"Faraday him."

Thale's eyes snapped open moments before the cage came down. Three dark figures around the bed were crouched low and held subtech weapons – knives, clubs, snub nosed stubguns, their boots. The one holding the cage slammed it down, the fibermesh mask snapping tight around his nose, his ears, his mouth. Thale felt the pressure of it against his face, the muffling whump of his nostrils pressing completely to the solid, laytex like fiber.

"Cinch it! Now!" One of the men snarled, while another planted the stubpistol into Thale's stomach.

He pulled the trigger.

The hammer snapped down on the fleshy join of thumb and pointer finger as Thale jammed his hand into the mechanism. The gunman hissed behind his mask, but then Thale brought his head upwards. He took advantage of the Faraday cage wrapped around his head to smash his face into the man with the knife's face. The mask he wore crunched and he stumbled backwards with a muffled grunt. Thale's claws sprang from his fingertips and he leaped off the bed, slashing with his hand. The man with the club caught his claws on that and the club went whistling off into the dark. It cracked into the window that looked out over Eudaimonia's cityscape.

Thale's eyes could only see faint shapes through the mesh.

The man with the pistol lifted it up, snarling.

Thale snapped out his hand. The clavegun that was hidden in the wall above the Emperor's bed fired through the thin material. The massive, explosive slugs caught the assassin in the back. His shoulder blew apart and his head turned into a fine red mist. The other assassins sprang for cover, one shouting: "What the fuck!?"

Thale pointed with his finger, stitching a line of explosive death across the floor. But one of the men had leaped behind the imperial dresser – made, like so much of Rehoboam's old stuff, out of material denser than some planetary cores. The clave rounds impacted and burst on the surface like tiny supernovae.

Thale felt his lungs burn.

The assassin with the knife darted from cover and Thale snapped his finger to him, but the man leaped behind Thale. The clavegun let out a whining bleating noise as it tried to target a firing solution through his body. Thale spun and blocked the knife thrust at his throat with his forearm, knocking the assassins' arm aside. He thrust out with his own claws, burying them in the man's stomach. Their fiber armor gave, but he didn't scream and Thale didn't feel blood.

The knife, again, whistled at Thale's face. Thale jerked his head back, then caught the assassin's wrist. With muscles burning and heart hammering, he shoved and bent the arm backwards, driving the blade into a seam between mask and throat. Then, pivoting, he tossed the assassin at his fellow, who had emerged nowt hat the clavegun wasn't currently hammering away. The two went down in a pile of limbs. Thale grabbed at his mask, trying to work his claws in. His vision began to waver and fade as he felt the material stretching around his claws. He tugged and the mask drew back – but the added space had no air to breathe in it. He fell to his knees, his hands tightening and tugging more.

The assassin with the club stood. He had the pistol.

The door to the room bust open and a blazing, red bolt of light cut across Thale's vision. Several thumps followed and the red light flashed again and Thale felt fresh air explode into his face. The Faraday cage came apart and he gasped in breath. Sparks exploded before his eyes and when they cleared, he saw that Adoran and Enriquah stood before him. Enriquah held her twin bladed threshold staff in her hands and was beaming at Thale.

"Did they really think that'd work?" she asked, laughing. "A Faraday cage? Pfffttbbth!" She waved her hand.

Thale, his hand going to his throat, continued to breathe heavily. His head pounded and his tongue felt thick and fat in his mouth. His lips were numb too. He blinked up at Quah, who waved her hand and flipped her hair dismissively. "As if powers that reach across spacetime and make physics their bitch would be stopped by a bit of chicken coop and, what's this, nanomesh?" She snorted. "And it's not even top of the line-"

"Quah," Adoran said, his arm having slid around Thale's shoulder, allowing Thale to rest his head on his shoulder.

"-honestly, I'm shocked they went subtech with their weapons. If they were this ignorant, I'm shocked they didn't come in power armor!" Quah giggled and shook her head. "What a bunch of useless assassins."

"Quah!" Adoran said, louder now.

Enriquah turned to face the two of them. She leaned forward, and seemed to finally register that Thale was still shivering and gasping quietly. "...oh, right, suffocation is a little stressful," she said, nodding.

"Yes, Quah," Thale snarled. "Being strangled to death is a little stressful."

