We reached the hangar level and Varis took off at a sprint. Craft were taking off all around us and heading out of the shielding. I could actually see the shielding when I looked out over the city. Clearly they'd turned it up to 11 as a result of recent events.

There weren't many craft coming back in.

I hoped that meant they were sending people out to take part in a rescue. Though from the size of that mushroom cloud, and from some of the damage reports Varis was getting, I didn't have high hopes there were going to be a lot of survivors from that explosion.

Maybe from out near the edges of where it went off, but it could be difficult to tell in a situation where all the buildings had shielding that was rated to stand up at least to part of a nuclear blast.

I shook my head. This was one sequel trilogy of an escalation from the empress. I could totally believe she'd do something like this, though.

It almost made me wish we'd already had a meeting with her. Maybe we could've done something to stop this. Maybe she would've been satisfied. Maybe she wouldn't blow up that building and all the people in it.

I shook my head and pushed those thoughts away. She was a despot. She ran one of the largest star empires known to humanity. She was one of our biggest adversaries.

That didn't change the fact that the mindset was the same for these assholes no matter where they were. No matter how big their empire was. She was going to pull something like this because someone dared challenge her. That's all that mattered.

"Over here," Varis said, gesturing for me to follow.

"General," Harath said, coming to attention and bringing his fist to his chest in a salute. "I got your fighter ready the moment I saw the explosion. I figured you might want it."

"Thank you, Harath," she said, nodding to him.

I nodded to him as well. He stood next to her fighter, and sure enough she was gassed up and ready to go. Even though gassing up a fighter wasn't something anyone had done for nearly nine hundred years back on earth. Even the legacy stuff was mostly converted to clean engines.

Which had resulted in a booming industry of aftermarket speaker systems that tried to make antique and ancient airframes look and sound and rattle just like the real thing even though the engines powering them were quiet fusion or solar.

That nod surprised me. Maybe I'd finally proved myself, or maybe he simply approved of me being willing to go out and fight the good fight. Even after the empress had shown she was willing to escalate to the point of dropping a nuke on us.

"Arvie, are you ready?" Varis asked as she climbed into the ship.

"I am," he said.

I took a moment to enjoy watching her climbing up into the ship. She had to bend down just a little to get in there, which gave me a nice view of her backside. I wore a goofy grin, and I was so distracted by the view that I didn't even notice a hand like a steel bar that went across my chest until I tried to follow her.

I looked down. Harath was staring at me. It wasn't quite a glare, but it was an intense look. The kind of look that said I didn't want to disappoint him.

"Take care of her," he grunted. "There's a reason the two of you are a battle pair. I don't understand why it's a human, but there has to be a reason."

He said it in a tone that told me he was still searching for that reason. That he desperately wanted to figure out what I was doing here. Well that made both of us.

I merely nodded at him. This didn't seem like the time for jokes or my smart mouth.

Besides. I'd do nothing less than everything to keep Varis safe.

He paused for another moment. He hesitated, and then he handed me something. It was a cylinder with a grip built into it. I stared down at the thing, frowning.

"What's this?" I asked.

Then I blinked. It was a sword. Fairly plainly made. Just a handle, but there was a button on the side. When I hit that button a thin filament popped out of the bottom and went to full length, and then plasma started to glow all around it.

Yeah, it turns out the lightsaber totally wasn't a thing that was realistic with any understanding of physics we'd discovered. Like that wasn't even one of those things where some alien species saw Star Wars or one of the numerous knockoffs or reboots or remakes that'd happened over the last thousand years, and assumed it was something we had so they made it.

But there were workarounds. Like having a thin wire made of super rigid plasma conducting material that could be used to direct and channel the plasma. It worked on a small scale, like the bread knife I used to threaten Varis at our first dinner date, or on a larger scale like this one.

This wasn't like a conduit, either. The plasma was out there and ready to cause some damage.

There was a simple mark down at the bottom. One of numerous livisk characters I didn't recognize because I'd been more interested in learning how to swear and taunt my enemies than in learning how to read stories about Dick and Jane throwing themselves into honorable combat to die for their empress.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"You are one of ours now, Bill," Harath said, clapping me on the back. "And I expect you to take care of our general. Do you understand? The mechanics are the hilt of the sword, making sure the blade can be carried into combat."

"Right," I said, looking down at the thing and back to him. I had no idea how I was supposed to clip this thing to my belt, but I figured I'd figure it out eventually.

"It will attach to your utility belt when you place it against the thing. It forms a small but unbreakable bond on a molecular level until you're ready to use it, and it will only work for you," he said. "Carry it well. I'm risking much by giving something like that to a human."

"Thank you," I said, nodding at him. I didn't need the link to feel the gravity of this moment, for all that I had no clue what in the sequel trilogy this moment meant.

"You're welcome," he said, nodding back.

I climbed into the cockpit. Varis turned and hit me with an irritated stare.

"What's the delay?" she asked.

"Sorry. I was having a conversation with Harath."

"We don't have time for you to have conversations with Harath," she said.

"Well he sort of gave me something."

