the futile pleas of drowning men below. If they did not use the cannons now, they would all perish. He could not be certain of anything else more than this.

The black-clad legionnaires had seemed so small in number, barely eight regiments by Cuthbert's count. Their steady, death-marked climb up towards Kang's mountain fortress had also cost them dearly; it just was not quite dearly enough.

Alfred's reconnaissance had spotted the imperial forces nearing a great gaping mouth in the otherwise sheer mountain. The cave seemed to lead directly to the arsenal below, and believing the weapons would be lost otherwise, the Vidar had charged before establishing anything enough close to a beachhead.

It had been a mistake.

The Black Legion had not found the entrance to the fortress, but so many had become invested in the charge down the empty cave, they had found something more valuable: a corner from which they could not retreat. Cuthbert, leading the VLF's front and completely unaware of what awaited him behind the cave's stalactite toothed mouth, had rushed in after the imperials. But in electing not to wait outside to form his own bottleneck, he had disastrously concentrated his own troops instead.

It was then that Alfred saw firsthand the power of the imperial cannon.

A river of lava suddenly arced its way back and forth horizontally like an intravenous tube instantaneously grafted straight onto the mountain. For those who lived to see it, the bright yellow ribbon that jutted violently out of the cave awoke in Alfred and his men some long forgotten collective trauma, an evolutionary by-product of despair, a gene of pure doom that quaked the knees of even the strongest among them. It was there, on that enormous slate of volcanic rock, that they saw the re-emergence of the Holy Star, the wrath of an angry god hoped to be long-since dormant now awakened to exact a penance beyond any mortal standard of mere pain.

The wave of VLF attackers was melted instantly away, but the laser could not be so easily contained to just the tiny opening of the cave. Tracing a scar nearly a whole kilometre wide, the heavenly barber's razor slipped dangerously in His hands, trimming a wide swath of rubble from the mountaintop. The climbers, cut off and dropped immediately to their doom, would have counted themselves lucky not be among those to face the incoming rockslide. For them, stranded on the steepest inclines with no retreat possible, the choice was to make a desperate plummet to the ocean or submit to the crushing mass hurtling towards them.

With its frontlines in disarray, the whole VLF host began to push backwards down the slope, paying not the slightest mind that the steep faces of the mountain walls simply would not permit retreat of any kind. Almost immediately, whole squads of men began sliding down onto one another like kebabs as they are pressed and slid off their skewers. With no high ground firmly held enough to direct a rally, the warriors let gravity guide them towards the waters, and as more and more men fell back to the ocean, one layer began to pile onto the first until the heads of those at that bottom were being forced down below the waterline by the sheer weight of their onrushing fellows alone.

Sensing they had the enemy in shambles, the Black Legion sheathed their laser and stormed out, descending the mountain like a second rockslide, and proving no less terrifying than the first.

Alfred was finished waiting. He signalled Alwin to approach him, nudging himself through his densely packed army so as to keep a cohesive phalanx against the impending assault.

"Alwin," he whispered, "we must use the cannons now."

The general's face, already shocked from the tremors of battle, whitened as if the order had been spoken from the lips of a devil. Alfred empathized; he understood what Elena had brought to bear upon him to ensure his loyalty, understood how even the carnage of the battlefield might seem trivial in juxtaposition to it. Yet, as Alwin just stood there, a horde of glinting steel points and crackling rifles raced close and closer to them, Alfred could not understand why the general could not muster up even the slightest syllable in response.

Then, just the edge of a reflection in Alwin's petrified eye answered everything. Alfred whirled around to see Elena standing before them, having heard everything.

"No!" She yelled, grimacing in apparent disgust as she pulled the commander by his collar. "Hold fast. Do not waver now. The cannon is to counter Cuthbert and only that!"

There was nothing else for her to say. Could she really accept a world where Cuthbert had died without incident, where the duplicity of hiding the cannons had been fruitless and where her torturing Alfred's generals to keep their secret had served no purpose beyond its own cruelty? Worse still, would she allow the possibility that even despite its futility she had enjoyed the tormenting, nonetheless?

No, Elena's cruelty demanded an object. It could be only a means, never an end, and that was a supposition for which the woman was more than prepared to die. What life could one possibly live in admitting the contrary, after all? Could one who though themselves good, true of heart and singularly motivated to highest possible cause admit to themselves that they derived pleasure not from the consequences of the pain, but rather from the pain itself? No, it was too monstrous to consider, and so and it became unconsiderable.

The first lines of the encroaching berserkers had penetrated into the lagoon where Alfred's men now lay clustered and vulnerable. They VLF huddled shoulder to shuddering shoulder, offering up their frail, battered bodies as shields for the generals cowering behind them.

Alfred saw the wild manner by which the black-suited men raced forward, poleaxes, swords, maces and other grisly melee instruments in one hand and continuously blasting automatic pistols in the others. They seemed not to care in the slightest that they charged in alone, Vidar encircling them almost immediately. To the contrary, it was a defeat they welcomed with blood-drenched ululation, their final moments ones of pure, unadulterated ecstasy, spent cutting through the Cassians like scissors through paper.