He stood, slipping from Adoran's arms, but allowing his hand to find its way to the big prince's hand, squeezing him. Adoran stood, so that the two would keep holding hands as Thale stepped over to the pile of assassins. The one he'd hit with the clavegun was little more than a lower torso. Red matter was spread all across the upholstery and splashed onto the walls and even the ceiling. A single hand had been left intact, but its fingers had been forced apart so his comrade could get at the stubgun. The one Quah had sliced up had been left in nearly as many pieces, thanks to the monowire of a threshold blade's edge.

But the one Thale had stabbed was still intact. Enough that he was able to yank off the mask and glare into his eyes. He reached into the Imperial registry with his mind and skimmed through it – finding the man's name and identification number before the door opened and his 'royal' guard entered. They were Darkstar and Antaras – Thale had learned the names of every Alliance Marine that Meetra had entrusted to his direct command. Enriquah had outdone herself in inventing a fictitious records for each of the Alliance marines, records notable enough that their assignment to guard the Regent was not going to raise any eyebrows.

That was one advantage of the size of the Hegemonic military. New soldiers were hardly noticed.

Darkstar kicked at one of the corpses, his power armor whirring softly. "How the fuck did they get in here?"

"That's what I want to know," Thale murmured. "This man is posted to a ship on the Far Watch Fleet. The San Diego." He frowned, slightly.

"That's not a standard Hegemonic name," Antaras said, his face-plate hissing back to look Thale in the eyes. "Where's it from?"

Adoran, his face set in a frown, spoke up first: "It's a black ship. The Hegemony rechristens any ship that kills a planet with a name from a Home city that was destroyed. San Diego...that's one of the nuked ones, wasn't it?"

"No, that's Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Quah said, her hair writhing. "San Diego was hit by an antimatter bomb."

"Oh, well, I stand corrected," Adoran said, rolling his eyes.

Thale shook his head. "This subtech equipment is Hegemonic black ops gear, for anti-Liminal duties. Most of this stuff isn't even mothballed. They must have fabbed it up special for them." He touched the chest plate. "This armor has magnetic repulsors that are designed to disrupt a threshold blade."

Quah whistled cheerfully as she started to twirl her staff around in her wrist.

"I never said they disrupted it well," Thale said, then stood. "Lets call a council to talk about this." He looked back down at the corpses, then sighed. "And...I think I'm going to start sleeping in the Liminal Knights barracks again, protocol be damned."

Adoran grinned and let his eyes sparkle. Quah was considerably less restrained. She threw her arms into the air. "Yippie!"

***

Ever since the death of the Emperor and the destruction of his gene-bank, the Hegemony had been operating under the regency of Drak Thale. As the one of the sole survivors of the attack and a relatively famous Liminal Knight, the population of Eudaimonia had reacted the same way they would have if Emperor Rehoboam had simply been killed and replaced with his clone-son: By engaging in the week long mourning celebrations, then returning to their day jobs. The upper echelon had been trickier. Thale still remembered demonstrating his right to rule through the most expedient means possible during the first meeting with the admiralty.

Admiral Johnstone had demanded: "By what right does this masked freak have to give us orders. We don't even know if he's human behind that mask!"

Thale had stood. Walked around the table.

Then thrown Admiral Johnstone through the smart-window, which had flashed into vapor on a single mental command. Johnstone had struck the slanted roof that led away from the meeting chambers to the three kilometer drop straight down to the foundry pits that ringed the admiralty tower. Thale had sprung onto the window sill and waved his hand – popping out a vent-vane out just in time for Johnstone to grab onto it with his fingernails.

Johnstone had quickly pledged his fealty then and there.

Fascism had that one advantage. In the end, the protocol, the history, the pompous chest beating, the justifications and the rationals, all of it boiled down to one brutal fact: He who could, did. But Thale was not so foolish as to think he had won anything but a deferment of the coup – in effect, Johnstone had simply pushed it from his inept hands to someone on the admiralty who knew how to lie. Which was why Admiral Johnstone had, two weeks later, been replaced by the new up and coming Admiral Metara – who had a remarkable string of victories in her record and plenty of loyalty to the Regent. She had then ingratiated herself to several other Admirals, who showed a worrying disloyalty to the Regent.

