The enemy hadn’t cared enough to continue the fight. They were more interested in destroying Dasnoyk and anything else along the way to Edsall Dark. As the senior officer in charge of the fleet, he was happy that the battle had lasted a significant amount of time and that the losses were limited to a few fighter pilots. As a soldier, his ego was bruised by the fact that the enemy barely considered him worth confronting.

  “How long for us to get to Dasnoyk?” Desttro asked his nav officer.

  “Eight hours, sir.”

  Desttro’s neck tightened. By the time they caught up to the Hannibal, anyone living on the frozen colony would be dead. If he were the type of commanding officer who flew into fits of rage the way Hotspur had many years earlier, he would make his way across the command deck and strangle someone. Instead, he took a deep breath and stared out at the stars.

  “All the fighters made it back aboard their flagships before we left?”

  The logistics officer checked his display. “Yes, sir.”

  Each flagship under his command was flying at full speed to intercept the Juggernaut. Outside the main viewport of the Hellship, the stars in front of him began to rotate toward his side. Without any gravity to fight against in space, the ship picked up more and more speed until it was throttling through the galaxy at such a pace that only the stars in front of him remained constant.

  He wasn’t racing so he could save anyone on the frozen moon. They were as good as dead. What he was trying to do was to save the next colony after that one.

  We’ll see how it goes when we meet again, he thought, already strategizing on how to react to the Hannibal defensive perimeter of portals when they ran into the Juggernaut in eight hours.

  110

  The public memorial for Julian was performed the next morning. There were many places it could have been held—at the space port where many of the flagships he commanded were docked, in the fields outside CamaLon where many other important ceremonies had taken place over the years. The place Talbot and Margaret settled on, though, was the public square, the same place Julian had been treated as a hero upon arriving back from the Cartha campaign.

  Just as many people were there for his funeral as had been in attendance for his return as a victorious general. The mood of the public square, however, could not have been more different than it had been weeks earlier. Gone were the cheers and the applause, the children shouting support, the adults celebrating the man they thought would solve all of the Round Table’s problems. In their place were crying children, adults who groaned with sadness, and others who openly wept. There was no parade through the streets. No march. Only a collection of people standing shoulder to shoulder, all focused on the stage that had been built between two banners of the Round Table.

  Talbot was there, as were Octo and Winchester. Margaret was not. She told Talbot she didn’t feel up to leaving the house.

  Hector was there, and he was the first person to move toward the microphone. Before speaking, he spotted Cash and Cimber near the side of the stage.

  “Friends, representatives, countrymen,” he began. “Please hear me out with what I’m going to tell you.” A slight murmur went through the crowd, and he was unsure what rumors had already spread through the audience. “You know me as an honorable man. When you hear what I have to tell you, please understand that it is coming from someone who gave much of his body so that peace could exist. Judge my words as those of someone who lost friends, his own peace of mind, and peace of body on the account of others. I will also say that I loved Julian no less than anyone assembled here.” He took a deep breath as he scanned the faces in the crowd. Old. Young. Distraught. Accusing. Hopeful. “Then you all must be wondering how I could kill General Reiser.”

  Many in the crowd must have heard the rumors that Hector had been part of the mob that killed Julian because they stared at him, waiting for the explanation. Most people, however, even the ones that had heard the rumors, hadn’t actually believed they could be true, and a wave of shock ran over the audience. Thousands of people in the crowd gasped.

  “I didn’t kill Julian because I loved him any less than his own family loved him but because I loved the Round Table more. Would you rather General Reiser had lived and you all became slaves, or he died and you all remained free? That was the choice I had.”

  The crowd settled somewhat. Most of the people who had been distraught were no longer crying. The few men who had looked and sounded as if they might storm the stage folded their arms and considered what they were hearing. After all, the very same people remembered shouting that Julian should become emperor without ever truly considering what that entailed.

  Hector looked out amongst the faces and said, “I weep for Julian as much as you. He was a valiant officer and I honor him for that. But he was ambitious, and I couldn’t stand by. If by defending the Round Table and peace I have offended anyone here, please tell me.”

  A rumble of murmurs passed through the crowd again. Everyone looked to the people beside them for reactions.

  “Not I,” a woman called from the middle of the square.

  After the first person spoke up, more followed.

  “Not me.”

  “Not me either.”

  “None of us.”

  The same people who had welcomed Julian home and begged him to take a crown now gave Hector their forgiveness.

  He nodded to all those in front of him. “I did nothing more to Julian than I would expect others to do to me if I was filled with the same ambition. However, none of the glory General Reiser earned should be diminished by this. Nor should anyone remember his final offenses after everything else he did under service of the Round Table.”

  There were whispers behind him, movement, and Hector could sense that Talbot and the others gathered on the stage were growing impatient to have their turn to speak.

  “With this I leave you: I killed my best friend for the good of the Round Table. I can tell you, I will never kill another living thing except if you decide I deserve the same fate. If that happens, I have an ion dagger ready for myself.”

