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Toroi awoke to a bed empty besides for him. At first he groped around on his pallet blindly, searching for the missing warmth of Uelo's body until, with a sudden start, he sat bolt-upright, alone and cold.

The room seemed so empty now without Uelo's accoutrements, the large rose-coloured pillows, the flower-patterned shoulder-sack that contained the lotus man's clothes and other items that had sat in the corner, mostly ignored but now conspicuous in its absense, the clavikora Uelo had serenaded him with the night before. Even the little engraved brass incense bowl. All gone, as though it were all but a dream.

He slumped back again as, the clarity of wakefulness gradually returned. He stared at the ceiling for a long while, listening to the chirruping and songs of the early morning insects and birds. Normally he wouldn't waste a spare minute lying in bed, his eyes would barely be open before he'd be dressing and calling for breakfast, but the strength wasn't in him yet.

'Just a little worn out, that's all, better just lie a little while longer.' He reassured himself.

Memories of lying entwined with Uelo bubbled up traitorously in his mind. Brief phantasms of feeling sleek fur covering taught muscle moving beneath his hands, sighs and moans that were sweeter than song and the heated intesity of their kiss. Gone now. He felt as though he ought to weep, but he couldn't bring himself to. No, he wouldn't shed a tear, the last time he had done that it had been an admission of defeat and a surrender to fate. Never again, he was in control now.

It was presentation day, the day Baronet Wei's yacht was finally scheduled to arrive, and in a few days he would be wedded.

'One year, my lord,'

That was right. This was not the time time to wallow in self-pity just yet.

'Treat your sapphire husband well, and with honour, and in one years time I shall return to you.'

Therein lay his lifeline, somthing that could pull him from the morass of despair, there was something he could control.

"I'll hold you to that, lotus man." he whispered into the half-light, and felt a renewed conviction filling him.

For the first time in years, that morning Toroi summoned the servants to dress him, somehow it felt right that on this day, at least, he should do things exactly as tradition dictated. The weight of the vitrite over-robe felt like armour on his shoulders, and with his shiversword at his side, still in it's utilitarian red-lacquered scabbard, and his hair re-bound with it's golden ring and black-steel needles, he felt like he was girding for War. He wore some of his small collection of jewelry that had been recieved as gifts from well-meaning family friends and locked away in a safebox, largely forgotten, until one of the rare occasions when he felt that it would be suitable to bring them out. He decided on a matching set of six enameled rings and a pair of wide blessing-engraved silver thumb rings, leaving his middle finger on each hand unadorned, and a bracelet of scrimshawed Jaegercat teeth.

When it was done he dismissed the servants and closed every blind in the room. He kneeled before his shrine-cabinet and grasped both the handles, they hummed slightly as the biometrics read his prints, sampled his DNA and pheremones, before finally clicking open. It was a simple affair, just a lucky octagonal mirror, a few carved-ivory charms, a small steel plaque engraved with the names and titles of several ancestors that had been deemed auspicious for his birth, a mishmash of paraphenalia from both the ancient warrior-cults of Xanshin and the imported Yaakharii ancestor-worship of the old Eagle Empire. He took up the nanostylus resting in a jade holder carved to resemble an archaic inkwell and studied his reflection in the lucky mirror as he applied the stylus to his fur, drawing the outline of the three moons of Xanshin upon his forehead; the central full moon and the twin crescents, one above and one below, their outlines touching the surface of the central disk. He clicked the setting on the stylus and tapped the sketch he had drawn, instantly metamorphosing it into a thin yellow outline filled with deepest carnelian - the full mark of Xanshin, worn only during special occasions. In turn he traced the outline of the crescents beneath his eyes, highlighting their redness with threads of yellow.

'War paint,' he thought 'Once, these marks were war paint and my ancestors wore them to bring fortune in battle, now they have been civilised and put to other uses.'

Part of him still wondered whether their purpose had changed that much at all.

There was purpose in his stride as he made his way to the greeting hall, there was no need even to announce his entrance as two servants flanked the door in anticipation of his arival, pulling the ornate lacquered doors wide at his approach.

Upon the raised dais that took up one side of the halls two rows of cushions had been placed; one row of seven for his siblings and their own spouses and two more in front of them where he would sit with the Archduke and Archdutchess during the first part of the formal presentation.