She looked over at me. The look was sharp, but there was more curiosity than anything coming though the link. Like she wondered what he could possibly be giving me.

"A sword," I said, holding it up.

Her eyes went wide. I sensed surprise, but that surprise only lasted for a moment. Then she was going through the takeoff sequence. She didn't say anything to explain that surprise.

Again I got the feeling there was some livisk cultural thing I was totally missing here.

"I want us out over the affected building. Make sure you give Bill a flight path that's the shortest way there," she said to Arvie. "The fighter wings should be enough to keep the empress from trying for us."

"Certainly, General," Arvie said.

I blinked and turned to look at her as the controls on my side of the cockpit lit up.

"You want me to do the flying?" I asked.

"Do you have a problem being the one doing the flying?" she asked, arching her eyebrow as she turned to look at me.

"No. No problem with that at all," I said, grinning as I grabbed the control stick and started the thrusters. I hit the antigrav button and we moved off the ground.

"Air traffic has been cleared in the immediate vicinity," Arvie said. "There are several imperial fighter wings doing a close in patrol pattern around the outer edges of our territory, but for the most part they seem to be keeping their distance. Like the empress is hesitant to move in."

"They're probably just there to keep an eye on things," Varis said. "And to make us think there's a real possibility the empress means to invade."

"Do you think there's a real possibility she means to invade?" I asked.

Varis's lips compressed to a thin line. Dissatisfaction came through the link.

"I'm not sure," she finally said. "If the empress did want to go after us then it would be a costly victory, but she might decide victory is worth it to be done with me for good."

"Fucking wonderful," I muttered.

I pressed the throttle forward and the craft shot out through the shielding and over the city. I could see swarms of fighters moving around Varis's building, along with swarms of imperial fighters off in the distance. It looked like flocks of birds floating through the air. Or maybe like a school of fish darting around to avoid a predator. Sort of like what I saw in the central fish tank in Varis's building.

"Funny. It doesn't look like an evening for warfare," I muttered.

"It never looks like an evening for warfare when war comes calling," Varis said with a shrug.

She was busy tapping away at various controls. There was a holodisplay in front of her, and she was checking the damage to her building. As well as a display that showed her entire complex.

I'd been surprised to learn she actually controlled a chunk of the city that radiated out from her tower. Her control was more tenuous the farther you got from the tower.

There were other nobles who controlled their own little slices of the city. There weren't pretty little lines on a map and once you crossed that line you were out of one's territory and into another. No. It was far more amorphous than that. Not little nation states in the middle of Imperial Seat.

It was more that the farther you got from her tower, the less likely you were to run into somebody loyal to her. Sort of like gang territory in a city back on earth. Back when that was still an issue.

It was still an issue, of course, but there were plenty of politicians and corporate types who said it wasn't an issue. That robotic artificial intelligence enforcers were enough to keep anybody from turning to a life of crime, though anyone who was a victim of that crime knew that wasn't the case.

"Do you need help with that?" I asked.

"I need you to do a banking flight over that building and then come in for a landing," she said, her eyes never leaving the holodisplay in front of her.

"Banking flight over the damaged building and then coming in for a landing. Got it."

I moved in lower. I kept an eye on the imperial ships off in the distance that could come our way at any moment. Though the waves of Varis's fighters in between us and them would probably be enough to keep them from trying to come for us.

Maybe.

If shit really hit the fan then my best option would be to make a beeline for the main tower. As much as I wanted to stick around and mix it up with the empress right now.

Discretion was the better part of valor and all that. Though I'd heard a much better way of phrasing it. He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day. It was longer, but it was a good piece of wisdom I tried to remember.

There was no point in being the sorry son-of-a-bitch who died for his country, to paraphrase another great ancient general.

"Damn," Varis said as she finally got a good look at the damage. I looked down and let out a low whistle.

I almost expected to see a glowing hole in the ground. Like glowing green with radiation, for all that I knew radiation wasn't green.

Instead I saw a glowing orange hole in the ground with smoke rising up out of it. And a cloud of dust that reminded me of every unplanned urban demolition via munitions I'd seen in my career.

It looked nasty. As I flew over the thing we were buffeted by wind currents being kicked up by the fires. The beginnings of a firestorm that would never get off the ground because of shielding tech.

Shielding had gone up around the destroyed area in a cylinder that shot up into the sky. That was part of why we were being buffeted by those air currents. It was creating a localized windstorm inside the funnel that kept the fire from spreading.

Also? I could totally see lots of radiation warnings going off. Not that I was too worried about those. Varis had decontamination pods the same as everyone else. Plus she was always on a war footing, so there were enough to go around.

Not like on Earth or a colony world where they only had so many decontamination pods because they couldn't conceive of a world where somebody would drop a nuke on a city. Or at the very least they hoped and prayed they weren't living on a world where somebody would drop a nuke on them.

I pushed those thoughts away. It was time to focus on what was in front of us. I cast one last glance towards the imperial fighters in the distance and hoped they didn't come over here to start some trouble. Then I moved in for a descent that would set us down just outside the massive shield column preventing the fires from spreading to the rest of the city.

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