Chapter 31 - Your Honor is Your Life. Let None Dispute It.

  Your Honor is Your Life. Let None Dispute It.

  Iman had lived by the words of her grandfather. And his grandfather. And the ghost of a thousand ancestors before them, whose bones lay buried under the sun-bleached dunes that once stretched endlessly across what was now the Dubai Territory. They were dust now, just like the sovereignty of nations.

  The flags had changed. The Earth Sphere—one mega-government bloated with history and rot—swallowed them all. But in the shifting sands of her lineage, the call of home had survived. The call of the desert, of faith, of something older than Earth Houses and orbital wars.

  Her religion—old, cracked with time—had lived through the silence. Others hadn’t. Most people in the colonies forgot what it was like to kneel. But not her. She remembered. She burned to remember.

  Christianity. The Sons of Mars. The Solar Evangelicals with their polished smiles and red planet gospels. Iman had seen their god in the eyes of generals, in the silence between drone strikes. She’d seen what they worshipped. And it was not mercy.

  She exhaled slowly, pressing her forehead against the cold glass of the stadium’s high window. The concession aisle buzzed behind her with the plastic joy of snack wrappers and holo-menus. A baseball cap was pulled low over her brow, the name of a university stitched across it in a language she hadn’t committed to memory. She cursed herself quietly for that—it would be on the report. Every detail mattered.

  Her mouth twisted with irritation.

  “Some fucking soldier I am,” she muttered under her breath. “Stuck on glorified babysitting duty.”

  Her fingers tapped mindlessly along a rhythm game on her phone, the pixelated icons dancing in time with the distant stadium lights. Her arms were crossed, posture tight, folded in on herself like she was afraid of being seen by someone who’d recognize what she'd become.

  Tara wasn’t lying. She’d really spoken to her boyfriend about the guard shifts. And Zephyr—snake that he was—had come to Iman with that weasel smirk of his, confessing with faux remorse how it had come up. How it slipped out.

  He wanted her to know.

  She hadn’t wanted to know.

  And now it was between them, a quiet rot. Another worm in the apple. She touched her face. Clammy. Her stomach turned. Shame—old as scripture—pooled inside her like thick oil.

  “Iman, get a fucking grip,” she whispered, digging her nails into her palms.

  Zephyr had said it so casually. That she was the commander. That she had earned her quiet little corners of avoidance. That nobody would notice if she disappeared for a while.

  He hadn’t said it to be kind. He had said it to see her. To remind her how visible she was. How watched.

  She’d written him back, agreeing. Told him to drop it, to just let it go. And now she was stuck here, useless, distracted, sweating through her undershirt while her mind screamed in circles and her hands couldn’t even hold a damn phone steady.

  She was seeing Henryk again. Everywhere. In the dark of tunnels. In the space between faces in a crowd. In the silence before she spoke. In her fucking dreams.

  But it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.

  He was gone. That… thing… she’d imagined? That boy with the smile and the soft voice and the hurting eyes? A lie. A coward’s lie. A monster’s mask. That’s what he was. That’s what they’d said. And God, maybe for once, they were right.

  She’d never hold another man. That shame—the grinding, the sweat, the breath caught between her teeth when she let herself want—she’d carry it to the grave. She was marked. Defiled. A ruin.

  But she’d live.

  She’d pray. She’d kneel until her knees bled. She’d work until the hours blurred and her skin cracked. She’d serve House, serve God, serve the bones of her grandfather in the sand.

  And Henryk?

  She’d erase him. Face and all. She squeezed her eyes shut, crushed the memory of his smile in her mind like a cockroach. Ground it down into black. And if she saw him again—God forbid—if he stirred anything in her, even a flicker of warmth she couldn’t extinguish, then she’d shoot. First, fast, and without hesitation.

  If she was lucky, maybe she'd shoot him before she cried.

  Hopefully—

  A sound broke her spiral.

  Crying.

  She blinked, looked up.

  A pregnant woman was moving nervously through the side corridor of the food court. Pale, exhausted. Her hand gripped tightly to that of a little boy. Asian features. Wide eyes. A worn teddy bear dangling from his arm.

