Never had Skthveraachk expected to sing in antiphony, to purposefully segment herself into a division of choirs which resonated yet stood, undeniably, apart. Never thought she would feel like the first descendants of Founder Gh’e; their mournful wailing as they left the Canyon of Webs no longer as one, but as three, leaving cuts within the mountain range so deep that it was said you could hear still their cries when the wind blew fadeward. The Queen’s mother had never needed to raise her voice in such an admission of failure. Nor had her mother before. Scouring the memories, she found that the last of Skthveraachk-Colony to compose and cry out with an antiphonal chanting had been four generations of Queens her previous. Knowing, as Skthveraachk Queen knew now, the sacrilege of her enterprise, then against the Triumvirate. Knowing, as Skthveraachk Queen knew now, the scars it would leave on legacy and life itself. Knowing. Accepting. Undertaking, all the same. The left of the column, the column comprising ninety-eight percent of the militant arm taken from the Caldera, bellowed out their resolve. The right, using the same notes, colored the return with a whimpering, pitiable sorrow. Voices, at odds. Purpose, unanimous.

“Hathan-Commander?”

Heard through the Band. Felt through the bodies of her children, far in the rear. Strained as the stalk stretched taut in the drought, amidst the groaning metal and cracking steps of laden formites, and the dull trundle of wheeled vehicles in which the contingent of Sovereignty soldiers and pilots rode.

"Primary scouts have reached the outskirts of Rugoro-Auslander. Forward clusters are establishing a perimeter.”

Her gilded silver armor shook as it traveled, still somewhat unsteady, but rapidly acclimating. There was movement within the settlement, but no open attack. It was good. Even with the entirety of her force, clumping and stacking bodies so that buboes and cysts appeared across the formations, limited the area which they could cover. Surrounding Rugoro would take time.

Solovyova spoke in monosyllabic deadness.

Skthveraachk risked a look back, a mender’s eyes serving while her own kept forward. Saw the hunched bodies seated in the trucks curling over their lances. The empty stares. The Hathan’s beautiful blue uniform, clean and smooth, sat as rock within the smaller jeep.

No drones remained at the command post for the Queen to use, the mustering point some thousand and more lengths yet outside of Tarasque where the two advances of Sovereignty forces had set to meet. Preparing the assault while the outer settlements, and their weapons, were secured. She could hear, though, that as had been the case upon their departure, that even the Solovyova’s voice refused to look at her.

The Commander spoke as he once had in the hearing held within the sky. More machine than the vessel in which Queen had been imprisoned. His transport did not sway as it increased in speed, the body of the swarm parting to reveal the road beneath their writhing. Even the smallest nest was secured beneath ground, or surrounded by artificial mounds of sand and silt. Rugoro-Auslander had no wall, no ditch, not even a presentable palisade of rickety timber or metal. Spires of smoke, not of shielding, rose from its interior. Buildings, squat and unpresentable, smelling of hardstones and fuel consumed by machines as they grew in sight. Four hundred lengths from end to end. More an outpost than a nest. But they were not formites. They were not her people.

“I am sorry, Hathan-Commander.”

Not an order. Not heeded.

“Your presence is necessary for this. Your vehicles, necessary. I would have not had you here if there was any other way.”

Miroslava bit hard through the comm, her response substituted in the silence which came from the Hathan. Yet even in her hardness, there was a tremble. An inflection of questioning in what should have been statements.

“Yes, humanite.” Shapes now became figures. Heads and eyes, poking through gaps within the thass or hollow windows, suits patchworked and stretched clinging to those watching her marching troops on their borders with a fascination nearly suffocated by fear. Armored throne bleeped from the center of the mass, Skthveraachk told of approaching guard-post indicated upon its map. Hathan’s transport rolled past her. Encircling arms of her colony host wrapped and touched at Rugoro’s far end.