The hall looked resplendant in reds and golds and the flashes of more exotic colour provided by the vases filled with ample bouquets of Byzantine flowers, easily the brightest and most diversely-hued natural flowers in the Empire. Days of work by cleaners and nanite deep-cleansers had made the whole room look like it had just been constructed rather than being thousands of years old. The screens had been opened out to look over the vast, eye-catching fields of colour-shifting peacock grass. Weather-control satellites, normally left inactive save for quelling dangerous hurricanes, had been moved in over the area, focusing the sunlight to warm the earth, sending sweeted breezes wafting through the manor and burning off any rain-bearing clouds.

He was lost in thought as he watched the winds toss the iridescent peacock grass about in bright ripples, mostly thoughts of Uelo which he refused to feel guilty about, even if his mind should be occupied by other matters right now. Idly, his fingertips strayed to his lips, bruised and tender from the night before. Every indrawn breath was still flavoured by Va'Se.

A keening from his noetically-honed hearing alerted him to approaching voices and footsteps and he gathered himself with a deep breath. The family had arrived.

They were all there, dressed in formal garb of Ro'Xanshin, his parents, Jashiid and Tusade, heading the group. Besides him and his younger sister, Hisari, all the scions of Ro'Xanshin were already wedded; Janai and second-son Seyocu, his brothers, with their wives Nesara and Seris, elder sister Ebranii with her husband Rubril from the Minor House Fenlat. It was strange seeing Ebranii without the red crescents of Ro'Xanshin beneath her eyes, replaced by the two yellow fang-shaped marks framing her right eye, but she was Fenlat now and so wore the symbol of her husband's House. Naturally, Rethan was there too, trailing behind at a discreet distance, he may not have been family but the Maestro rarely left Jashiid's side.

"Toroi! My boy, there you are, I was beginning to think you had run off." His father said, amusedly.

'You have no idea how close...' Toroi thought as he dragged himself back to the present.

