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“You squawk like a … like a chicken,” Ragnar says in reply.

“He can’t insult me,” Sevro says, aghast. He looks at me. “Control him.”

I wash my hands of it.

“If I may suggest continuing,” Lorn says.

“Right. Serious faces, everyone.” Helmets slide from armor to cover our skulls. I see thermal readings, power levels in the digital display. “Prime it,” I tell Mustang.

She activates the leechCraft thermal drill. It’s meant to burrow through the outer hull of a ship and create a breech large enough for a boarding party to pour through. So carving through the floor of a ship is nothing. And we’re only one deck above the command rooms. I jump atop the drill.

Momentum is everything to a Helldiver, to military endeavors, to life. Keep moving and dare someone to get in your path.

“You know what I said earlier,” Lorn asks me.

“About tact?” I ask.

He grins evilly behind his beard. “Slag tact. Terrify them.”

I look at Mustang. “Burn.”

She presses a button. The drill glows red. Heat radiates up into me. Spreads along the floor. LowColors flow away, abandoning their food, fleeing the room as the floor sags and melts like sand pouring down an hourglass. The drill falls through the dripping deck into the command room with me riding on its back. A Helldiver again, if only for a moment.

It slams into the middle of Augustus’s great wooden table, sheaving through and impacting like a meteor into the marble floor, still melting. I cut the power cable with my razor and rise amidst the smoke and steam and leaping flames as the table catches fire.

A hundred Golds of the Society stare up at me. Praetors, Legates, Judiciars, and knights of powerful houses stand with their razors drawn. All once loyal to Augustus. All now under Pliny’s thumb. Going with the wind, as they say.

And there he is, at the head of the long table, his face fast paling. Beautiful, clever

Pliny. One eye left, the other sporting a temporary bionic replacement. At his right sits one of the Furies, the Politico, Moira. Compared with Aja, she’s a puffy pastry of a woman. But her sweet smile is half again as sinister as her sister’s razor. Beside her is an Olympic Knight, the Storm Knight from the Japanese Isles of Earth.

“My goodmen!” I bellow through the voice amplifier in my helmet. “I have come for Pliny.” I jump down from the drill, helmet rippling back into my armor so they can see my face. I walk toward him. My friends follow through the hole. Arcos first. Then Mustang and Sevro.

“You said he was dead!” someone to my left snarls, razor half-pulled.

“Lorn au Arcos?” murmurs another. His name rips through the place as Sevro and Roque secure the doors leading into the room.

“And KAVAX AU TELEMANUS!” Kavax booms wildly as he lands. Guess Pax had to learn it somewhere.

“The Reaper is not dead,” Mustang says, hopping down from the drill. “Nor am I. Nor is my brother. And we have come to reclaim what belongs to our father.”

These Peerless don’t know what to do.

“Liars!” Pliny cries. “You betrayed the ArchGovernor. Seize the traitors!”

Lorn makes a simple proclamation. “If anyone comes within two meters of Darrow, I kill everyone in this room.”

They don’t seem eager to call his bluff. The men I walk between jump backward. Lorn’s reputation carves a hole for me straight to Pliny. I don’t break pace.

“Pliny,” I say. “We must speak.”

“Kill him!” Pliny screams. “Kill the Reaper.”

A young man lurches forward and dies as his neighbor stabs him in the back. The neighbor looks fearfully to Lorn.

“Two point three meters,” Lorn says. “Close.”

“Kill him!” Pliny shouts futilely. “He’s a just a boy!”