Mortok closed in her wings, folding them about her. She shared Sartok's penetrating eyes, the same yellow irises. But her skin wore more like parchment, absent hair follicles, darkened, reminiscent of a hairless bat. "Dargan has enlisted one of my kind."  

"So he's a better chess player than I imagined. Still it can't be of much consequence." Nero was imperious - the reason he had renamed himself Nero, and every bit on guard against mutinous attempts to stab him in the back. He was a man whose attention to detail was unfailing. In any other life, he would have been a bureaucrat, perhaps an accountant, or at best a project planner. But in this life, he governed over a sprawling empire that cast its shadow over half of known space.  

He knew he wasn't fit to rule, and didn't really want the job. The task had been bequeathed to him by a father who ruled with an iron fist. It was all Nero could do to quench the rumors that the old man had passed, and passed he had, some six months back. Surely without the fear of the old one behind them, there might well be an uprising throughout the empire as every adversary with a plane to command and a couple hungry fools to beguile would be only too happy to come after him.  

No, guile and cunning were Nero's only true attributes. Luckily, he excelled at both, and that included every kind of backstabbing maneuver that came with political office. He liked to think he'd invented a few underhanded tricks that no one in the history of the empire was of nimble enough mind to come up with before him, assuring his place in infamy once and for all.  

"She is a mere five hundred years old." 

"You're verging on five thousand, last I checked. I imagine that means ten times the power. Can she see into your mind as readily as you see into hers?" 

"No, not at this distance. She's too weak." 

"Like I said, nothing to worry about."  

"You would do well not to underestimate Dargan. He is a true god of war, the likes of which the world hasn't seen since Alexander. And now he has a beguiler. Those he cannot win over by force of logic, or by mere force, he can now all but hypnotize. As if his own reputation were not grounds enough for others to fall at his feet." 

Nero flinched at her words. "And I'm little more than a spineless worm? Go ahead, say it."  

"At least you are not so cowardly as to hide that truth from yourself." 

"Dargan's a gallant fool. His solution to any problem is to take a battering ram to it. Any problem he can't solve with spontaneous acts when his back is against a wall he will not solve at all. So let's just see that he doesn't get into any situation he can extricate himself from with such straight ahead thinking. He's a tool in the hands of men like myself who think countless moves ahead. I could use ten more of him." 

"He's older now, not so innocent and naïve in the ways of the world as he once was, not so trusting." 

"Better yet. As I recall, that youthful bravado and confidence lent him a certain cachet with the troops. They'd follow him anywhere. Will they as readily follow a man crippled with self-doubts, I wonder?"  

Tired walking, Nero steadied his hand against the superconductive alloys in the wall and willed himself forward. The floor yielded its frictional coefficient in favor of zero resistance, allowing the mere power of Nero's thought to push him to the antechamber toward which they were now headed.  

There are those few men who need no technological boost, Mortok thought, who have spent lifetimes concentrating their mental energies until they can cleave a planet in two by merely focusing their minds. You live in a fool's paradise, seduced by your ability to sway the masses. Rhetoric wielded in the shadow of your father's waning influence will not get you from one end of this battlefield of galactic scope to the other. Wise up before I kill you myself and swear allegiance to a more worthy successor. Such nobility as ran in your bloodline is running thin.  

Crossing the threshold of the antechamber behind Nero, the sight of the gathering senators took Mortok's breath away. Their thoughts were positively maddening. So many out of control minds. How was it weasels and worms alone rose to such summits of power? Clearly, anyone truly clever would have nothing to do with trying to control others, content enough to master their own minds. It was a wiser move on the chessboard, especially for days like today, when all history turned on one man's folly.  

Nero was in all his glory. His meager stature at 5 foot 6 inches all but erased at this angle from the balcony looking down on the crowd. All but eclipsed, what's more, by the giant translucent dome arcing a hundred feet or more over their heads, granting full view of the stars. The senators' ships still docking everywhere along the ring suggested the chamber was nowhere near capacity despite the clamor of the crowd. This ring, nearest the north pole of the spherical spaceship SacroSancti, was quite distinct from its ring at the equator, providing the same 360-degree view of the stars, used for doing battle. 

As Mortok took in the facades of the senators, it was clear that Nero's mediocracy was exactly everything his father had designed it to be: the middle men of the empire, business men, farmers, traders, capitalists, all providing all the things an empire couldn't do without. They were neither creatures of savagery that constituted the military ranks overseen by the plenarium, and seeded by Frakas. Nor were they the godmen that were overseen by Draxor and his lineage of hundred year men. They were maudlin and unremarkable in every way, lacking the extremes in temperament to mark them for true greatness. Some species, with three and four breasts, looked like little more than feedstock for the more savage species of the plenarium. Others, with skills that marked them as master craftsmen and talented go-betweens in their own right, might have had the potential for greatness, had they the same indomitable spirits that Draxor sought in those precious few species that seemed to give rise to those qualities.  

No, if there were diamonds in this coal mine, they were invisible even to Mortok's eyes, able to see along numerous wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum to which almost all others were blind. Nefaru, who had genetically designed the mediocracy to counter the loss of so many key players in the days when they had left Mars to escape a sun exploding well ahead of schedule, had done his job well. Too well, as far as Mortok was concerned. "May you get everything you wish for" - a Chinese curse from old Earth, but one that she might have uttered herself.  

As to Nero, he'd broken ties with the Plenarium, not caring for having his power usurped by the Mixadorians who oversaw it. In his mind, they couldn't be controlled, and were more deeply disturbing than any of Frakas's other vicious lifeforms which they "managed." The SacroSancti was his world-onto-itself, and even this show for the mediocracy was as much an adieu to this life, and their need to kiss his ass, as it was a matter of not entirely burning his bridges behind him. He was about to divorce himself from them, too, allegedly to act like Marco Polo - opening more trade routes for them - and so was leaving on a high note in case he actually had to return and take up the reins once again. But, in truth, he looked to put them behind him.  