Those Admirals had been a mixture of people who believed, earnestly, in the Hegemonic party line of protecting humanity from the chaos and disorder of a Chain without guidance, and petty tyrants who wanted to grind anyone who wasn't blond and blue eyed under their heel.

The latter had been uniformly found guilty and sentenced to death.

The former?

The former were sitting around the meeting room table, with Admiral "Metara" at the head. Meetra grinned wryly at Thale. "Did Lady Venn reach Home?"

"Not yet," Thale said, his stomach knotting. He walked into the chambers flanked by Adoran and Enriquah. Enriquah was adjusting her skin colors with a thought, making her look like a poorly done visual effect. Thale took his seat at the table and rubbed his throat.

"What's wrong?" Admiral Karak asked, his brow furrowing. He had, until Johnestone's unfortunate trip down an elevator shaft, been the youngest of the admirals, and was still the one who was most prone to speaking his mind.

"Several assassins from the Far Watch fleet tried to kill me tonight," Thale said, frowning slightly. "They had subtech weapons and armor and what they believed would be a game winner: A Faraday cage." He shook his head, his tail lashing from side to side behind him – the only clue to his lingering nerves. "But my question is how the hell they got to Eudamonia?"

Meetra tapped at the table, their fingers working at a furious rate. They whistled. "Sixteen worldkillers, six of them being blackships. Why the hell did the Emperor post such a heavy force so far from anything of interest."

"They're three jumps from Home," Admiral Gi said, her voice stern and rough and slightly mechanical – her throat had been ripped out by a railgun slug that had clipped the man next to her in a battle. She had survived only be dint of being within several seconds of the medibay on her ship. "I think the homeworld of the human race would be of interest."

"It's not," Meetra said, their voice flat. "Home's ecology collapsed before the Domain even founded. Their heavy resources were mined, their ateroids were tapped. The Machines unwove their gas giants to make shellminds and computational cosmii. The only reason to go to Home is if you're a Liminal Knight walking the constellations."

"Well, see what one Liminal Knight has done for the alliance," Admiral Karak said. He looked at Thale. "Did you find anything in the records about it, Regent Drak?"

Thale sighed. "I've had Quah investigating it."

He'd wanted to tear apart the Imperial databanks until he found the dark secrets and hidden truths of the Hegemony. But enacting a stealth coup of the largest empire on the Chain, even with the assistance of the entire Alliance of Free Worlds, was a heavy task. He had been spending days in speeches, meetings, using kinesthetic feedback to spot liars and traitors, observing citizens through the surveillance networks of the planet spanning city of Eudaimonia, putting out orders that would take the pressure off worlds that the Hegemony was in the midst of devastating. To keep up appearances, he had needed to don his mask and his gloves dozens of times and ride a agrav-chariot through the streets of the city, so the people could see their Regent and marvel at his black uniform and flowing cape.

Every time he came home, he felt dirty and longed for Venn to be there, to hold him and stroke his ears.

Quah stepped forward. "The only references I've found to Home and the Machines are oblique references to a prophecy that founded the Hegemony. But that prophecy itself hasn't been written in any of the records I've been able to find. And I've found a lot of records." She shuddered. "You don't even want to know what Emperor Daniel Babylon Xerxes got up to in his free time." She waited exactly zero seconds for anyone to prompt her before blurting out: "He fucked his own clones!

"Well..." Admiral Gi said, her mechanical voice whirring and warbling as she cleared her throat. "Consenting adults, ah-"

"Fresh from the tanks," Quah said, her voice dripping with melodramatic horror.

Admiral Gi sighed, loudly.

"Quah," Thale said, his voice soft.

"What?" Quah blinked. "Oh. Right. Anywho, there have been several prophecies that were written down, but all of them came from after the founding of the Hegemony and referred to a string of military disasters that were narrowly averted." She smiled. "Without the information provided in the first prophecy, the Hegemony would have been shattered by the Republique in one of their first battles." She giggled. "Once you strip away the dross and the propaganda, the...early victories of the Hegemony relied more on luck than our innate prowess. Rather than being a lean, relentless march towards inevitable victory, the early Hegemony bumbled a lot. For example, the Battle of the Three Singularities? Totally botched the follow-through because political infighting meant that the admiral of the gold fleet didn't send their remass tankers to the worldkillers in the engagement, so four were dragged into black holes!" She giggled. "And that was the worst defeat the Republique handed the Hegemony that year, and that was in a battle where every Republique ship was shot down after two days of fighting!" She shook her head. "What kind of boneheaded moron does that?"