“Soldiers will hold at borders. Scentmarking underway.” She felt the contempt radiate from the purple behemoth. His tone charged with consternation. “Will not advance.”

“Received. Await further orders. Spray nest marker along the town’s edge. Defend if breached.”

“Received.” Coalition soldiers. Five. Set within the guard-post, but emerging with lances shouldered or raised above their heads as they saw the vehicle approach. The trucks and tracked transports halted further back in the milling bodies, safe amidst the mounds and bulges formed by stacked and concealing chitin. Thinkers and menders both chastised and bit as Queen continued her own advance, drawing up to the edge of Hathan’s parking, angular jeep. Wanting to see with her own eyes. Feel, on her own skeleton. He stood, but did not dismount. Enemy soldiers, halted. Faces unreadable beneath their own masks.

th Dracan Infantry Brigade. On orders from Brigadier-General Prescott, I surrender this town and garrison to you.”> They did not salute. The Queen thought, smelled perhaps, that Hathan was quietly grateful for that small mercy. He did not offer one of his own.

th Imperial Reclamation Fleet.”> Drones parted in her approach. Clung against her, continued their harmonized yet opposing lament. There were more behind the Coalition’s Lieutenant. Beyond the entry post, to where habitats and factories made to provide artificial stomachs for hardstone’s digestion formed a circular street. Soldiers. Unarmored males. Females. Looking, watching, waiting as the Lieutenant waited. When the Commander did not continue, his mouth pulled to a line, the infantryman coughed through its filter.

Hathan did not look at the Lieutenant. He looked through him.

“Perimeter established.”

“Scent-marking lain.”

“Received. Cease lament. Begin the song.” Their legs thrummed as they beat against one another. Some of the others had begun to take steps back, but Skthveraachk was struck by simply how…confused, the Lieutenant looked. Unregistering. Gazing up as Hathan sunk back down to his seat. Folding his arms, lowering his head behind the shield of his vehicle. “We cry until our lungs bleed. Let all know what we do here.”

Transport pulled itself back. Turned on its wheels, grounding towards the Queen with the slowness of the fading sun, and all of its finality. Rear pair of soldiers unslung their lances. Commander nodded a single time, his eyes shaded by his cap. Concerto’s first movement. Death before the rebirth. The order given. The Queen obeyed.

“Received.”

She made sure the Lieutenant was the first. Struck at that expressionless, confused mask with naked scythe before the soldier knew what was occurring. A beam struck her crest almost immediately after, and the flood of pheromones it released were all that was required to send the rest of the colony into a wrathful charge. Queen could have left, then, as she had wanted Hathan to leave. Necessary, he had said, to deliver in person the announcement, and for an officer to be present to accept any offer of surrender from the enemy. They had not offered it. They had defied to the end. That was the Sovereignty’s truth. She could have left then. As the next two soldiers fell, a slow tumbling as three sets of jaws and pointed spears plunged down through armor meant only to dissipate heat, and as the wailing of her colony magnified with eighteen hundred new voices of terror, she did not leave. Not the Composer’s plan. Not the Sovereignty’s plan. Her plan. Her decision. She would stay. She would watch.

“Target central settlement building. Secure weapons. Menial humanites still present danger if armed.”

“Received.” Largest soldiers held the perimeter. The smaller warriors, menials, drones, descended as a cloud, a swarm, a host of black on planet’s red. Faces in a window, withdrawing, eyes bulging and mouths split wide; six drones formed a ladder, seventh and eighth and ninth ascended, to break within the building and puncture the man with scythe and claw. Those in the street turned, ran. Humanites could outpace a formite in an open sprint; there was nowhere to go. One of their females hugged a smaller grub, a developing juvenile, within frail limbs and a thin back turned to the approaching swarm as shield. Cries were wet first with fluid. Blood, when bones and bodies flattened under a hundred trampling legs. Silent then. Two fewer. Hundreds to go.

“Soldier. Elevated, orange building, near entrance.”