  Iman stood before she even thought to.

  “Ma’am, you can have my seat,” she said, her voice coming clearer than she expected.

  The woman smiled with soft, embarrassed gratitude. “Oh—thank you.”

  “Thank you, nice lady!” chirped the child, waving the stuffed bear with a beaming face.

  Iman gave a tired smile in return, hollow behind the eyes but warm at the edges. “Nice, huh…” she echoed absently. The words hung in the air like a joke without a punchline.

  Something tickled her senses—a scent she hadn’t realized she’d missed until it hit her like a whisper from the past.

  The scent of home.

  “Oh, hell yeah,” Iman muttered, inhaling deeply.

  There was a line—long, winding, alive with shifting feet and murmured impatience—but she didn’t care. It was Halal. The scent wafted out in warm, oily ribbons: cumin, coriander, charred meat, and something sweet underneath it all. She slipped into the line and slowly edged forward until she reached the counter, fumbling for her wallet.

  That’s when she heard it.

  “Come on, I can’t believe I’m actually short,” said the young man in front of her.

  He wore a pilot uniform—too crisp, too many creases. The tag was still dangling from the back of the collar like some forgotten umbilical cord. His voice was strained, a little too high-pitched to be calm, fingers swiping desperately at his campus app.

  Iman tapped her boot against the tile. The line behind her was growing, and she could feel the tension rising like static on a dry day.

  “Sir, you’ll need to move,” the vendor said, terse and tired.

  “Wait, hold on—I just need to add more credits, I—”

  Iman cut him off with a flick of the wrist and a breath through her nose. She was already peeling bills out of her wallet. “I’ll cover it,” she said flatly.

  He turned, caught off guard. Asian features, pale skin, glasses sliding low on his nose, and hair matted with sweat like he’d run through a downpour of nerves. “Thanks, ma’am.”

  She flinched. “Don’t call me ma’am. Makes me feel like I’m forty,” she snapped, handing over the money.

  He gave an apologetic smile, took the bag, and shuffled off just as two more figures approached.

  “I’ll take one large platter—chicken and…” The girl’s voice faltered.

  “I can’t believe you forgot it!” came another, louder voice from behind her.

  Iman barely glanced up, already placing her own order. “…Rice and plantains. Ugh. And a soda. Cola. Whatever’s cold.”

  “You had one job, Wilson,” the second voice groaned, older and full of theatrical disdain. “White rice, not brown. You know how Adaline hates the texture.”

  “Well just shoot a guy,” Wilson grinned sheepishly. “I didn’t even want lunch. I’ve got to be out in twenty minutes anyway.”

  Iman kept her face forward, but her ears stayed perked. She hated when people talked this loud, especially in a place meant for peace. Her mother raised her better. Quiet. Orderly. Composed.

  “You’re not quiet and you’re not orderly,” hissed a voice deep in the back of her skull.

  She shook her head in real time, like she could physically toss the thought out the side of her mind.

  Wilson pressed a hand to his stomach. “Yeah, scratch that, I’m good.”

  “Worried you’ll lose your lunch in the cockpit?” the older one—Bea—asked, her teasing tone falling flat now.

  “Exactly.” Wilson ran his fingers through his hair, a nervous tic. “The last thing I need is to puke mid-flight. Especially while test-running Henryk’s new rig.”

  Iman froze.

  Her heart slowed, just for a second. Not in a romantic way. More like a system crash.

  Henryk.

  The name hung in the air like a specter. Henryk. It could be another one. The galaxy was big. Tens of billions on Earth alone, more scattered through the colonies, the moons, the megastructures.

  …but Iman—that feeling behind her eyes, along the edges of her mind like static on a broken radio.

  That same sickness.

  The one Henryk carried like a curse. The same disease that had crept into the Witches of Jupiter. A resonance that never left, only deepened. They had all felt it. All of them. As if some ancient chord had been struck, and the vibration hadn’t stopped. It ran deeper than blood, deeper than flesh.

