The silverfish, as I later learned such assassin devices were called, rushed towards me at frightening speed. The only noise was the quick scuttle of its legs. I cried out and leapt to my feet. It was the only thing I could do before it jumped at me.

  I fell backwards, only barely dodging. I scrambled to my feet, and I didn’t look back as I ran for the door, but it was already opening. I nearly slammed into Kybit, desperate to get out of my quarters. I hesitated, surprised by her sudden appearance. I tried to turn and point at the danger, but I felt a metal hand on my shoulder. Kybit wordlessly threw me behind her with such force that I hit the wall panel on the other side of the hallway.

  I watched breathlessly as the silverfish lunged again from the doorway. Kybit plucked it out of the air with her hand and tried to crush it in her palm. She tilted her head, confused as the silverfish resisted pressure which would’ve cleanly snapped bone. Instead, the machine’s chitinous armor began to heat up, and after a few seconds, Kybit’s fingers were clenching a white-hot, squirming thing. Her fingers were losing the battle, slowly but surely melting.

  She did not show an ounce of concern on her face as she turned and slammed her hand against a nearby wall panel. The force was enough to bend the sturdy metal, and the noise made me clasp my hands over my ears.

  Her fingers snapped off, and the silverfish jumped at her neck. Wasting no time, it clawed through the cables and synthetic tendons, trying to get so deep that it could not be extracted. Kybit expressionlessly reached into the molten hole in her neck and violently yanked the silverfish out.

  Seeing no other option, Kybit drove her fingerless hand through the wall panel, and with one quick movement of her arm, sheared an opening through. Behind was a power conduit, thick tubes carrying millions of volts of electricity. She did not hesitate to plunge the silverfish through the cables, piercing the safety insulation.

  Lightning arced out as the lights flickered. I saw Kybit’s body stiffen and shudder for several terrible seconds, the Nekomata’s humanoid body contorting the way no human ought. Finally, the safeties activated. The electricity stopped and the lights went out. In the darkness, red emergency lights flicked on, and I saw the silhouette of the scorched Nekomata slowly withdraw her arm from the conduit, still clenching the silverfish. The machine was lifeless in her fist, its mangled body fused to Kybit’s fingers.

  Her porcelain face had been terribly burned. Half of it was rendered inert. Even as her personality heuristics kicked in and she attempted a graceful smile, only the left part of her mouth tugged upward. One eye was filled with friendship and the other stared lifelessly at me, numb as the Nekomata so often are.

  A moment later, Ingrish was by my side, helping me up.

  …

  “He tried to murder my son!” Ingrish shrieked, hands slamming down on the table. She had taken me to the mess hall where Rykar was busy with welding tools on the silverfish. He had helped Kybit detach and install temporary replacement arms, and she was busy self-operating with a solder iron. Tut was nowhere to be found, as there was no one for him to fix, and I was on a high-chair, far from any surfaces with my knees drawn close. I was not so much awake as simply aware, the terror of what had happened keeping me from sleep. But I was also so exhausted that I was struggling to follow along.

  “Tyrell tried to murder my son!” Ingrish yelled again at Rykar, as he obsessively worked on the silverfish.

  The red bird glanced up with his yellow eyes. “I know you’re upset, but we have to be very careful right now. Kybit’s plugged into the bridge. I’m having her run more scans on the ship, this time keyed into the alloy composition of this silverfish. We need to know if we’re infested. For the meanwhile, I pulled the safeties on the electrical grid. Most of the ship’s compartments are running tens of thousands of volts. Let’s make sure we’re safe before we do anything else.”

  Ingrish took several deep breaths, running her hands on her head. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Thank you, Rykar.”

  “Always here to help,” Rykar mentioned as he turned back to the silverfish. With a pair of tongs he lifted part of the machine’s exoskeleton and examined it closely. “It’s none of my business, but I feel I ought to ask, do you intend on breaking your promise to Amon?”

  Ingrish’s fingers clawed against the table. “Tyrell tried to murder my son.” She spoke as if that answered the question.