“Received.” Armor shattered. One drone fell to the lance, curling itself around the barrel to ensure only it died in the rush, and the rest stampeded into the structure. Shouting, crying, old and young, male and female, emanated shortly after. Thinkers kept a tally, comparing the fallen to the listed number of occupants. Eighty-seven potential Queens, birthing mothers, thinkers and futures were silenced before the building was declared empty.

“Humanites fleeing, risefade side of town, direction of reinforced factory.”

“Pursue.” Male turned from the group, a rod of wood and metal in its grip. Managed to parry aside the first thrust from initial menial which had reached it. Two slung stones emptied the contents of its head on the soil, and one of the females broke from the fleeing group. Unarmed. Running towards the falling corpse. Skthveraachk waited to watch the mandibles impact through her before shifting on. Her own body now, in the streets. “Reinforced building. Able to penetrate?”

“Negative. Barriers too thick.”

“Received. Obtain flame-spewers from central hall. Ignite the structure. Stand-by menials to finish humanites attempting to escape.”

“Should allocate soldiers to this tasking. Alien weapons, not required.” The former Vhersckaahlhn was stalking the perimeter. He could taste the metallic air, each voice silenced, each future ended, each colony exterminated, spilling more and more of the brownstone aroma amidst the growing smoke as menials located the tools of fire and flame.

“Soldiers too large to move within humanite structures. Maintain perimeter. Exterminate any the warriors miss.” Menials in the squat two-floor dwelling at her left were signalling for silence, as much as could be had in the pandemonium of death and frenzy. Lending her own attention, the murmuring oddity was located beneath the sleeping furniture of an upstairs room. ‘It’ll be alright. Look at me.’ Repeated, as a mantra. Two drones rushed to the located source, and stabbed down through the fabric barrier until the sounds ceased. “Did you know, Skthveraachk soldier. Even to the humanites, the killing of an infant is seen as irredeemable.” Two figures burst from a burning building, wreathed in the cackling blaze. Drones did not risk closing in, and tens of spears were flung to halt their approach. “It is possible we are now more contemptible than even a humanite in our actions.”

“Comparison faulty. Potential is not actuality. These are not Queens. These are not thinkers. These Coalition are menials.” Skulls and the bones of legs, wound together and set within the soldier’s armor, rattled and clattered. Displeasure mixing with the surety of memory. “They die to preserve the lives of soldiers, theirs and ours, as you have said. There is no wrongness. It is their role. Their warriors should praise their sacrifice.”

“The Coalition and Sovereignty both should show them great praise, then, in measures to come.” Her voice floated like a corpse in a river. A female attempted to leap from the third layer of a building as soldiers ascended. Skthveraachk caught her within her jaws, and severed her cleanly at the waist. Halting only long enough to ensure a second blow through her skull, to end the pain as quick as was possible. What was necessary was right. What was right, was good. Repeat until it was truth.

The Solovyova’s voice was an afterthought in the chaos. For her, but not to her. It punched free of the confines of a shack, an anti-gravity skiff; shredding atop the bodies of her colony as its engines burned and melted those beneath. Racing to the perimeter, the single soldier aboard firing lance at anything, everything, while the civilians shouted and clung and clasped one another. It broke through the first line. And then, the second.

“Do not permit escape! Eradicate all hostile presence! Prescott must see!”

“Received! Pursuing!”

“Reinforce warrior wall, do not allow the vehicle to penetrate!”

Fear battered through the barrier she had erected around her heart. Sorrow leaked in through the cracks. Even as she hacked down another kneeling humanite, its hands raised and offering nothing, it was to turn to the distant trail of dust approaching her perimeter.

“Hathan-Commander! Refused, negative! You are not to taint yourself with this! It is my undertaking, my role! Orders were clear!”