"Not quite yet, father, I have some business to attend to first." Toroi replied with a smile, giving his father a shallow bow.

~~~@*@~~~

Yaroi didn't know exactly how much sleep Wei had managed to snatch in the end but nonetheless the young lord looked renewed. After all his fretting and distraction, now that the time was finally here he seemed to have gained a measure of quiet resolve. Yaroi found him sitting alone, staring out a porthole at the psychadelic neutrino streamers of wayspace, dressed once again in full presentation garb, the metal-vaned thermal hand fan of the Yusho nobility resting closed in his lap.

Yaroi cleared his throat conspicuously, instantly snapping Wei from whatever private thoughts were occupying him.

"Ah, Captain, have you spoken with the bridge crew?" Wei said, turning to face him.

"Yes, your honour, in under half an hour we will be translating out of wayspace." Yaroi replied, standing to attention for good effect. The dress uniform always made him feel like full military protocol was necessary, especially when he had all his medals pinned to it, a good sharp salute made them clatter in quite a satisfying fashion.

Wei nodded. "Excellent." he said and snatched up a small injector ampoule from the table at his side, He twisted off the clear plas cap, put the contact point to his wrist and depressed the injector button. The oxy-jab gave a quiet hiss and Wei winced for a split second before tossing the spent ampoule into a bin and rubbing at his wrist with the back of his hand.

Oxy, the commonly-used monicker for metaglobin, provided instant refreshment with no addictive factor and fewer side-effects even than caffine when taken within the recommended dose, little wonder then that it was the Empire's favourite breakfast drug.

Wei took a deep breath and rose to his feet. "There. I trust the surface transport has been readied?" Said the mouse-lord in an unusually authoritive tone.

"Yes, your honour, all is in readiness for your arrival."

"Very good. At ease, Captain." Wei said, primly.

Yaroi sagged slightly, returning to a more neutral pose, consciously loosening his muscles in series. As much as he liked the pageantry of it all, if only for its shameless kitch', it had always struck him as ironic that so much military formality actually worked to lessen one's combat effectiveness. Stand to attention for too long and you seize up, become stiff, stress-toxins build, all combining to make you as wooden as a plank should the real action begin. Formally, the blademasters distained such affectations, loose-limbed and ever-ready was their way. Still, it was fun to play soldier now and then, just not too often.

"I must say, your honour, I'm suprised you aren't wearing your shiversword, it would go rather well with the whole ensemble."

"I'm not quite ready to make that great a breach of protocol just yet, captain." Wei replied, laughing demurely.

"Hmmm, well, perhaps not," Yaroi agreed, reluctantly. "I am glad to see that you are in a better state of mind, though."

"Of course," Wei said as he turned to leave. "Anxieties or not, I have been preparing for this day my whole life."

Of course, Yaroi realised, this marriage of Wei's was an arranged one, the terms of it were finalised with Ro'Xanshin only months after his birth as insurance against continued Lashani aggression. Again he was struck by the difference between common and noble life; that, despite possessing such great wealth and power, scions were used like gaming chips by their House peers, traded like so much currency for political favours. At the command of his House, Wei was literally giving up everything he owned to a man he had never met with the implicit possibility attached that he could end up shunned and virtually banished at this man's pleasure. Any doubts as to the mouse-lord's bravery vanished in that moment.

Mutely, he followed Wei and his attendants to the ship hangar. The Dragonfly's atmospheric lander was as much a marvel of Yusho engineering as the ship itself, its pearlescent hull designed with the same insectoid proportions that characterised Yusho craft design, giving it the form of a great silk moth near to a hundred meters in length with contra-gravity repulsors in the wings to make descent as smooth as a ride on a riverboat. In the subterranean factory-cities arthropods brought by the Siren colonists in ancient times were one of the few lifeforms that could eke out a niche, they seemed to show up everywhere in Yusho engineering and art.

Including the hilt of Wei's shiversword, he remembered, as much a piece of art as it was a weapon.

Inside, the presentation parade stood ready; four dozen chanters, musicians and flower-girls stood at the head of a hundred Yusho guardsmen in formal dress, blades at their sides and polychrom-laser assault rifles resting on their shoulders. The soldiers flanked a gilded hover-sedan artistically fashioned into the form of an archaic carriage with veil curtains on three sides, the lifters disguised inside its golden faux-wheels.

'Giftwrapping.' Yaroi thought, ruefully, casting an eye across the assembled crowd.

"Noble on deck!" He bellowed, his voice echoing through the cavernous hangar bay, swiftly followed by the rhythmic thump of booted feet standing to attention.

The carriage extended a stair of gold-coloured mimetic metal which Wei ascended, it folding back seamlessly once he was inside and seated, the gauzy curtains folding smoothly closed. Though slightly obscured, he could still see Wei kneeling inside, eyes closed, looking almost meditative.

'And there's the gift.'

There was a soft chime before the speaker-system cut through the muffled whispers of the small crowd.

"Byzantium-Tertius Waygate echo sighted, transmiting clearance and beginning final approach." Said the voice of the ship captain. The speakers cut out and were replaced by an image from the hololithic projectors set into the ceiling, they showed a direct transmit from the external cameras, of a shadowy circle of bent and distorted light hanging amid the rainbow-streamers of wayspace like the lens of a god's monocle; a waygate meniscus.

For the first time in a week, Yaroi allowed himself a moment's relaxation. It was like seeing the light at the end of a very dark tunnel; mission complete, the Baronet delivered safely to Byzantium.

Still, it seemed strange that Lashani hadn't done more to try and stop them considering what was on the line. Seriously, just the one assassination attempt? They were getting slack.

~~~@*@~~~

The vast, segmented metal hoop of the Waygate dominated the greeting hall's viewscreen, like a ring on a bed of black velvet in a jewelers shop, stars glittering like diamond-dust behind it. Laser-red warning lights flashed about its circumference as it prepared to energize its hyperspacial meniscus, right now the segments were being seperated to enlarge the ring and allow the Dragonfly to pass through.

The early guests had arrived to join them in the hall, several more would be arriving over the next few days to attend the wedding, even, it was rumoured, an envoy from the Imperial family. From his seat on the dais Toroi oversaw all the conversation, mingling and minor politicing that inevitably accompanied a formal gathering among House nobility. Envoys from Houses Salandri, Ur'Zhonguo, Sayavana, Herros, Ro'Kobash, Ka, Kel'Lantinvanii and Meriset were all in attendance, with Veoni present as the envoy of Nal'Galagar and Rubril representing Fenlat. Together they formed the tangible representation of the intricate web of alliances that Ro'Xanshin had built up around itself over the course of its rise to power. And there weren't just nobles present either; guildsmen from the Golden Peony and Twelve Fortunes cartels were in attendance also. Toroi fought to repress a smirk as he watched the corpulent toad guildsman, Consul Poteris of the Golden Peony, swagger arrogantly through the crowd in his gilded moisture-suit, jewels dripping from the heavy chain of office about his bloated throat and the gem studs pierced through the webbing of his fingers. He wouldn't be feeling quite so sure of himself once he discovered that the terms of the marriage contract with House Yusho would mean that the Golden Peony cartel wouldn't be able to extort Ro'Xanshin out of the rightful returns from their foodstock surplus for a good long time. Twelve Fortunes were major customers for Ro'Xanshin armaments and likely to be largely unaffected by the union, Ro'Xanshin slamfighters and meson cannons were needed in sectors that didn't pass through the Yusho waygate system, near the borders where pirate skirmishes were common.

