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His helmet is off His armor was once white, but now it is scored with pulseblasts, razoron the rigid slingBlade at his side He seems an old man, but the side profile of his face is scarcely older than mine is no could he do all this before his twenty-third year? Even Alexander of Macedon would mar

vel at the Slave King of Mars, a creature as grand as the elitters in the eyes of the hundred Moon Lords

The Reaper turns to look back with stony eyes at soe pits, but the Julii sets a hand on his shoulder “Share the load, darling,” she says “This one’s on me” She raises her voice “Helmsman, open fire with all port batteries Launch tubes twenty-one through fifty at their center line”

The Peerless around the Bleeding Place stand in silence, their faces illuminated by the pale fire that tears into their lost dockyards

The docks were never meant for war Her ships were to defend her What horror that her greatest child, the Colossus, would return upon the brink of independence to destroy her

Tungsten iron rounds shear throughinto wet bread The dockyards die in silence Oxygen vents Spheres of fire gasp and drown in space And dead metal drifts off, pulled inexorably to Ganymede’s bosom

As the destruction rains, the Reaper turns frorief and pain, and I feel as if I hear his heart beat across the years, across the space, and kno far he’s come from the man he wanted to be

He reodfather

While the roorates into fury, I marvel at the boldness of Darrow’s charade, even at the shrewdness of his cruelty In the last ainst the Riun, and he took it with as bold a maneuver as I’ve ever seen But it is certainty I feel, not respect or horror This is the e intellect with a limitless capacity for violence I respect his capabilities, but I do not respect the man And here, in the wake of his destruction, I understand beyond a shadow of a doubt that to protect mankind, the Reaper must die

Dido, it seems, was not mad after all

“The Slave King betrayed us,” Dido says, lifting her razor high till the bitter blade tre docks, the metal shiny and opalescent, like a strand of tears frozen in time “The Pax Ilium is broken! When his tattooed, mechanized horde is finished with the Core, they will come for us Your families Your homes You see it! You know it So now, my noble friends, I call for war”

The Moon Lords look to old Helios, who sits with Dioht, the picture of dignity and cold resolve He pulls his razor from his hip and extends it into the air “War!” cries their Truth Knight

“War!” thunder the eleven others, unsheathing their blades While they thrust them into the air, Diomedes barely lifts his hand

With the Olyh the assembled Moon Lords A host of razors unfurl and shine in the dions Seraphina looks at ious satisfaction, she unravels her razor and, like her enerations of kin, she lifts it into the air

“War,” she says softly, as if declaring it only against me