"Get the Royal Knight unit ready," Leonora ordered. The bridge folded into silence and obedience around her. "We'll break the enemy formation with them. Once they're divided, we fire without stopping. We have to take this battle very seriously if we want to avoid unnecessary bloodshed."
"Yes, my lady." One of the officers hesitated. "Should we leave the God Unit on standby?"
Her voice narrowed, and her temper flashed like steel. "There's no need. He thinks he's the only monster around here. I'll show him what other monsters look like. Prepare the Phantom. I'm deploying too."
Outside the viewport, the Kalkan sun leaked the color of hot iron across the fleet. "The Royal Knight unit is ready. We are entering the solar system. All Orbiton units ready to deploy in three minutes." Those three minutes felt like a countdown to everything.
Far below the bridge, in a detention cell that smelled of disinfectant and hummed with the drone of distant engines, Youri was bored. Boredom had always been dangerous for him. "Hey, guard," he called through the bars. "You wouldn't happen to have anything to drink?"
"Keep quiet. You're suspended. No drinks and no food until you leave this ship."
"Come on. Even prisoners get treated better than this. Just one sip." When the guard ignored him, Youri straightened. "I'm your superior, you know that?"
"As long as you're in the detention room, you're stripped of your rank and your authority."
"Great. So now I get to starve." He leaned his head back against the wall. "What did I ever do to that general of yours to make her hate me so much?"
"That's a question you should ask her yourself," the guard said, and walked away.
"Oh, now you talk!" Youri called after him, but the footsteps were already fading down the corridor. He was left alone with the metal wall and the sound of the engines.
Back on the bridge, the calm held right up until the Phantom launched. Leonora settled into its cockpit with the bridge's voices in her ear. "All units, follow me," she ordered. "Aim at your designated targets and leave no room for error."
"Yes, sir."
Then the comm chimed with a call that made steel bend. "My lady, you have a call from Count Markus."
"Put him through." Her polite mask slid back into place as his face appeared in the corner of her display.
"General, I'm sorry to distract you at a moment like this, but I have news from the homeland."
Her fingers tensed on the controls. "What do you mean?"
"The Emperor has issued a new order. Total annihilation of Kalkan. That includes the entire solar system."
"What?" Her voice cracked like a snapping wire.
"I'm sorry to have to tell you, but I do admire your effort to spare these people. You are ordered to return to the capital as soon as this is over. Please just deploy the God Unit." The call ended like a judge's verdict.
Something inside the cockpit shattered. Leonora slammed her hands against the controls again and again until the metal stung her palms. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" Her voice was trembling, terror and rage braided together. When she finally opened the channel again, she could barely keep it steady. "All units, retreat. Return to the ship. The plan has changed."
By the time she reached the detention level, Youri was asleep on the bench of his cell like a wounded animal, and a guard nudged him with the toe of his boot to no effect.
"What is he doing?" Leonora asked.
"I think he's sleeping, my lady."
The cell door opened, and the overhead light hit him full in the face. "Get up!" Leonora snapped.
He stretched and blinked, self-possession fighting with a hangover on his face. "Oh, it's you. Finally. Can I go?" Before he could sit up properly, her hand closed around his throat — not cruel, but relentless.
"You asked me a question last time," she said, her voice quiet and deadly. "I came here to answer it. What does a monster do when it loses its source of food?" She held his gaze. "It starves to death."
He laughed once, a short bark that had worn soft around the edges, and then he surprised her. His fingers closed around hers where they rested on his throat, and he squeezed — a pressure that felt strangely intimate and entirely foreign. "You're wrong," he said. "They feed on their own." Then he pulled her hand away, stood, and walked past her out of the cell as if she were not there at all, leaving nothing behind him but the faint smell of gin and a wrong answer.
On the hangar deck, Altopereh purred to life. "Altopereh is ready to deploy. Open the hatch." The bay sighed open, and the giant black machine slipped out into the void like a sleeping god waking up.
"Altopereh has launched, my lady."
A clinical voice cut into Youri's channel almost immediately. "Nice to meet you, D7. This is Count Markus. I will be supervising this operation."
"Keep it short, please," Youri said flatly, like a man who had calibrated himself to survive being given orders. "Just tell me what I have to do."
"These orders come from the Emperor himself: the total annihilation of Kalkan." There was not a trace of doubt in Markus's voice.
Youri let out a long breath, the sound of a man who knew exactly what the cost would be. "This is going to cost me," he said, and it sounded almost like a prayer.
"I understand your situation, but you are a living weapon, and orders given to weapons are absolute."
"Fair point." Youri's voice turned half warning and half something darker. "Then I'd advise you to leave the solar system. You might get caught up in the mess."
"Understood, D7." The channel clicked, and Markus was gone.
As the antimatter cannon began to charge, Youri opened a channel to the main ship, and his voice carried across the bridge where Leonora stood with her hands clenched at her sides. "General, I know you're listening, so I'll only say this once. Righteousness is for the weak. Only fools feed on it." He drew a breath, and the cannon sang with its terrible geometry. "A monster has no conscience, because it lost that long ago. So my sins are mine alone to bear, since hell is already at our feet."
A blaze of light swallowed the Kalkan system. The feed went white, the sky tore open, and one by one the planets winked out like candles. Then there was silence, and after it nothing but stunned static. On the bridge the only sound was the breathing of people who were breathing far too loudly.
"Altopereh has resurfaced, my lady," a report finally came, small and mechanical. "The pilot appears to be unconscious. We're sending a retrieval unit."
A little later another followed. "He's been taken to the med bay, and the God Unit has been safely stored."
"Call me if he wakes up."
"Yes, my lady."
Leonora stood among the fallout of her own command with her hands still trembling. "I couldn't do anything," she whispered, and those words carried all the blame she would ever be able to hold.
"Hell," someone on the bridge breathed.
"He might be right about that," another answered, in a voice that sounded like regret burned down to ash.