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The liquid was leaking from the shattered faceplate all over the floor, and the much smaller creature that was Winzik was crawling out of its remnants, moving in jerks. His crustacean mouth gasped for breath. He was…suffocating in the air.

“A bureaucrat?” another of the soldiers asked. “You really think abureaucratorchestrated the conquest of the entire Superiority? We weren’t going to follow a leader who couldn’t tell a flanking maneuver from a feint.”

“We needed amilitaryleader,” one of the varvax aides said.

“We needed,” the tenasi next to me growled, “ahuman.”

Stars and Saints above. Everyone in this room had…had been working behind the scenes with Brade for years. Each of them knowing, all along, that Winzik was a puppet. I looked back to Brade, who was going over battle reports and quietly giving orders. Scud,thiswas the real Brade, wasn’t it? All this time, all these false faces, andthiswas who she was.

A conqueror. Hiding in plain sight among her enemies. Despite everything, I couldn’t help but be impressed.

“Give the order to gather our forces,” she said to the aide. “Quickly this time. Inform the command staff that I’ve finally executed our contingency. I suspect a lot of them will be happy to hear it.”

“Yes, sir,” the aide said, tucking away his datapad. “We’ll need to start the propaganda machine immediately. The planets could accept Winzik as their war minister, but a human is going to be more difficult to spin.”

“I’ll wear the hologram in public until you manage the situation,” Brade said, waving them off. As the aides left, she strolled over to a workstation and picked up a large crowbar that she—to my surprise—absently handed to me.

I took it, feeling the heavy weight of the steel in my hands.

“For him,” she said, nodding to where Winzik was crawling across the floor.

He was trailing what I guessed was blood from several sections of his carapace. It looked like he had been connected to the exosuitbiologically. I’d never known if those things were entirely tech or natural growths. I thought maybe they were something in between.

“The final blow belongs to you, Spensa,” Brade said. “For what his people did to yours. An honor I give you, one soldier to another.”

He was slowly making for the door. Probably deranged by the lack of liquid to breathe, and bleeding out. I gripped the crowbar, then hesitated.

“You’re just going to record this,” I realized. “And as soon as you need an excuse for why you’re in charge, you’ll plaster the video all over the news, showing me—a human assassin—killing Winzik.”

“Damn,” Brade said. “For once you figured it out.” She slapped her arm, and an illusion snapped into place around her—like the one I’d worn to imitate Alanik. They’d stolen that tech from M-Bot.

The illusion made her look like me.

“Fortunately,” she said, “few know about this tech. Modern holovideos have encrypted metadata to prevent tampering—but it’s perfectly easy to fool them if they’re genuinely recording what they see.”

I had no idea what some of those words meant, but as a guard handed Brade another crowbar, I stepped forward. I figured I could milk this for a few minutes of extra time…but as I saw Winzik suffering, I actually felt a little sorry for him. Despite it all. So, I slammed my crowbar down on Winzik’s carapace, crushing the life out of him.

With that, I finally ended the tyrant who had kept my people imprisoned for years, who had gotten my father killed, who was responsible for so much death. At least a member of the DDF had delivered the final blow, instead of Brade in a disguise.

I felt…unfulfilled. Not because I felt bad killing him. It had been a mercy, and he certainly deserved an execution if only for the death of poor Comfort earlier. Winzik had been a thoroughly evil creature.

But I couldn’t pin the suffering of my people entirely on him. The oppression was systemic in the Superiority, not the result ofone person’s schemes. I’d gotten vengeance on one little part of the machine that had ruined my people’s lives, but this wasn’t the solution. The solution had to be much, much bigger than one girl with a crowbar.

“What now?” I asked Brade, looking up from the dead Winzik.

“Now,” she said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to crush your rebellion. Nothing personal. Can’t have a rival faction of humans challenging me for control. Our military is proud to have a human at their head, but an entire fleet of them would be problematic.”

“We could work together,” I said, stepping toward her. “You don’thaveto do this.”

“Of course I don’t,” Brade said, frowning. “Spensa, do you haveany ideahow long I’ve been working toward this? I’ve been planning it ever since they took me from my family. Putting things in place. Positioning myself.

“The Superiority is anenormousmess. The military understands how tenuous it all is. We lack the strength to control what we have, and need to rule through access to hyperslugs. Yet one slipup, and the secrets of hyperdrives would spread through the entire galaxy.The Superiority is a stone balanced on a single point, and it’sgoingto fall.

“We had to take action, and they needed a leader who understands aggression on a level that hasn’t been forcibly bred out of her.” She waved to herself. “I’m poised to rule everything, and your people could upset all of that.”

“Ourpeople.”

“What, because we’re the same race, we should work together?” She smiled. “Have youreadany human history, Spensa? Wenevergot along. That’s part of what differentiates us from some of the other species. They had world governments early—achieved through excluding those who didn’t agree, yes, but they unified. We’re simply not good at that.”