  It was in their bones. In their dreams. In the mud of their genetic past, back to the first primates who had glimpsed stars through tree branches and wanted more.

  Iman didn’t blink.

  Her body was still, but her eyes—those almond-shaped brown eyes—narrowed with something cold beneath the surface. Her back straight, spine like steel, both hands tucked into the oversized pockets of her sweater. Her visor tilted downward, casting her Toffee-dark skin into half-shadow.

  She looked like a predator watching from tall grass. Like something nocturnal, coiled in silence.

  “My mom came all this way,” Wilson mumbled nearby, his voice brittle, breaking. “Last thing I need is to screw this all up and lose out on all this money.”

  Money.

  That old demon. That chain of fools and gods alike.

  “Iman,” said the cashier, dragging her back to the now.

  She didn’t answer. Just took the bag, dropped the last of the bills, and turned into the tide of people. But she didn’t walk toward her designated post. Didn’t walk toward duty or protocol.

  No.

  She smirked instead.

  The Martians were always secretive—always draped in riddles and false flags. And they’d been humiliated before. The Eunuch Emperor had carved his warning into them, burned it into their sense of pride like a brand.

  So what were Henryk and his clique building now?

  She grit her teeth. Her jaw locked so tight her molars ground like engine parts. She’d been briefed. She’d memorized the layout. She knew exactly where the Warcaskets were being stored, tucked beneath the earth in those reinforced hangars.

  They thought she wouldn’t check.

  They thought wrong.

  Her smirk stretched wider, curling across her face like a blade unsheathing.

  She’d do a sweep.

  Just a quick one. A look around.

  Because whatever Henryk was cobbling together down there—it wasn’t clean. It wasn’t right. The scent of it had already hit her like blood in water.

  If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  An abomination.

  She sneered. Her stomach twisted. She wasn’t as hungry as she thought.

  Henryk

  Henryk and Arthur were lined up on one side of the long chamber, seated in a row of a thousand gleaming chairs. The overhead flatscreens flickered with irrelevant data, like gods too drunk to care, and the ceiling lights—those sterile, eye-stabbing fluorescents—gnawed away at the hangover riding Henryk’s spine. If that didn’t break him, nothing would.

  Up above, Axel and Edward sat together in the gallery of elevated seats. Their uniforms were pressed—white dress shirts, ironed slacks, shined shoes—but the atmosphere was anything but clean.

  “How you think they’re holding it together?” Ed asked. There was a curl of a smirk on his lips, almost kind.

  Axel chuckled low, eyes scanning the mass of students and officers like they were insects behind glass. “Henryk looks better. Still haunted, but better. But the girls—” he laughed harder now, “they loved Arthur. Like, the moment they realized he was a legit, old-world, sword-toting, crest-wearing knight? I don’t know, man. Chicks dig uniforms, I guess.”

  Ed grinned. “So, you and Henryk get a lot of action last night?”

  Axel’s eyes flared, and he stiffened, glancing down at the crowd like he expected to find a sniper scope trained on his chest. “W-What do you mean by that?”

  Ed sighed. “No homo, but you two aren’t exactly ugly. And after that circus with Iman, Piper, and Sirine? I mean... maybe the guy deserves a win.”

  Axel frowned, caught somewhere between confusion and defensiveness. “What are you getting at?”

  Before Ed could answer, a voice slipped in behind them.

  “Oh, I’d love to hear this.”

  Mateo. Blue-eyed, suited, and the only one wearing a vest like it was a badge of rebellion. Slid into the row beside them with practiced ease, like the conversation had been waiting.

  “Come on, we’re all boys here,” Mateo said, voice half-laugh.

  Ed rolled his eyes. “Sirine’s basically vanished. She’s not giving Henryk any attention anymore.”

  “Boo hoo. Henryk’s princess ditched him,” Axel muttered, bitter and low.

  Mateo leaned back, elbows draped lazily over the seat. “That was the girl he saved, remember? The Headmaster’s daughter. I saw it happen—outside.”

  Ed nodded slowly, then turned to face them both fully now. His voice flattened, softened with a twinge of regret. “Piper’s on suspension. And Iman… I never figured they were a thing, but something about it feels off.”