The admirals pursed their lips. For some obscure reason, they didn't look particularly pleased to see Quah giggling over the deaths of thousands of Hegemonic naval officers.

"Anywho!" Quah said, oblivious. "Those prophecies started to dry up after the Hegemony got real momentum. That seems pretty interesting, don'tcha think?"

"Why?" Gi asked, her voice sounding even more dour.

"Simple: There's no such thing as a prophecy," Quah said, her hands on her hips. "Nothing, not even a Machine, can predict the future."

Meetra cocked their head. "They're essentially gods, Lady Enriquah-"

"Oh!" Quah's hair flared up, the tips wriggling. "Say that again!" She pointed at Meetra. Meetra frowned.

"They're essentially gods?" They said, clearly wondering where Quah was going with this.

"No, no, the other part!" Quah said. "Lady Enriquah, I love that-"

"Quah!" Thale snapped, his ears pinning back and a snarling growl creeping into his voice.

"Oh, right!" Quah blushed. "Basically, any and all true prophecies would require you to have perfectly modeled every single thing in the universe accurately. That means you'd need to essentially simulate the entire universe down to the last atom, the last quark, the last vein of Lord Drak's impressively huge cock!" She spread her arms wide. "That computational power is beyond even the capacities of the vaunted Machines."

Thale's cheeks heated. Admiral Karak tried to cover his face with his hand. Several other Admirals were less subtle. Admiral Gi slowly cocked her head, her thoughtful expression pulled into a horror-show by her ragged scars. Meetra shook her head. "They're Machines. They've had millenni to advance their technologies."

"Even if every single atom of a computational system was capable of doing calculations, you'd need a mass equivilent to the universe to calculate them and, I guarantee you, the Machines do not have a second universe hanging around. We'd have noticed." Quah grinned. "Also, computational speed slows down when you have your computronium atoms being smashed by radiation – meaning the machines would need to be in quiet places – the space between galaxies, effectively. Since they'd need the same mass as the universe, they'd run out of room!" She spread her arms. "And you know what this means, right?"

Blank stares from the admiralty.

Quah frowned. "Come on, it's obvious!"

Thale sighed. "Spell it out, Lady Enriquah," he said. The tone of his voice made Adoran grin and Quah gasped with joy.

"They weren't prophecies!" Quah said. "They were spying. Simulating the future is impossible – but hacking into fleet computers and astrogation systems is piss easy. Literally, I work harder to wet the recycbowl than a Machine would need to pluck the Republique's war plans out of their comptech and chuck it at a Hegemonic Knight in the form of a wobbly wobbly dreamy woop de shoop!" She wriggled her arms dramatically.

"Sire, is she just making up words now?" Ki rasped.

"Yes, but the point stands," Thale said, frowning. "Why the hell would the Machines do that?"

"I dunno," Quah said, shrugging. "But it's kinda neat, huh?"

"While this is fascinating," Meetra said. "It doesn't help us with determining how the assassins got here, nor why they're going after you."

Thale's tongue slid along his lips. A suspicion started to form in his gut – something deeper and darker than he wanted to think about. And so, he gently put it into the back of his mind, to worry about later. He looked back at Meetra, nodding. "The how matters less than the where. Sixteen worldkillers isn't a lot compared to the overall forces we have. But it is significant in its concentration. Most planetary systems have a single worldkiller – even with warnings sent by QE coms, they're all strung out. That means that the commander of that fleet could begin to roll up the Hegemony directly. They only need to take several of the most potent worlds on that end of the Chain to have a power base."

"In which case we trade the small civil war for a big one," Admiral Karak whispered.

"With both sides being space fash!" Quah said, helpfully.

"We're not-" Admiral Karak bit back the words he had been about to say. He shook his head. "We are no longer fighting for the false ideology of the Hegemony. Everyone is here because we believe in protecting humanity from chaos. From collapse." He sighed, his jaw so tight with stress that Thale could see the jumping muscle in his cheek. "We..." He sighed.