Even still, it should prove a mighty potent lesson in humility to all guild members in attendance, whether their revenues would be affected or not. Toroi had never been one for the idea of 'keeping the commoners in their place', it was just his experience that he had always left the presence of Poteris and Huikai, the representative from Twelve Fortunes, with an urgent desire to bathe. The scheming bastards made his sword-hand itch.

Still, all of it was secondary in his mind, still his thoughts returned to Uelo whenever he let them drift for even a moment. And with them came a crushing sense of loss that turned his heart to a lump of cold lead in his chest, it felt like he had finally found something, something that he had been searching for his entire life, whether he knew it or not, and then had it slip through his fingers.

'Because that's exactly what happened.' Came a thought, unbidden, into his forebrain.

He bit his lip to avoid cursing aloud at the jab of near-physical pain that thought brought. He didn't know whether to weep for the Lotus Man's absence or curse his name for playing such games with him. Why leave? Why turn down an offer of the Jade Contract he himself had seemed to desire? The flimsy pretext Uelo had given him seemed foolish to the point of cruelty, it was never expected that he and Baronet Wei were to be wedded as anything other than a political move, the idea that Uelo's presence could have somehow damaged their relationship was ludicrous; there was no relationship, and there never would be. One only had to look at Veoni to see that much, he and his wife practically lived unrelated lives, save for the brief times when he returned to Praxis to at least make a show of doing his duties, and Veoni was hardly unique. He and Wei would be no different.

Maybe he had lied about wanting the jade contract, surely Toroi couldn't really have been the first one to ever profess love to Uelo, perhaps it was simply his way of letting him down gently. That's what the lotus people were supposed to be so skilled at, wasn't it? Making each and every client feel special, loved.

No, He couldn't stand to think about Uelo like that. Maybe it would have been easier to just chalk up his feelings to lotus path witchcraft and try to ignore them, to bury them along with every other thought and emotion that offended him, but he couldn't admit that that was the truth, not yet. He'd cling onto hope and in one year he'd either be rewarded or he'd know what a fool he truly was, but not a moment sooner would he surrender to despair.

A soft hand on his knee snapped him from his reverie.

"What's the matter, dear? You look ill." said his mother, Tusade.

He met her earnest, open gaze for a moment before clearing his throat and finding his voice.

"It's nothing, just a little too much brandy last night, that's all." He said, immediately regretting his choice of words, the memory of the sweet burn of brandy was the last thing he needed right then.

"You're sure? You're not letting your fathers games get to you again are you?" she said, knowingly.

"No no, nothing like that." Toroi replied, airily, before a sudden revelation occured to him. "Mother, why didn't you tell me about all this, this business with the arranged marriage with the Yusho? I can understand father getting some hairbrained scheme," he paused to look over his shoulder at the Archduke but he was engaged in some heated discussion with Rethan and apparently didn't overhear him. "But I'd have thought I would at east have heard about it from you. I mean it's hardly normal, is it? To go through your life with marriage plans you never even damn-well knew about until they were sprung on you at the last minute."

"Oh, I'm sorry, dear, between everything it must have just slipped my mind." She replied with that far-too-innocent tone that father used when he was in the middle of a plot.

"You were in on it too!?" Toroi said, his ears going flat. "Merciful ancestors, how I ever managed to keep my sanity this long, I'll never know." He added with a sigh, pinching the bridge between his eyes.

"Don't be surly, it doesn't become you. Actually, I was being honest, the truth is it was an awful long time ago and by the ime you were old enough to know what it meant it had slipped my mind, such things will happen." Said the Archdutchess, her tone returning to normal.

Toroi just grunted a dismissal of the topic, it was pointless arguing about it now.

"So what's really the matter?" His mother pressed, honest concern demanding an answer.

"It's...just nerves, I suppose." He said, lamely, his throat freezing before he could give voice to the true answer.

Tusade seemed unsatisfied, and he knew she could sense he wasn't being completely truthful, but she let the subject slide with nothing more than a 'hmm' of acceptance or skepticism, he couldn't tell which.

Dully, Toroi returned his attention to the viewscreen and the Waygate, warning lights still blinking. There was something odd about it, something not quite right, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. It wasn't until he tried a noetic analysis that he realised what the discrepancy was.