  Axel's eyes lowered toward Henryk, sitting still among the seats below, trying not to crumple under exhaustion. “…Honestly,” he murmured, “I think he’s got his eyes set on Piper.”

  “Really,” Ed replied flatly, and Mateo chuckled.

  “Told you. Henryk’s got eyes for one girl. He’s not a player. He’s got, like, a million younger sisters.”

  “That’s an exaggeration,” Ed said, though he was laughing too.

  Axel scratched the back of his neck, clearly flustered.

  “…What about you, Axel?” Mateo asked, sly. “What’s your type?”

  Axel’s face flushed a shade deeper than embarrassment. He rubbed the back of his neck harder, voice faltering. “W-Well… someone quiet would be nice.”

  “Oh? You want a doormat?” Mateo teased, grinning like it hurt to smile. “Figures. You Feudal types love a woman you can walk over.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Axel protested, but Mateo was already laughing.

  The way those features scrunched up, how the blue eyes darted between him and Ed—it was like watching two twin orbs orbit, threatening collision. Axel looked Mateo up and down. The slightness. The frame. The angles of the face. Then he said, almost involuntarily, “…Skinny. Short.”

  “That’s not gonna be hard,” Mateo said. “You’re huge.”

  Ed didn’t catch it.

  Not really.

  They all funneled in.

  The Block’s dignitaries. The string-pullers. Men and women who ruled their districts not with charisma, but with the quiet, deadly efficiency of old-world bureaucrats. Power, trade, autonomy—all in their hands. But there would be no bickering over taxes today. No debates over border lines or tariffs or trade ships lost in Neptune’s storms.

  Today wasn’t about the Block.

  Edward scanned the swelling crowd. He counted the colors. Neptune’s blue dominated—like algae on stagnant water—but then, slowly, other colors crept in. Foreign dignitaries, Outworld delegates. Some too proud to bow, others too desperate not to. And then came the red.

  His heart skipped. Blood-colored tabards. The seal of House Mars stitched like open wounds on their chests. Silk, but the kind of silk that meant war. They were trying not to stick out. They failed.

  Ed smirked, but his lips felt dry.

  “Looks like we’re not all dead yet,” he muttered.

  No petty squabbles today. Maelia, daughter of Mars, would take the stage. And when she did, she’d spill it all: the crimes of Neptune in the Oceana Sector, the assassination of her brother, the puppet-marriage plot they’d tried to thread around her neck like a noose. She’d bare her teeth to the Eunuch Emperor and demand her birthright—land written in blood, scripted by her ancestors in the soil centuries ago.

  The People of Oceana were a mixed bag—fractured, stitched together by history and necessity. But even they hadn’t forgotten the Martians. They remembered their heroes. They remembered their monsters.

  Ed's eyes jumped to the flickering screens above. Lights danced across his vision like ghosts in a static storm. He wove through the crowd, eyes sharp, heart pounding. He found Henryk. Found Axel. Their eyes met his and nodded—tight, grave.

  He swept the room with a soldier’s precision.

  Kieren—corner shadow, nod returned. Then Wilbur. Then—

  His spine went rigid.

  Wilbur… and no Franklin.

  “The fuck?” Ed hissed, just loud enough for the others to hear.

  Mateo turned, Axel with him.

  “Where the fuck is Franklin?” Ed barked.

  Outside, crouched low against a wall, Franklin looked like a rat in a maze built for wolves. His knees were bent. Jacket flapping open. Glasses fogged. He spun left, then right, breath shallow.

  “Vanya,” he whispered into the tiny comm in his collar. “W-What is this? You said you were going to be busy today…”

  Static bled into his ear.

  “Franklin…” her voice cracked. “Last night—I should’ve told you. You’re a good guy. Better than me. Please, wherever you are… get to an escape pod. Aim for the front of the Block. Hurry.”

  “Vanya?” he said again, squinting at the signal. “Vanya, your receiver’s shit. I—I can’t hear you.”

  A breath. Then silence.

  “Franklin…”

  Then nothing.

