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“Trust your wife to find our son. Trust your Sovereign to bring the armada. Trust in me enough to stay alive.
She stops and turns. “According to our Senate, you’re not my commanding officer. You’re a traitor.” There’s only one thing to do with doubt. Stomp on it. “Imperator, I don’t need your opinions. I don’t care about your feelings. I don’t care if you doubt the Republic. I don’t care if you hate its people. For this army, this is an extinction event. My only care is that my best weapon is sharp before zero hour. Will you be sharp, Imperator?” She snaps to attention. “As a rat’s teeth, sir.”
“Do you know what I learned from my father’s death?” I wait for him to tell me. “Not to ramble.” Exposed to the harsh elements of Io, Romulus wasted precious air on his last proclamations, and fell short of reaching the tomb of his ancestor, Akari. I swallow my reply.
“Fear those who seek your company for their own vanity. As soon as you eclipse them in the mirror, it won’t be the mirror they break.”
We fall upon them with malice.
“Life is meant to be felt. Else why live? Valleys make the mountains.”
“Please. This horse rides for only one man.”
“Don’t insult your own intelligence by insulting mine,” I reply.
But the measure of a man is not the fear he sows in his enemies. It is the hope he gives his friends.
Your brother sat him on his knee and told him that’s all life is. Moments you build only to see washed away. But that doesn’t mean it’s all for nothing.” I stop at the door and tap my temple like Daxo tapped Pax’s. “The key is having a long memory for the sweet, and a short one for the bitter.
But it is a tragedy to see any man sacrifice his nature for his vocation, much less a man I love so much. To be what we need, what I need, he must go to war again. All his life he waited to pass the reins to his children; now so few are left. It is not how he thought it would be, but he endures.
“If we cannot engineer salvation for our men, then vengeance will suffice,” Victra says.