'The gate defaults to one-point-five thousand miles in diameter, given that the relay for the live feed is located on the moon, and the gate orbit is about a hundred and fifty thousand miles outside of that. Then using the Agnexis nebula as a waypoint, and given the distance between the warning lights, the gate hasn't expanded past... two thousand miles.'

"Father..." he said, quizically, turning to the Archduke's seat.

He had intended to ask as to the specifications of the Dragonfly, for a transport yacht to make the distance from the Sirens to the Byzantium system in under a week it would need neutrino sails at least three thousand miles in diameter, and thegate didn'tseem to be expanding any further. But his father was no longer in his seat, instead, he and Rethan were speaking animatedly with a white rabbit wearing the uniform of a Ro'Xanshin astrometrician and a worried expression.

"One moment, mother, I just have to speak with father about something." he said, rising from his cushion with a glassy tinkling from his vitrite overcoat.

"What about, dear?"

"Oh, nothing really," he lied, deciding for the moment not to let slip what he thought was happening. "I shall return in a moment."

It wasn't until he got closer that he noticed the presence of a sound-dampening field surrounding the trio, apparently the situation was serious enough that they didn't want any of the guests overhearing their conversation. Foolish, almost everyone here was a noble, and that meant that many of them would have noetic skills and all but the most self-absorbed of them would be able to deduce what was going wrong before long.

"Shut the viewscreen down." He said once he was inside the dampener field, the sounds of the assembled people becoming hushed even as the conversation of his father and the astrometrician came into focus.

"Ah, Toroi, nothing to interest you here, why don't you go back to-" His father protested.

"I know exactly what's going on, father, shut the viewscreen down before everybody else does, make some excuse but shut it down now before there's a panic." said Toroi, his tone firm enough to make even Rethan blink in suprise.

He turned to the astrometrician. "You, why isn't the gate expanding to the full size, the Yusho transport must have neutrino sails larger than it's configured for?" he said.

"There's a jam, one of the gate segments' lock systems has stopped responding, it's not allowing us to expand the gate further." The rabbit replied, hesitantly, holding out his datapad.

"Maestro Rethan," Toroi said, addressing the old grey fox. "You being a scientist, could you tell me what exactly would happen if the Yusho transport were to attempt to translate through the hyperspacial meniscus with the gate ring too small to allow its sails through?"

Rethan's ears flattened. "Aye, I can tell you exactly what would happen; all partitioned matter would have its charge and spin-handedness inverted, converting it into antimatter in an environment where its matter opposite is widely abundant. In layman's terms, an explosion big enough to light up Byzantium as if we had a second sun."

"Hmmm, well that interests me greatly." Toroi said, fighting down a pang of fear.

"Have you tried contacting the Yusho?"

"Yes, yes! It was the first thing we tried, we're locked out of the waycomm grid, some kind of computer virus."

Toroi studied the pad for a moment before seeing a solution. "Can you energise the meniscus without a gate segment?"

The astrometrician shook his head. "We've already tried the self-destruct on the gate segment but it's not responding."

"So you can energise it while missing a segment?" Toroi pressed.

The rabbit nodded wearily. "We can lose one or two and still allow something the size of a Yusho transport through, though there would be no way to get a high-speed ship through until it was repaired."

"What about the planetary defense weapons?" Jashiid suggested. "A tactical meson strike would be enough to blow just about anything."

"Destroy a single gate segment with a meson cannon? It would be like trying to sew with a shiversword, begging your pardon, milord." said the rabbit, remembering his manners at the last moment. "It would end up taking out too many segements of the gate, and there's no way we could energise the meniscus then, not for something that large."

"Oh, merciful ancestors, we can't use the grasers, the EMP would fry the whole gate!" The Archduke growled in semi-frantic frustration. "Damnation, we need something more accurate."

"Can we get a signal to the fleet?" Said Rethan.

"On the other side of the planet? They'd never make it in time with the ammount of coordination it takes to get them moving, we need something with a gun up there now, there's less than half an hour until the Yusho are due to breach the gate."

Toroi was breaking into a run before the words had fully left his fathers mouth, pausing only to shout over his shoulder before he left the circumference of the dampening field. "Shut that viewscreen down now!"

And then he was running again, tugging off the constraining folds of the presentation robes, dropping the priceless vitralis overcoat in a tinkling heap and sending gold-frogged red silk flying in streamers behind him until he was down to the black underobe and could run unimpeded. In the direction of the slamfighter hangars.