  No click. No goodbye. Just static.

  He blinked, stunned. Then felt it—a tapping at his back.

  He turned.

  Henryk.

  Gaze narrowed. Stance rigid.

  “You know you’re not supposed to be out here,” Henryk said. “Meeting’s about to start. Maelia’s going live any second.”

  Franklin just stood there, face buried in his hands.

  This was just some girl. A bathroom meet-cute, a clumsy flirtation. Why did it feel like she’d just given him the don’t come to school tomorrow speech?

  “Franklin,” Henryk repeated, more firm now, fingers closing around his wrist.

  “H-Henryk, wait—I’ve got to—”

  But Henryk was already dragging him, almost effortless, like pulling a wet flag across concrete.

  “Say it when we get inside,” Henryk muttered. “Ed will rip you a new asshole. Especially after—”

  Franklin froze.

  Especially after what?

  Henryk glanced at him, jaw clenched. “Listen. I don’t fuck with the favoritism they give me. Never have. But we’re working together now. And I’ve got a couple skills notched under my belt that don’t show up on a résumé. Might come in handy when things go to hell.”

  Franklin didn’t speak. He stood there, hands twitching, breath shallow. And when he finally scraped together the courage to speak—

  “Henryk?” he asked, voice thin, uncertain.

  It wasn’t Henryk who answered.

  “Yo.” The voice was flat, almost bored. It belonged to someone new.

  Marcus.

  He stood tall in a full suit of riot gear, helmet off and clipped to his hip. The matte-black armor was stamped with the Block’s crest, gilded along the breastplate and shoulder guards. It gleamed faintly under the flickering overhead lights, like it didn’t belong here, like it had been peeled from a parade float and dragged through a battlefield.

  Henryk’s gaze narrowed. “Didn’t realize they had your people working the event,” he muttered.

  Marcus shrugged, loose and easy. “When the Mercurians want something, they take it. Doesn’t matter what it is. But yeah… security’s their favorite gig. Keeps them close to the data streams. They like knowing everything before it happens.”

  Henryk tilted his head. “Information addiction.”

  Marcus smirked. “More like a free surveillance pipeline.”

  Henryk didn’t laugh, but Franklin did—a weak, too-loud giggle that died in his throat. “Sucks to be your taxpayers.”

  “Why do you think so many of us pour into the academy?” Marcus replied, eyes scanning the atrium. “Half the riot units are kids. Look around.”

  Henryk did.

  Teenagers in ill-fitting armor joked and jostled each other along the wall. Helmets too large, rifles held like toys. Their bodies still soft with baby fat, their faces too clean to have ever seen real combat.

  “They’re fresh,” Marcus said, voice hollow. “Some barely out of high school. Most of them… not smart. I think the government just feeds them to the machine.”

  Henryk frowned. “Why? Wouldn’t people back home be angry?”

  His tone shifted—harder, darker.

  “During the conflict between Oceana II and III,” Henryk said slowly, “we found a transport. Still drifting. Burned out from the inside.”

  Marcus blinked. The color drained from his face.

  “They just left it?”

  Henryk didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  Franklin shuffled beside them, stomach twisting. He wanted to vanish, melt into the floor tiles. He shouldn’t have come out here. He should’ve let the call go to voicemail. What had he been hoping for? Some kind of confession? A kiss goodbye? He wanted to slap himself.

  “I was on that ship,” Marcus said, voice gone quiet.

  Henryk’s shoulders tensed.

  “It’s all a game,” Marcus continued, his words now clipped, deliberate. “The academy. The Houses. The war. You think they care about outcomes? They care about players. Gerald’s dead—did you hear? House Pluto. Assassinated in his own wing. Can you believe that? In our own walls?”

  He exhaled sharply and glanced at the flickering lights above. “The Emperor’s game is rancid.”

  Henryk’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, ‘game’?”

  Marcus laughed without humor. “Come on. The Academy’s older than most of our bloodlines. It was founded by the Emperor himself. Every House is required to send their heirs. Every generation, new blood. New nobles. New monsters.”