One of the trucks had deviated from the column, moving to intercept. It was beyond her. Commander and four soldiers dismounted the trucks, pointed weapons forward. One was shaking, she saw from a scout’s vantage, shaking its head and shouting something. It was pushed out of the line, the Lieutenant pointing away and barking as another rose to take its place. Hovering skiff had made it eight tenths of the way to the perimeter wall of bodies before the lancefire erupted. Melted metal, flesh, engine. It dipped, carved a scar across the land, flipped and collapsed. Her soldiers, pouring onto it, ensuring beyond doubt there had been no survivors. Cutting her view from it, it became just another darkness in the memories. A past to address in the future. Not the now.

Impact on the throne. Skthveraachk turned to the source, to the tattered male which had hurled not a beam, not a spear, but a simple stone. Blood, but not his blood, coating the right half of his matted body. Filter, torn. Tube, ruptured. He labored to even breath, and stooped to pick up a second rock. Nearest building had been swept. Menial still trying to untangle a severed torso, its thin dress of a shell fluttering where knees had been, from the end of its spear as it approached the alien. Queen sent notice that she had the matter handled, and it turned away without protest. So focused was the male on the throne, he did not notice when Queen’s naked claws seized and drew him up. His assault, ended. Silhouette, dark on the clouds of rising smoke. In another life, perhaps he would have been an Emperor. A Composer. A Queen. There was nothing she could say to a humanite. She said all she could as if he were one of her own.

“Your death will preserve the lives of hundreds of thousands. Your purpose is honored, and my voice sings the thanks of an entire species.”

He wound back, preparing to strike at her unguarded eyes. They flooded instead with his fluids, head and leg removed in the tearing pull. The Queen dropped down to the ground, and a pair of tenders hurried over to assist in the scrubbing of the viscera which now blinded her. Twelve hundred gone. Six hundred left. The fear that she had been wrong, that the thinkers were incorrect in their computations, their seen futures, was as biting to her as her own myriad jaws on the dwindling survivors. Each one found now brought out to the street before it was silenced. Hoping. Believing. Praying. Let him see. Let him see.

No joy. No celebration. Resignation upon the Solovyova’s voice.

“Received!” No time for emotion. No energy to spare on celebration. Continue the slaughter. Eighteen hundred lives she owed, and eighteen hundred she would repay. Know your enemy. Know yourself. “Form raiding clusters, three…no, two thousand. Soldiers and menials, proper balance. Commence the march. Hathan-Commander-!”

She took a step. It sloshed. When she looked down with fresh eyes, she saw the pool which had formed at the lowest point of town’s uneven streets. Limbs, floating. Bodies, sliding downward. Skthveraachk forbid herself consideration or recognition, and pushed through it.

“Received.” Alto and towards the fade. Soldiers broke from their ranks, formed up anew, clustering around the throne nearly perfectly in their center as had been rehearsed. Their concerto entered its second movement, the foundations set and first sacrifice made. Rugoro-Auslander was the first of the mining villages, the least of three. Her tens of thousands would finish here, and march on the next. Queen led the raiding probe personally, the armored throne uncovered and shining as it struggled to stay on course, as mere two thousand broke from the collective and began to race along the opened terrain. A line, straight and true. A spear for the unguarded, unprotected masses now known to be awaiting same fate as Rugoro. Mounds in the colony behind her shifted, parted to allow the humanites access. Not her concern. “Finish the task, Skthveraachk Soldier. I go.”

“Received. You go. Bring us victory, Skthveraachk Queen.” They did not need to spare their energy. Perhaps, in part, it was too the way the smells, the sounds, the blazing buildings and sodden streets of core and the weeping death left in their wake, faded behind them which urged her ever onward. Like she could feel the fire in those shrouded shapes, still begging, race throughout own heaving body. Two thousand led the vanguard across the wastes, spending all they had until stomachs clenched on air and bile. More. Faster. Reach their civilians before they could. Their few transports, not enough to evacuate all before the swarm arrived.

