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“What’s your core status?” Kalindora asks.

“Sixty-six percent.”

“So he still listens.” She nods in disgust at the Iron Leopards. “Most of those whelps are walking around sub-fifty because they didn’t hold their burn. They’ll depend on recharge.”

“That was a war crime,” I say. “It was only small-arms fire.”

“Only a crime if there’s a court. Eat.” Kalindora tosses me a protein bar. “You move well,” she says. At any other time, I’d bask

in her compliments as I did as a boy. “Superb instincts. But you’re clumsy in takeoff and need to expand your field of vision. You act like you want to use your razor instead of your gun. This isn’t asteroid corridor fighting or whatever the blazes Bellona had you at. You did prime work on that aerial infantry though. I saw you put down four. Not your first kills, it seems.”

“No.”

She sees me staring at the ground. Her voice approaches anger. “What did you expect?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you come back?” she asks.

When I don’t answer, she turns her back and crawls into her mech. “Your sensors picked up some people.” She levers to her feet as I climb into my cockpit. “Did your sensors tell you they didn’t have weapons? No. Did they tell you they weren’t saboteurs or snipers? No. Or even Howlers? No. So how can mercy exist when anyone could carry an atomic rocket, and you don’t know? That’s the problem with this war. Cruelty is necessary. Yet cruelty is a thermal runaway.”

The first wave of transports descends from the sky by the time I’ve sealed myself back in my starShell. Those ships with thrusters kick clouds of debris into the air. The ones with gravity engines form floating cloaks of chalk. GravBikes roar out of pens. Gray legionnaires skinned in desert armor and visor-bearing helmets pour out of personnel carriers. Dozens of humanoid titans, hoverTanks, and spiderTanks decouple from their transports and land on the dirt with a sound like hammers striking on wood.

Then come the engineers.

With a hundred fifty thousand men and women landed, the engineers rapidly begin securing and fortifying the landfall for the primary wave.

I look past the disembarking troops to the north.

There are shouts. Portable railguns swivel on their gyroscopes.

“Signatures inbound!” Seraphina shouts from the perimeter. She bursts back.

“Friendlies!” someone confirms.

A swarm of starShells descend perpendicular to the main landing. They make landfall in a pyramid in front of Kalindora, nearly a thousand in armor of a dozen disparate houses. Not one amongst them is Gold.

Only the best and most loyal of Grays are given license for starShells.

Their leader clomps forward. His starShell viewport and the pulseArmor helmet beneath retract and the face of a young-gunslinger-turned-old-centurion stares at me as if he’s seen a man come back from the Void. One thousand mech-suited Praetorians fall to their knees.

“SubLegate Rhone ti Flavinius and the First Cohort Praetorian Guard reporting for duty, my liege.” His cheeks are covered with more black and gold teardrops than when he served as my shooting instructor in the Citadel. I didn’t think there was any more room.

The Gold knights surrounding us look back and forth between the most famous Gray alive, a thousand ex-Praetorians, and a scarless Pixie in borrowed armor with the Love Knight at his side.

They need no further explanation.

“Rhone ti Flavinius?” I say. “Hades didn’t reclaim you yet?”

“And lose his best recruiter? Perish the thought, my liege.” His accent is pure Lunese stock. Last in a long line of Praetorians, from birth he was sponsored by my family, and excelled in the ludus until he proved himself in battlefields across a dozen spheres under the command of Aja and Lorn. He rose so high as to become second officer under Aja of the XIII Dracones. There is no more famous a Praetorian, save perhaps his treasonous understudies: the Nakamuras.

On the day my grandmother died, he was in orbit preparing to face Virginia.

He would have thought the Line ended that day.

I wave him to his feet and tell him to rise.

“I cannot, my liege. On behalf of the First Cohort of the thirteenth and the scattered Guard, it falls upon me to issue our grievous apologies for abandoning the search, and presuming you dead. Our oath was till the extinguishment of the Blood. If there’s punishment due, it is my duty to bear it for my men, in place of decimation, and an honor that my last order come from the Heir of Silenius.”