  Franklin went still, like the hallway had turned into a trapdoor.

  Marcus folded his arms. “They’re trained together. Bred together. Friends, enemies, lovers—whatever the mix, they’re taught to compete. Then they graduate. And what do they become? Presidents. Kings. Generals. Executioners.”

  He stepped forward, close enough that Franklin could smell ozone and sweat on his armor.

  “You and Jace,” he said to Henryk. “One day, you’ll be an Executor. He’ll be a King. Think about that. The two of you, fed through the same grinder. One day, you’ll stand on opposite ends of a battlefield, and neither of you will hesitate.”

  Henryk swallowed. He didn’t speak.

  Marcus smiled faintly, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

  “Jace holds the Empirical ARC. His bloodline used it to carve out feudal rights over entire planetary systems. But here’s the real trick—not everyone realizes it—the academy itself is the Emperor’s blade. It carves the future long before it arrives. If you pit tomorrow’s rulers against each other early… if you make them bleed, make them compete, make them hate—”

  He paused.

  Franklin’s voice cut in like a blade through fog.

  “Those grudges become distractions.”

  He was blinking rapidly, as if something monumental had just clicked into place.

  But Henryk… Henryk wasn’t blinking at all. His gaze was blank. Empty.

  He didn’t speak, didn’t argue.

  Because he couldn’t.

  Because maybe—just maybe—it was all true. And if it was, then all his instincts, all his anger, all his rage and blood and war and duty—

  None of it had ever belonged to him.

  Outside, cleaving through the twilight, ten mobile suits sliced the darkness of space in perfect formation, trailing rich blue ion plumes. Each one was matte black—non-reflective, silent, deadly. Tri-colored red dots glowed along their visors, tracking in sync with the movement of each pilot’s head, like the retinas of killer drones locked onto prey.

  Below the waist, the suits were thickly armored, their bipedal frames swollen with muscle-like plating, insectoid in design—bulbous thigh guards like the chitin of something born in fire and bred in tunnels. Their squat, heavy helmets brimmed with mechanical menace. Cyclopean optics pulsed like furnace embers. Every step hissed with pistons and servo whine. Their exposed limbs moved with arachnid precision, spindly but coiled with power. Thrusters flared from their backs and hips, their streamlined rockets mounted flush against armored buttocks. They didn’t glide—they pierced the void.

  Each suit carried its own configuration. One with a beam repeater slung along the shoulder. Another with high-yield demolition pods. They spoke in silence—hands flashing coded signs, numerical gestures, beamlight signals blinking from their visored headlamps. They crept with surgical grace beneath the blind edge of the Block, planting bricks of C4 like gardeners sowing a harvest of death.

  They didn’t fumble. They didn’t hesitate. This wasn’t terror. This was ritual.

  The politician was gone. Just a smear of expensive cologne and the lingering aftertaste of empty promises.

  The chamber's lights dimmed, not all at once, but like dying breath. The silence afterward was suffocating. No clapping. No murmurs. Only the unsteady thrum of collective breath, and the faint electrical hum of the Block's cooling systems. Tension leaked into the room like carbon monoxide.

  Ed already knew who was next.

  Maelia.

  She stepped forward like a blade being drawn. The fluorescents struck her from above, and her fur—lush, earthen, primal—shimmered like a living oil painting. Not patchy. Not muted. She was painted in myth, in the earth of long-dead gods. Brown and white in streaks across her shoulders and thighs, thick as battle hide, dense as ancient fables. Her ears twitched. Her eyes, gold-ringed, locked ahead.

  The diplomats in the front row shifted back. One Neptunian senator whispered mutant, but it was breathless—like the hiss of a man who’d just glimpsed the wolf that would eat him.

  Maelia didn’t blink.

  She didn’t wear a crown. She didn’t need one.

  Her voice came low, polished, and inevitable. Like a warship groaning to life.

  “I speak not only as the sister of a murdered child-king,” she said, “but as a woman born of a sector that has bled while the galaxy watched.”

  The room shuddered.

  The feed changed.