  Rykar was silent for a long moment as he poked through the innards of the silverfish. I didn’t look, but I imagined the machine’s guts were no less horrifying than the outside. Rykar picked up some bizarre mechanism I couldn’t recognize and examined it closely.

  “You know, it’s weird, how Amon has a knack for finding people like us. People who need a different path than the one they’re walking down. He gave me a rule. No thieving, not if I was going to fly his ship. I remember when you begged him for help. He had a rule for you too.”

  “It’s Vas’ life this time.” Ingrish spoke through clenched teeth.

  “Amon Russ is the most dangerous man in the galaxy. If he chooses to go to war against Tyrell, you’ll have your blood and then some. But it’s his call to make. You would be taking that from him. And that’s if all goes well and you don’t get caught by the Rhodeshi.”

  “You think I would be sloppy enough to get caught?”

  Rykar glanced up. “No, I don’t.” He paused and thought for a moment. “You know, I was once the most feared pirate in the Artorius Sector and a dozen others. I rubbed shoulders with the most violent men in the galaxy. Do you know who they told horror stories about? I’ve heard enough about the Golden Court and their assassins. What they trained you to do.”

  I blinked, as for once, Ingrish didn’t censor the word like she normally did. It is odd—how certain things can only be said by letting the other person overhear them. Ingrish knew Amon wouldn’t like it if she informed me of her past. But she was in such a frenzy that she wanted me to know. She wanted me to know I didn’t have to worry about being harmed again because she was going to rip Tyrell’s beating heart out before he got another chance.

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  Although that was what I imagined, I learned later that Ingrish was proficient in a far more sophisticated way of killing.

  Rykar lifted another bit of the silverfish’s innards and looked at it. “I don’t doubt you can do it. So, I ask again. Are you going to break your promise?”

  Ingrish was quiet, but Rykar didn’t need her to speak to know the answer on her face. He sighed deeply and got up from his seat. “Kybit, turn the safeties back on the electrical grid. I think I know where the rest of the silverfish are.”

  The Nekomata looked at him puzzled but obeyed.

  Rykar reached down and picked up an electro-thrower, a pistol-sized weapon with a disproportionately large barrel at the end. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Be patient, I don’t want you to have the wrong target.”

  Ingrish read his mind instantly, and if she had been angry before, her wrath intensified to a star. Her normally reserved mind burned with such hate that I could feel it as pinpricks on my skin. I awoke at this, but she remained motionless.

  Rykar shortly returned holding Oberyn’s medallion, scorched after he blasted it several times. Picking up one of his tools, he smashed it open and several more silverfish spilled lifelessly from inside.

  …

  I don’t know if Oberyn accounted for Ingrish being a former Golden Court assassin. Those details, unfortunately, have been lost to time. But what the Game Master implicitly understood was that there was no way to break Amon Russ on the battlefield. There was nothing left of the man to break—except his purpose.

  The play was to let Amon get close enough to Tyrell, enough for the trillionaire to get worried and attempt to secretly reach out to Ingrish. That much at least was in Oberyn’s calculus. Ingrish would refuse him as she obviously would, and then the silverfish could do its work. It was a perfect story of revenge and retaliation, a moral lesson characteristic of the human species. It was also a story that would get Tyrell immediately disqualified, robbing Amon both of his purpose and object of his own revenge in the coliseums just as he was to fight General Kairon.

  I don’t know the ending Oberyn predicted would happen. I believe there was an acceptable range of outcomes, as one often has with such complicated schemes. But Oberyn’s masterstroke, the summit he yearned for, the once in a lifetime narrative he had worked so hard to tell, would’ve been Amon in utter despair, killing himself with the zero-sword to spite Kairon his suicide.

  That was what the Rhodeshi Game Master gambled everything on.

  But of the thing I do know for certain, the variable Oberyn failed to account for, the fatal flaw in his thinking that undid all of his plans, was that he didn’t know Amon Russ had the Pirate Lord of Artorius as his personal pilot.

  It was such an improbability that one would’ve had to have been a madman to consider it—just as crazy as Rykar installing three different security systems around my quarters, alerting Kybit the moment the silverfish had breached the first layer. Just as crazy to think through Waylon Tyrell’s perspective believing there was some humanity left in the man. Just as crazy as Rykar running a molecular microscope over the alloys to identify trace particles consistent with the medallion.