  He spoke these final words the same way he would say the sky was blue or the desert was golden. The crowd, stunned by his honesty, by the lengths a man without legs and with only one of his original arms was willing to go to serve the common good. Everyone stared in awe without speaking.

  Only after Hector nodded a second time and swiveled atop his energy disk so he no longer faced the crowd did the shouting begin.

  “Hector!”

  “Long live Hector.”

  “We love you, Hector.”

  “Live, live.”

  The shouting grew louder until a child yelled, “Hector should be our leader,” and then the crowd broke into a frenzy at the idea.

  Hearing the people clamor so easily for someone else to lead them, Hector’s eyes closed with sadness.

  He moved back toward the stage and said, “Please, let me go home. I have nothing else to give of myself.” He turned and gestured for Talbot to step beside him. After Julian’s son was there, Hector put a hand on the young man’s shoulder and told the crowd, “I’m leaving, but you must stay and listen to Talbot Reiser, the son of the man we mourn today.”

  As he was exiting the stage, Hector heard a man tell his son that Julian had been set on becoming a tyrant and had deserved what he had gotten. He heard a woman tell her child that CamaLon was lucky to be rid of General Reiser. Part of him—the part that had slew Julian—agreed with them, but he also didn’t like knowing that if he could hear them say those things, Talbot must also be able to hear them.

  He looked over at Cash and Cimber. Both men nodded, pleased by Hector’s words and the affect they had on the crowd. Then Hector turned and began making his way home to Portia.

  111

  Talbot watched Hector depart from the stage and make his way through the throngs of people before finally disappearing at the edge of the town square. After the man was gone, Talbot looked out amongst the crowd that had at one time worshipped his father and the next moment had cheered his death.

  There was no better way to start his speech, he decided, than to borrow from Hector: “Friends, representatives, countrymen.” The crowd’s murmurs and restlessness, following Hector’s words, faded only slightly. “Lend me your ears.”

  When the people seemed more concerned with talking amongst themselves than hearing Talbot speak, the air went out of his chest. A younger version of himself would have seen that he obviously had less charisma than both his father and Hector and would have left the stage and gone home. The officer who had survived the Carthagen trap, however, who had fought for the chance to live another day, who had sworn to avenge his father, stayed exactly where he was.

  “Please, I’ve come simply to bury my father, not to praise him.”

  The crowd stopped talking then. All eyes focused on Talbot. He saw in them the look of men and women who no longer knew what to believe. They had wanted his father to protect them. After Hector’s speech they were cheering that he had been cut down. They would have no patience for more words that tried to sway them back in the opposite direction.

  “The evil that men do lives after them but the good often disappears with their bones. Julian was my father, so I hope that isn’t what happens to him. You all heard Hector say my father was filled with ambition, that he needed to die. I didn’t know Julian as an ambitious man. I knew him solely as any boy knows his father. But Hector said he was ambitious and Hector is honorable so it must have been the case.”

  The crowd, unsure what to think of what they were hearing, remained perfectly quiet. Not even the children squirmed or made a noise. Everyone stared intently to hear what Talbot would say next.

  “Did Julian seem ambitious when the people shouted for him to become emperor? If he was, why didn’t he accept the offer? Yet Hector says my father was ambitious and Hector is an honorable man. Each one of you saw how many times Julian was offered a crown. And yet each time he refused. Was that ambition? Yet Hector says he was ambitious and Hector is an honorable man. You all loved Julian, and for good cause. So what, then, prevents you from mourning him now?”

  He stared out at the throngs of CamaLon’s population, at the aliens of all types, sizes, and colors. None of them knew what to make of what he had told them. He glanced over at Cash and Cimber, the two representatives that Octo said had been accomplices in the murder. Both men looked at the crowd, their eyes darting for the first sign of a mob, their lips pursed with tension.

  Someone in the crowd said, “Everything Talbot has said is true.”

  Another yelled, “I was there when Julian refused the crown. How was that a sign of ambition?”

  A woman shouted, “If it was, all of us should be killed because we’ve never accepted crowns either!”

  Talbot looked out over the crowd and raised a hand for silence. “Yesterday, Julian’s word could have stood against the entire galaxy. Now, he’s dead. I won’t do Hector or”—he turned his attention to Cash and Cimber—“or the others who killed my father an injustice by saying they should be killed as well.” Cash flinched. Cimber took a step back, away from the crowd. “I won’t say that because they are honorable men.”

  He withdrew an old fashioned note, written in ink on a piece of parchment rather than a typical electronic message, and held it in the air for the crowd to see.

  “I have with me a note my father wrote during his campaign to the Cartha sector. I had thought to read it but I know it will be too upsetting for everyone.”

  He paused, allowing the crowd to shout that of course he should read it. Some in the audience said they wouldn’t leave until Talbot told them exactly what the note said. Others stated it was their right to know what Julian had written.