Interference. Not enough to sever the connection. Enough to prove the words true. Not yet. The scouts ahead signalled fear. They had not reached the mapped canyon yet. Faster, then. Disregard scent-markings, travel blind, race deaf and dumb with only the throne to guide!

“How long do I have?”

“I may not make it in time. Hathan-Commander, I am ordering my drones not to uncover you until appointed signal, or I am deemed silenced.”

That had been the plan she had sung to him. Breathless from the weight of her decisions then, breathless from the fire in her lungs now. They ran. Primary scouts signalled audible contact. Part of her fear. Part of her, a private desire for the silence which fast approached. Halfway to the next town, halfway removed from the crime against life she had left behind.

Contempt still oozed. Anger, still rung. But there was no falsehood in the Solovyova’s utterance over the Band. The shadow of the hostile wyverns passed over the primary scouts. The canyon, still missing. Throne was clustered around, protected by soldiers and drones all. No death came for the frontmost observers. It was not them the Prescott wanted. Tertiary scouts messaged a detected launching. Foremost soldiers, a breath’s worth of registered heat before their voices vanished from the choir. The Queen gazed high through clouded eyes to cloudless sky, saw the red and white explosions of light, and though her claws never faltered in their sprinting, her mind’s limbs spread wide to welcome them. Crescendo.

“Eighty-four voices silenced. Kinetic impacts.”

“One hundred sixty-three voices silenced. Fire.”

“Un-…able…link…-econdary scouts…silen-“

“Secondary scouts silenced. Probe arm eradicated. Sixty-three silenced.” Roles were reallocated as the four gleaming wyverns passed over them. Three, the blue and orange proudly displayed on every flag and standard seen within Guir before its fall. But one, blooming red fire as bodies of her children were flung into the air, pieces and chitinous segments all, struck clear with the gold chevrons of office and rank. Of Queen and Commander. She watched it fly above, even as she was tossed like a bucked phidite off her legs. Tumbling head over gaster. Two direct hits upon the throne. Internal readings, relayed as nineteen percent shields with multiple breaches. Blood oozed out from between the cracks. Not yet. Forward.

“Disregard. Protect throne. Forward. Forward! Locate canyon!”

“Protect Queen!”

“Protect throne or frenzy! Locate canyon!”

“Located!” There. A scout, wearing a shattered helmet, clutching a humanite lance weapon, wrapped in a concealing cloak of silver. Perched up upon a boulder, its antennae and forelegs pointing as it squirted line after line of marker. “Canyon located!”

“Cave?!”

“Present, as it was promised!”

“GO!” The wyverns circled back. From their sides, the rotator lancers spat a half-hundred bolts ever breath or two. Drawing lines, jagged and sloped, throughout the raiding party’s advance. What were six hundred silenced voices? Eight hundred? Nine? She had just silenced two thousand colonies. “Flee! Protect throne! Enter canyon! Enter cave!” Wings black like the shadows of a chelicerite’s webs above them, only the gift of the void to deliver. Her carapace was cracked. One of her spurs felt as though it was ready to dislodge. Throne shrieked warnings, blazed with light. Good. Good. The bodies covering it fell away one by one as it sputtered and dragged itself towards the safety of the canyon where the wyverns could not follow.

“No, Hathan-Commander!”

“My plan!” A thousand voices silenced. “My choice!” Twelve hundred. “My penance!” Five hundred remaining. A trail of carnage and smoldering bodies not yet dead, but no longer alive. She kept pace with the few soldiers left, the walls of the crevice looming ahead. “I will deliver the Prescott! Alive! The Herald gives his word, the Emperor swears. The Prescott, alive, for the future and peace of colonies unnumbered! We live for the Sovereignty, we die for the species! Do not protect me! Do not protect the Queen!” Impacts around her. Two pieces of metal scrap plunged into her as a shot blew clear through the throne’s roof, boiling that which lay beneath. “Protect the species!”