  It is, as I think, entirely improbable that all of this occurred in the way that it did. And I am sure some will accuse me of historical revisionism—that there was no way the infamous Pirate Lord of Artorius had actually faked his death and was secretly living on the Aphelion. Such a story would stretch the suspension of disbelief to its breaking point for anyone. However, as I have found, reality often contrives odder circumstances that can be put to fiction. And so there are many events in history that defy storytellers, that they cannot put in their narratives because they would naturally lose the audience.

  But since this is a historical account, I do not need to worry about such things.

  …

  I slept in the mess hall that night as I was afraid of going back to my quarters, and Ingrish had to coax me over the next few days to convince me it was safe. However, I noticed her attention was entirely distant now. She watched the Pa’Zac tournament with fervor, staring for many hours at the Game Rooms and especially Oberyn. The rage did not lessen with time.

  Ingrish kept the news of what had happened quiet, acting like nothing was wrong. She reached out to the Rhodeshi Game Master. There was to be a party at the match between Amon and General Kairon. She asked to be allowed to attend as his guest, to which Oberyn reluctantly agreed. I imagine he sensed something was wrong, that Ingrish should’ve been raising hell with the Game Wardens over my murder—that something of my death should’ve come out.

  But this is speculation. It is sadly impossible for me to journey back in time and question the Game Master on his final thoughts.

  However, what I do know of what happened in the coming days, is that Xurak agents were hard at work. The terrible race we encountered on the derelict were nearly finished with their plans, preparing a wholesale invasion of the Rhodeshi system. Embedded infiltrators were disabling security systems, rerouting patrols, and slowly peeling away layer by layer everything that stood between them and the Rhodeshi homeworld. None of it was detected by the Rhodeshi surveillance because in many cases the Xurak were the Rhodeshi surveillance.

  They had planted fusion bombs on the Void Aegis, the most critical defense infrastructure of any solar system. Preventing dark space translation, once the bombs went off, warships could enter real space all the way to the orbit of Rhodon itself.

  Additionally, on several space stations, they had hidden rail cannons to be fired upon the pleasure cruises and coliseums, meant to rain flack on the satellite networks and overload the Rhodeshi laser-grids. During the attack and for three days afterward, the wreckage rained fire on Rhodon. The infrastructure was so crippled that they couldn’t prevent the leftovers of the battle from further tearing apart their homeworld.

  On the day of the invasion, the Rhodeshi Supreme Commander of Defense was going to be strangled in his own office chambers, by one of his most trusted lieutenants no less. Similar assassinations would be carried out all over the system. Captains were murdered on the bridges of their own star cruisers, followed shortly thereafter by the rest of the command crew. The formidable weapons of these vessels were then turned on allies and didn’t stop firing until they were destroyed.

  In most cases, it took sustained and prolonged plasma fire to finally put the Xurak infiltrators down. That meant on the day of the attack, across the entire Rhodeshi military and defense infrastructure, there were only three infiltrators who were killed before they could achieve their secondary objectives.

  The final accounting in the galactic record, is that the attack which took place on the seventeenth day of Jashesh, 102,972 A.V. was one of the most successful system invasions in history, with a total and catastrophic defeat of the Rhodeshi military. Had the Xurak been interested in conquest, it would’ve been the destruction of the Rhodeshi Homeworld and the scattering of their people.

  But such an objective was too low for the Xurak interest.

  This event marked the day the Xurak announced themselves on the galactic stage, stepping out of the shadows. The coming decades would be wracked with waves of panic as other species were terrified of infiltrators in their own ranks. Technologies were developed to detect Xurak subversion, trillions of heat-units spent in fear of such an attack ever happening again. The Scythans call this day the Truth of Jireh. The Dalfaen call it Sisha-Mu, The Wave of the Dark Sea. The Rhodeshi used to call it Aratach—The Humbling.

  Now, by my hand, they call it Unu-Aratach, The Lesser Humbling.