He wanted to evolve humanity along an entirely new direction from what his father had accomplished with the mediocracy. He wanted to take it in a different direction from where the Plenarium was headed. No, he had his own experiment to run, already well under way. Should it fail, he would return as the mediocracy's one true leader. No one could blame Nero for hedging his bets. 

One aspect of that experiment was ridding himself of the SacroSancti's unwanteds - the malcontents, those who wouldn't play ball with him. He had them unceremoniously dumped on worlds which he hadn't even bothered to investigate to see if they could survive. It was all the better if they couldn't, as far as he was concerned.  

Mortok had warned him this could come back to haunt him, but he wouldn't listen. One of Frakas's legacies from back in the early days on Mars was that his genetically altered subjects were extremely long-lived, and reproduced like rabbits in order to pass on their genetic alterations to subsequent generations more quickly. Nefaru's tweaks had done nothing to affect this part of the formula. There was time enough indeed for Nero's abandoned ones to show up at his doorstep with a few surprises for him.  

Nero's escape from the Plenarium and the mediocracy was as ingeniously planned as was Nefaru's a generation before. Nefaru had been tasked with mining a moon. Instead, he'd taken the numerous artificial life forms assigned him for the task and modified them further to build the SacroSancti for him. He then sped off to regions unknown and flaunted his outlaw status, staying beyond the reach of his pursuers long enough to procure his mediocracy. It was his own empire in a bottle, genetically crafted for the barely-habitable worlds of Andromeda. His genetic cocktails were such that, borrowing from Frakas's work, he could manufacture the desired qualities in his subjects. And he could raise it all from the ashes in less time than it took for the Plenarium to track him down. When he did meet up with them, he had so much to trade and to offer, they had no choice but to meet his terms. As to how he could procure the middle rung of an empire virtually overnight, clearly Nefaru had found some clever ways to spike Frakas's genetic cocktails, secrets he'd taken to the grave rather than share and lose his grip on power. 

Nero would leave the mediocracy the trading ships they needed to maintain good terms with the Plenarium. But his space armada - able to do battle anywhere in the universe as needed - that he would take with him as a way of upholding the terms of their "divorce" agreement. For now, at least, all the Plenarium could do was ably defend itself against any attackers. Without a way to control the jumps of the pod ships that connected the planets in the Plenarium, they couldn't go on the offensive. A comforting thought, considering their aptitudes for warfare.  

With his usual fanfare, Nero pointed to the back of the room in time for the senators to turn and witness the planet behind them exploding. Stunned gasps rippled into silence.  

"Nothing like a little fireworks to get the party started, eh, ladies and gentlemen?" The silence was rapidly succumbing to wave after wave of anxiety. Well, this was about helping them to know their place.  

Shouting over the din: "They would not trade with the rest of you. They thought they could go it alone, deprive the larger collective of profits. But we are the empire's middlemen, are we not? Where would we be without trade and barter, profit and the enterprise of business? I tell you where; we'd sink into the barbarism of the Plenarium. Or we'd disavow the mortal coil to take up robes and live like monks as do Dargan's Knights Templar reborn." 

Nods and weak applause. 

"Victory in the presence of any who would defy us - this I promise you today - this I promise you always." Rising cheers.  

"The Plenarium may have superior fighters, but they have no such technology. And should Dargan and his Knights Templar reborn-do gooders, the whole lot of them, who refuse to allow any man to get comfortable with his station in life-get us in their sights... Well, they'll find us more than a match." 

This time the chorus of cheers was deafening. 

Nero neglected to mention that the race he'd just destroyed on that planet were the ones that had built the Sacrosancti's advanced weapon systems for him. He had convinced them each one would go in turn to each of the inhabited planets of the mediocracy, ensuring a balance of power to forestall any possibility of war. Once they had gotten wind of his betrayal they were determined to alert the leaders of the other worlds. Alas, even he couldn't talk his way out of this one. Silencing them once and for all was just the final act of diplomacy. 

He held his hands high and turned to face each of the segments of the ampetheater in turn to cue them that sustained applause was appropriate.  

Mortok was swaying from the drunkenness of the moment, intoxicated by the flow of power rushing toward Nero as the fools handed over their very souls to him en masse. So long as he fed her addiction, he served his purpose. It was an equitable marriage, all-in-all, until someone better came along. Someone who could supply more of the substance she craved.  

She eyed the senators still clamoring to get inside, wondering why Nero would shoot his wad before everyone was gathered. Surely that could only take away from the glory of the moment. And then she realized those outside were just that much closer to the exploding planet, and without any filters to mute the orgiastic ecstasy of sharing in so much power.  

No, give it to Nero, he knew how to work a crowd. Maybe this stag had some balls on him, after all. Maybe he was worth riding a little longer.  

She was curious to ascertain, moreover, why he'd turn his back on the Medicoracy without at least leaving a puppet answerable to him in his place. Though, God knew, it was the only chance those people had of living a decent and honorable life, free of the aspirations that plagued the god-men and the devil-men alike, with which the hundred year men and Frakas were respectively attuned. Surely Nero had to know the Cubes would step in to fill the void of leadership. Their political acumen was the only thing in the universe which exceded his-by quite a bit. Had he truly grown bored with the mediocracy? Or did he simply need to leave his mark on the universe as his father had and as Frakas had before him-as one of its penultimate creators versus merely another overlord? Did his overreaching ego stretch so far? No doubt it did.