  “You will see how much Julian loved the Round Table,” Talbot told everyone in attendance. “You will know that he loved it every bit as much as Hector and the others who murdered him. We don’t know what kind of personal grievances they had against my father. Surely they must have had something against him to do what they did.”

  He stopped and stared at Cash and Cimber again, daring either man to speak up and call attention to themselves. Neither man moved, let alone said anything.

  Talbot turned back toward the crowd and said, “I don’t have Hector’s way with words. Men and women wouldn’t follow me into battle the way they would with him. I’m just a normal guy, no more and no less. I don’t have the credentials that Hector has or the friends on the Round Table. All I can do is tell you what I know.”

  The crowd began to sway back and forth in waves as calls for him to read Julian’s note grew louder. He held the piece of paper out so they could see the parchment, knowing they would have no hope of reading it for themselves from where they stood.

  He put the letter back in his pocket and said, “Julian wanted all of his possessions—his house, his money—to go to the people. He’s leaving everything to each of you. He wanted nothing for himself. Rather, he only wanted all of you to be happy.”

  “He loved us,” a woman shouted from the crowd.

  “What has anyone else ever done for us?” a man asked.

  “No one on the Round Table has ever done anything for us. They can’t even handle a warlord. Julian wanted to give us everything.”

  The cries of outrage continued, grew more fervent, until the inevitable happened.

  “The killers need to suffer,” someone shouted.

  “Let’s burn their houses down,” another called.

  Instead of protesting the call to violence, others in the audience seconded the notion. Talbot was sure the face he was showing to the people was emotionless and cold. On the inside, though, he was smiling at successfully avenging his father. When he looked over at Cash and Cimber to see what they thought of his words, he noticed they were both gone.

  112

  Brigadier Desttro was two hours from the frozen moon of Dasnoyk when three reports came to him. The first was a message from a freighter full of people who had managed to leave Dasnoyk’s colony just before the Hannibal arrived. That had been received thirty minutes ago. By the time the Round Table fleet got there, all life on the moon would be extinguished.

  As frustrated as he was, he forced himself to continue providing an aura of calm to his officers. His task had been to stop the Hannibal and he had failed. While it was commendable that only a few lives under his command had been lost, that would offer no consolation to the people who had called Dasnoyk home and who were now dead.

  The entire time his fleet raced across the sector to intercept the Juggernaut, he had been formulating additional strategies for facing the enemy a second time. The prior battle’s length negated any chance that he would be able to watch every angle of the holographic recreation of the confrontation before they once again met in battle, but he knew in which areas he had fallen short and in which his forces had excelled.

  The second report that came to him was of a completely different nature, although it too tested Desttro’s resolve. The lieutenant who handed it to him must surely have seen what it said. Instead of letting on that she was also flabbergasted by what she saw in the report, the lieutenant simply handed the data screen over to Desttro and went back to her station.

  The report said that a communication had slowly made its way across the galaxy after supposedly originating from a colony on 16-Tuero. The message’s sender insisted that one of the colonies on the planet had been spared because someone there had removed every symbol of the Round Table. If everyone else wanted to be saved from the Hannibal, all they had to do was reject the Round Table.

  He read the report twice, his face an emotionless slab, then set the data screen aside. If he were in his private quarters there was no telling how he would react. Maybe vocal disbelief. Maybe anger. All they had to do was remove any indication that they were affiliated with the Round Table? They were the Round Table! They were its essence, the uniting force that protected—or was supposed to protect—all life existing within the swath of the galaxy that had rallied together. The idea that they would disown the Round Table was absurd. The idea that the representatives on Edsall Dark would leave the Great Hall and agree to never return, to send the galaxy back to the dark ages of local galactic warlords preying on the weak, was laughable.

  Of course, that was assuming the message had any validity, which Desttro severely doubted. Was he really supposed to believe that the Hannibal mechs delivered death everywhere they went, yet would restrain themselves because some local villager had destroyed anything containing the blue, red, and yellow cogs? It was far more likely that everyone on 16-Tuero was dead and that whoever sent the message was trying to have fun at his fleet’s expense or else was playing a cruel joke after being abandoned by the fleet. Without wasting another thought on the message, he went back to contemplating the next confrontation with the Juggernaut.

  That only lasted a minute, however. The same lieutenant handed him another comm screen. This one was security protected. Desttro pressed his thumb against the screen while a beam of red light scanned his eye. A moment later, the third and final message formed on the screen.

  He read it in disbelief that was unmatched even by the preposterous report of the Hannibal supposedly leaving one colony alone. That report could have easily been made up. This one, however, was an official communication from CamaLon. General Reiser, the man Desttro had followed into the Cartha sector and then saved in the Orleans asteroid field, was dead. Initial reports said he had been assassinated by a small faction of representatives of the Round Table who feared a military coup.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Desttro noticed movement, people turning toward him without saying anything. His officers were looking at him as if expecting him to do something. It was only then that he realized he had let out an audible groan upon reading the news.