  The walls behind her flared to life—screens, holoslabs, even private tablets across the Block—all hijacked. No ceremony. No permission. Just truth. Violent and raw.

  Drone footage blinked into being: a village cratered by shellfire, children wailing behind dust-caked faces, Martian farmers crouched behind rusted trucks, firing bolt rifles at a descending titan of steel and fire. A mobile suit—twenty meters tall—stamped through a church wall like it was made of paper.

  A trenchline. Miles long. Screams, real ones, muffled by helmets and smoke, boys screaming until they vanished in a burst of red and dust.

  No one in the chamber spoke.

  The screams weren’t from the room. They were from the feeds. And the feeds were everywhere.

  Every holotablet. Every lobby terminal. Every smartglass ad board flickering across Luna and Mars and Europa. The Block was broadcasting. And Maelia had turned the truth loose like a disease.

  She gripped the podium now. Her eyes were sharp and wet. Her ears angled forward like antennae of fury.

  “I was meant to marry him,” she said. Her voice didn’t shake. “Kaelin. They told me to lie back. To smile. To bear their children. That was the deal. Tie Oceana to Neptune’s cock, and call it peace.”

  She reached up.

  Her claws raked across her chest, tearing the skin. Blood seeped into her fur. She didn’t flinch.

  “That was never peace,” she growled. “That was ownership.”

  Her voice rose—not in pitch, but in weight.

  “You want to talk about tradition?” she asked. “My brother was murdered. Shot through the heart because he wouldn’t kneel. And the galaxy? The galaxy laughed. Or worse. It looked away.”

  She stepped down from the podium. No script. No prosthetics. Just a woman bleeding in front of an empire.

  “If you think I’m going to let this galaxy forget him,” she said, “forget us… then you haven’t been listening.”

  The Sons of Mars were already rising from their seats. No applause. No shouting.

  They were listening. Watching. Breathing in time.

  Waiting.

  “And to the Emperor,” Maelia said, her voice rising into a growl, “this is your fucking invitation.”

  The screens went black.

  And then the world screamed.

  It didn’t start with a flash. It started with a sound—deep, bone-hollow, unnatural. A growl from the belly of the Block. One blast. Then another. Then dozens. Each one synchronized like some obscene war hymn. The chamber lights shattered, raining sparks. Power cut. The room plunged into darkness.

  And smoke.

  And fire.

  Outside, the side of the Block erupted in a perfect ring of annihilation. One after another, the C4 stacks placed beneath the infrastructure spat out their fire. Titanium composite. Bone-white stone. Steel girders the width of shuttles. All of it torn loose, hurled into the void like cannon shot.

  There was no ripple. Only thunder. No warning. Just pressure. The kind that crushes lungs and turns bones to powder.

  From the blackness, ten matte-black suits emerged like reapers. Heavy-thighed. Cyclopean visors searing crimson. Their boosters lit, blue fire roaring out in jets that bent the stars. They leapt from the collapsing hull like wolves off a dying cliff, twisting mid-space with all the grace of predators in their element.

  Each Warcasket's weapon systems were already alive. Auto-loaders hissed. Plasma coils spun into readiness. Fingers clenched over triggers that had been waiting for months. They didn’t fall into battle.

  They dived.

  Explosions bloomed along the underside of the Block, sequenced with the elegance of a symphony composed in blood. Flame licked the seams of the structure, carving geometric lines in incinerated steel. The underside of the great station tore open like a gullet.

  From orbit, it looked like a flower made of fire—a ring blooming in slow motion, petals made of blast and debris, curving outward with impossible grace.

  The Block groaned.

  Metal screamed. Massive support arms cracked, their joints failing one after another. The uppermost levels sagged. Then folded. Panels tore loose and spiraled into the void like confetti from the gods. Debris twinkled, caught in the reflected light of the system’s sun, like stars dying in real time.

  Inside the chamber, people were running. Screaming. Others just stood, frozen, mouths open, staring into the smoke-choked dark.

  But the Sons of Mars didn’t move.

  They stood like statues in the smoke. And they listened.

  Because the war had begun.

  And Maelia’s invitation had been accepted.