With the Party woman still latched on his collar, her accursed fingers ready at any moment to squeeze every ounce of life from his larynx, even amidst it all Alfred felt a whole planet away from the mayhem exploding about him. Elena, it was clear to him and had always been clear to him, could conjure forth that dungeon, that pain – that existential, soul-snatching, mind-obliterating pain – at any time and in any place. The hold over him was so visceral, in fact, that despite even the Black Hundreds exuberantly vivisecting his army not more than one or two hundred paces away, Alfred could not but whimper back to Elena like the whip-beaten puppy she had trained him to be.

"But... but," he sniveled. "Cuthbert.... He may already be dead!"

Elena stared back, and the lifeless, emotionless, utterly soulless void behind her deadened eyes opened in that second a portal seemingly to the very depths of Blackhell itself. Speaking coldly and forthrightly, the malice in her voice the only sentiment she could yet feel, she said "a man is never dead until you have killed him yourself."

No matter his feeling towards the messenger, Alfred could not but acknowledge the truth in the message. His five lieutenants were recoiling behind him, each of them more terrified than the next at the memory of the woman's torments, dreading what may be yet to come.

It was a dread that poured out from their wretched forms in all directions, bending proud backs and softening what had once been steely resolve. Rather than looking forward at the enemy before them, Alfred's troops stole glances at their leaders cowering behind their backs. Their pistols now were gripped less tightly, shields raised not as high, battle-cries dulled by voice cracks, and only his action and his alone could stop it.

Knowing this meant little to him now, though, for pressed by the tremendous weight of that woman's repressive gaze, he could not move so much as a single muscle.

Praying harder than he had ever prayed before, Alfred chose now to lay a bargain: everything else that woman could control. It was only his hand he needed. Just his hand. Please, he begged silently to himself, dear Stars. Please, oh merciful Stars, by all that is holy and right, just this once, this one and only time, please heed my prayers. Give me back my hands!

"Order the cannons hidden!" Elena demanded.

The forefinger on Alfred's right hand began to quiver and bend, blood returning to its shocked extremity. He said nothing in return.

The berserkers had now been exhausted, and the inner corps of the Legion's forces were running headlong down into the lagoon, peppering the Vidar with sheets of molten lead, eviscerating the defenders by countless dozens at a time.

"Hold!" the woman shouted, her visage as crazed and fanatical as the black-clad soldiers slamming into them.

Alfred gripped the knife at his hip.

Five grenade blasts ripped out through battlefield, and though they pushed the legionnaires back, the concussive energy of the explosions rippled treacherously through the VLF lines. Men were collapsing in on another, stampeding to escape the thickly grown jungle that caught fire and threatened to cook them all.

Elena turned her head, alarmed as much by the blasts as the crush of people that were now barreling after her. It was the last thing she ever did.

Alwin was little more than a phantom by the time Elena had slid onto the beach, and the casual thump of a body against the wet sand did little to enliven him. Rather, it was the image of Alfred, gaunt but tall, muscles rippling as he straightened his tunic, readying himself for the fight, that commanded – that could not but command – his attention.

"Alwin," the leader called to him, "the cannons."

It seemed as if, even as the army was pressed on all sides by the resurgent adversary, nearly every last man whirled around the tiny distance that they could to finally hear the resounding words of their new prophet shout out at last.

"Now!" Alfred cried, and his generals sprung into immediate action. Turning to face the black scourge before him, Alfred crouched, his knife outstretched and dripping.

"Down!" he exhorted, his words echoing loudly above the fracas. "Everyone.... Down!"

The cannons were quickly unveiled and raced towards the front, with every man they passed crouching in the style of their leader, and Alfred smiled as the force regained its spirit and acted once again in unison. They dove not from any sense of understanding of what the cannons were or the threat they posed, but from nothing other than the mystified awe of what unknown wonders these cylinders might conjure up in their hour of need.

The Stars, however, were not in a forgiving mood.

Alfred's smile was washed away in a shower of glaring light, a blazing, radiant glow directed not at the Legion, but at himself. The cannons had been decoys, bombs rigged to detonate at their first firing, and they discharged with a force great enough not just to leave one army in ruins, but both.

Without so much as a blink, Alfred found himself tossed into the ocean, gripping blindly at the yellow plastic tubing still clinging to the island, fighting valiantly to keep his head above water. He gulped, struggling violently as saltwater tried seeping into his lungs, but every hard-fought mouthful of air was acrid and excruciating, the smoke of a thousand bodies floating in with every breath.

Alfred tugged at the plastic, trying to pull himself to shore, but his hands quickly found even the tarp had grown too hot to touch. The sand on which it lodged was liquifying some eighty yards hence from where he had been thrown, and the dark, amber coloured glass the process left behind was leaching down into the sea, sizzling whatever it touched in great jets of steam.

Floating as best he could, Alfred looked up at the mushroom clouds forming overhead. It was not, though, those despicable, ominous harbingers of desolation that caught his attention. Instead, it was the sound, that even over the shockwaves rippling through the island, still managed to cut through the din and strike an additional blow against a man who truly thought no more could possibly be brought down upon him.

This was a sound he could never forget, though he had hoped with all his heart would find a way to be forgotten all the same. They were the metal beasts that had soared through the sky that first time Mila had rescued him from certain destruction. Now, of course, they came for a very different purpose.

Then, there had been but three. As Alfred saw it in that moment, the sky seemed filled with little else, buzzing, belching, sputtering chimeras, overlooking the devastation below them and ready to pick at what remained.

Alfred no longer had even the energy left to pray. He felt himself slipping downwards and did the only thing he could, embrace the sinking.