“Protect the species!” The wyverns dived forward. Corpses and wounded tumbled down the slope. A final salvo, a final hail, set the world with sound and fury behind her as once more she went airborne. Flying, like a humanite Skthveraachk thought in a strange daze of humor, freely through the sky. Until the reality crunched upon her, blowing air from her vents and spewing pheremones from her gaster. It would have to be enough. The four hundred and seven remaining drones pulled the throne, its engines failed, into the cave’s entrance as wyverns spun and darted above, trying and failing to find an angle to continue their assault. Its occupant had been dead for beats, now. The soldier selected to pilot it, a shriveled husk devoid of blood, vaporized from the inside-out. The Queen was dragged alongside it, her naked body always seeming more an oversized soldier than true member of her caste. In the darkness of the cave, internal threads sparked and shrieking continued, and she felt metal digging inside her abdomen whenever she moved too far in her breathing. Hathan was calling for her. Her children, feeling and gripping, signalled for menders she had ensured, deliberately, not to bring. Bait was meant to be devoured.

“Dis…regard, throne. Purpose. Achieved. Defensive positions.”

“Protect Queen! Protect species! Protect cave!” A few scouts. Sixty soldiers. Hundred, two hundred menials…it didn’t matter. Scout remained by the blackened pit’s mouth, gazing out from the wall of the open-aired subterranean cliff. Feeling, as the Queen felt, the rumbling of the Coalition’s vessels. Setting down to release their occupants. Twenty or more to a vessel, eighty humanites against four hundred wounded formites. Impossible odds. Irrelevant. Tongues licked across her, claws tried to reach into her and pull out the metal shards, but rescinded rather than risk infection without bactum present to sanitize.

“Coalition, landed. Multiple humanites, approaching. Situation, unpleasant. Bowels, emptied.” Helmed scout at entrance was trying to clack yellowed humor, but the terror it felt was undeniable.

“Am…here, Hathan-Commander.”

“Let them hear me…through the Band. It is not yet my final…note.” Lie? Truth? Wish? Tired. Did not matter anymore. Humanite truths, formite truths. War against soldiers. War against civilians. Against colonies. A planet of monsters, the smallest the Sovereignty or Coalition owned. Worlds filled with them, waiting, fighting, watching. So tired. “Not yet…a success. Hold positions. Wait. Soon.” They could flood the cave with their fire. With their weapons from above, perhaps. It was not a solution, merely a temporary stop. It would take little, but a few lives, to eradicate them. Skthveraachk would have used those lives without thought. A formite would have done so without flinching. Not a humanite. Not… him.

Only three hundred were capable of singing the concerto now, the Queen’s straining voice set at the lead of the ever dwindling ensemble. Each and every one, at the call from the mouth of the cave, let out an exhale which brought a wind artificial to wind and sigh through the cracks and boulders. A baritone shout. A hard, demanding tone. A man who had killed near more of her than the Sovereignty ever had. He was there. The Queen nearly drowned in her relief.

Claws wrapped around her. Her persisting hum, first amongst voices, led all through the final touches of the second act. They insisted, demanded, Skthveraachk remain. Eighteen of the raiding cluster were killed by the other hundreds as they frenzied, refusing to allow her to do what was good, for what was good was right, and what was right was necessary. Peeling the severed heads from her, spurts of orange emitting from the holes within her abdomen at each step, Queen paused only to touch upon the scout nearest the exit. The cloak was not quite white, more silvery. When she emerged, alone, reared onto four legs, slowly waving the obscuring fabric-metal over her head as a flag should be, she trusted it would suffice. Ranks of soldiers. Arranged in lines, forward, then further up on crags and rises, all aimed their weapons for her. Three, five shots at most, would be all it would take. And before them all, deactivating his pad which had amplified voice, a face of hair and lines. Wisdom of Queens, worry of age, shown to her until it had been set into the very shell of her core. His uniform was dirtied by sand as he approached, and stopped full ten lengths from her. She did not try to close the distance.

