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She likes that. “He is an effective operator, to be certain. He presented me with a hideous desert rodent and said my pain would last only as long as the rat ate. It gnawed the flesh off my calves, nose, and cheeks before it split its stomach and died. It was effective. It horrified. It degraded.”

She looks over at me. “Don’t you see?”

I frown and shake my head.

“Together you and I…we’ve broken worlds. Who can do what we have done? What our men have done? Yet we put ourselves at the mercy of rats. We free them. Protect them. Die for them. And when we turn our backs, they unveil their little teeth and gnaw at us one bite at a time. And when we turn to face them, they cheer, and we pretend their gnawing hasn’t made us weaker. Rats cannot even govern their own appetite. How can they govern themselves?”

“You sound like one of them,” I say so low it’s almost a growl.

“Is a doctor wrong when he tells you what you don’t want to hear? We don’t have a monopoly on truth just because our aims are pretty, young man. If I were wrong, this planet would embrace us. Instead it gnaws at us. If I were wrong, the Republic’s fleet would already be here.” She looks to the sky. “Where is it, Darrow? Where is our demokracy?”

My hand drifts to the holodrop in my pocket. The small teardrop of metal holds the face of my wife. I ache to watch her messages again, to drink in her last words to me, her face, the lines that web around her eyes, to somehow evoke the warmth of her skin and breath. But I fear to do so all the same. Sixty-five million kilometers of space separate Luna and Mercury at current orbit. An even wider gulf divides me from her. I do not doubt her. But I doubt she will do what must be done. Orion hit the truth of it. She fears too much to see her father and brother in the mirror to dissolve the Senate. I know she thinks her virtue is contagious. But I fear it merely emboldens the covetous nature in mortals of weaker substance.

“My wife promised that she would wrangle the senators,” I say without conviction. “That she would bring the armada.”

“Then why did you design Operations Voyager Cloak and Tartarus? Why not just wait for salvation?”

I take my hand off the holodrop. “Because hope is an opiate, not a plan.”

“Agreed. So how much longer can you hope, absent any evidence, that the people of the Republic are good? That they will finally start pulling their own weight?”

When I do not answer, she stands, putting a hand on my shoulder in empathy. As Sevro became softer, I found solace in Orion. We have always been alike, particularly in our growing suspicions of demokracy. But it was always said in a grumble over a bottle of whiskey. Never in a screed like this. Her doubt troubles me, and I don’t know how to ease it when the same doubts echo unspoken inside me.

“How long will it take to sync your Blues?” I ask.

“About ninety minutes for full fidelity.”

“I’ll handle Harnassus today.” Her lips curl at his name. “You know his opinions on Tartarus. Last thing I need is you two clawing each other’s eyes out. You just sync up and get back to quarters. You need rest.” She walks away like a petulant child. I stand. “Imperator. Your commanding officer is speaking.”

She stops and turns. “According to our Senate, you’re not my commanding officer. You’re a traitor.”

There’s only one thing to do with doubt. Stomp on it.

“Imperator, I don’t need your opinions. I don’t care about your feelings. I don’t care if you doubt the Republic. I don’t care if you hate its people. For this army, this is an extin

ction event. My only care is that my best weapon is sharp before zero hour. Will you be sharp, Imperator?”

She snaps to attention. “As a rat’s teeth, sir.”

A FAMED OLD BEHEMOTH FLOATS above the mottled planet. It waits to swallow the corvette that ferried us from Io to Mercury.

At just under four kilometers in length, the behemoth is shaped like an atavistic spear. Her battered hull is sable, like the seashells I used to collect with my father on the shores of Luna’s Sea of Serenity. Unlike those glossy shells, she reflects no light.

Her name is Annihilo.

I annihilate.

I hope that annihilation is not the total extent of Atalantia’s designs.

“Big beast,” the man beside me says as if discussing the weather. “That killed Rhea?” I turn, wishing he were Cassius, but Cassius died trying to prevent this very moment.

The Rim has come to make peace with the profligate Core.

Instead of my old friend, mentor, and guardian, it is the eldest son of Romulus au Raa who stands beside me on the bridge of the Ionian corvette. Of all the Golds of the Rim, only Diomedes was deemed fit to serve as ambassador for this dire mission. I believe the choice well made. The man has gravitas. He wears a look of wary bemusement. His dark gold hair is streaked with black and tamed by a knot. His scarred, blunt face is not handsome according to Palatine tastes, but like his slumped shoulders and brutish hands, it belies a quiet, terrible potential.

From the brief flicker of swordsmanship he demonstrated on Io, and the reverence paid to his skills by his fellows, I judge Diomedes to be the only Rim Knight equal to Cassius in the ways of the blade. Yet he alone refused to fight my friend—even at cost to his own family.

For that, Diomedes will always have my respect.