Not a single weapon lowered.

Alone. The humming from the cave, merely a backdrop. A desire to emerge, to protect. The hesitation, the slowness with which the soldiers around the General obeyed, were an echo of that same desire. Queen’s white flag came down, the pain in her arm at its raising dulled, as she forced instead the cross with which she had greeted the Pod. The Sovereignty. Once a welcome. Now, it had become a salute. Her vents flexed, and as the final act approached, her cadenza was sure and gentle.

“I am… Skthveraachk Queen, of Skthveraachk-Colony. I am War Queen, of the Imperial Sovereignty of Earth. I sing a greeting to you, from across a sea of stars and sky, with scythes folded.” The link was a fragile thing, through the sound of Band alone. Hathan was preparing to move. She doubled the number of drones upon his vehicles. Third chapter, fourth stratagem. Too soon to strike. Too soon to act.

Fingers twitched. Bodies tensed. They wanted her dead. They obeyed their Queen, as did all. Prescott removed his hat, rolled his neck in a slow circle. His internal bones cricked and clacked.

“Your study was effective. Your strategies…impeccable.” Another spurt. Metal must have punctured near her organs. It would be laughable to die here. Her final note would wait till she was done. “You have killed…thousands of my children. With only fraction of the Sovereignty’s forces. You are…an exceptional leader.”

She had, until moment ago. Watching the way his eyes sunk, his vision darkened. The cap was replaced upon his head. For a moment, she was back in Hollowcore. Finalizing the plans of the newest weapon which would have guaranteed her victory in the alto. Planning the rotation of the newest crop farms. Hearing, from far above, that Ktcvahnaah-Colony was swarming towards her. Antennae, lethargic and slow, tapped together in submitting laughter.

“My…partner. Hathan-Commander, says there is a term for this in your language. I believe he was referring to the notion… of ‘shit luck’.” There was a tug of something beneath the hair coating the mouth of the man. A single, brief sense of understanding. And then, it was gone.

“I understand your belief…in victory. But you have mistaken my intent here. I am not here to surrender to you. I am here to accept your surrender, before the Sovereignty arrives.” Twitch, in eye and finger. A lowering of hand to his pad, to bring up the display of his map. A map, which the Queen could see indicated still the absence of force.

“These are truths. As the same Hathan-Commander would say, it is…often the case, in humanites, that it is best only to reveal parts of the truth, bit by bit.” Her antennae dipped to the translator atop her head. An action which took but a breath, and though drew a few raises of lance, could not be halted. “Release the First of the Liars.”

Bodies fell away from the covering mounds. Bivouacs, that the Coalition expected to see in every swarm now. A way to hide their thinkers, scentcrafters, the vital components of their colony from assassination. Glinting metal shone out from the cracks in the dissolving barriers, heard through the Band as whispers in the Queen’s mind. The Cup, the symbol of the Sovereignty, blazing upon the hulls of the now thrumming aircraft. For as their armor, and as all their vaunted technology, the humanites scanned only for that which was powered. Active. Alive. A silent and deactivated wyvern showed no marking. A covered wyvern, carried on the backs of a hundred struggling and slowly crushed formites, showed as nothing more than a hump in river of bodies. Those bodies tumbled and fell, relieved at last from their duty. And upon the General’s screen, twenty signatures went active as engines roared to life but six divine beats from their location. His mouth set as a line. His mind, audible, churning beneath his exterior skull. The tiger, lured down the mountain by his compassion. Corpse, borrowed to resurrect the soul. And the chief, the General, the man and Queen who had and could single-handedly slaughter humanite and formite together by power of his mind, looked down as the Hathan’s wyverns began their impending approach, and encirclement.

“We have fewer than six beats, Prescott-General. Let us sing together. You…and I.”