He barely noticed Veoni until the wolf was already at his side, running beside him. Silently, Toroi cursed that bizarre skill of his, he'd never known anyone else who could sneak up on him without him sensing them from a hundredfoot away.

"Tovarich! Where are you going, don't tell me you've actually decided to make a run for it after all!?" Veoni whooped with a combination of nervousness and excitement.

"Veoni, give me your link." Toroi barked between breaths, mid-step.

"What?"

"Your link, damnit!"

"Well, allright, tovarich, just do not break it, it is new." Veoni said, reaching inside his pocket and handing the device to Toroi.

In a blaze of panic-borne motion, Toroi brought up the comm interface and keyed in the code for the hangar bay with enough force for his nails to leave scratches on the screen, causing Veoni to issue a pained half-moan.

"Hel-" came the voice of Loi before Toroi cut him off.

"This is Viscount Toroi, I want my slamfighter prepped immediately, screw the accelerators but I want a full spread of high-yield plasma missiles, you hear me, full spread!" Toroi barked into the link.

"Ah, erm, milord, we have quite alot of transports in at the moment, what with the guests, so we haven't much time to-"

"Screw them! If my slamfighter isn't ready in five minutes then you'll be scraping the remains of the main guests from the surface of the moon, without an environment suit, clear?"

"Yes, milord!" came the equally panicked reply and Toroi shut the link and tossed it back to Veoni.

"Der'mo! What was that all about?" Veoni said, pocketing his link with a reproachful side-glance. "You know, if you are running away then a slamfighter is hardly the best ship to do it in, we can take my yacht if you li-"

"I'm not running away!"

"Oh? Shame, I thought you were actually going to do something fun without me having to threaten you at gunpoint first." Said the wolf, wistfully.

"Look, you half-pickled pervert-"

"And proud of it!" Veoni interjected, happily.

"-the gate is going to die, and it's going to take the Yusho delegation with it, unless I get up there and perform a little medicine on it first." Snarled Toroi, sprinting round a corner with Veoni in chase.

"The kind of medicine you perform with a full spread of plasma missiles, tovarich?" said Veoni.

"Think of it as 'exploratory surgery'."

"'For psychopaths'." Veoni added.

The slamfighter was still missing half its missile complement by the time they arrived in the hangar but the loaders were working at full capacity and it took only a few minutes more with the prep-crew assisting the autoloader by hand to fill the missile tubes with the forty MK4 'starhammer' missiles, slim tubes of solidified ionised hydrogen that between them could vaporise an unprotected city. Given the sheer scale of the gate, even they would have to be employed carefully if they were to have any effect.

Inside the cockpit, Toroi wasted no time in getting a direct feed to the astrometrics station. The fox astrometrician who answered the comm looked visibly stressed and the commotion of voices and movement in the background told him that he wasn't alone in that regard.

"Milord, I'm afraid you have caught us at a bad time, here." Stuttered the astrometrician.

"I know, I need data on the gate malfunction."

"What!? Nono, there's no-" The fox began to protest.

"Need I remind you that lying to a member of the ruling family is an act of treason against House and Empire?" Toroi growled, menacingly.

The asrometrician gulped visibly, his eyes widening. "My apologies, milord, how can I serve?"

"Do you know which gate segment is malfunctioning?"

"Of course, milord."

"Good, map it to my targeting computer." said Toroi.

"Milord?" Replied the fox, as though wondering if he had misheard.

"You heard me, just like a derelict satelite, just make sure I have the right segment on my screen when I release my payload."

"Ah, right... yes, of course, milord!" Said the astrometrician, cutting an awkward salute.

A minute later and the tactical data was transferred, a wireframe image of the gate complete with tactical annotations appeared on his tac-comp and a small red diamond hovered on the edge of the slamfighter HUD, pointing the way to its target.

"Loi! Sitrep on the missiles." Toroi shouted at the top of his lungs from the cockpit as he studied the tactical readout memorising the key points with a surface trance.

"All done, milord, she's ready to fly." The hare bellowed back over the din of the hangar's machinery.

"Good," Toroi leaned over the edge of the cockpit until he spied Veoni. "Veoni! Get back to the greeting hall, and by your ancestors and mine, don't say a word about the gate, just try and keep everybody distracted."

"How!?" Veoni yelled back.

"Just be yourself!" Toroi retorted in exasperation and sealed the cabin.

He grabbed the control sticks and ripped the acceleration up to high gear as soon as he had cleared the hangar bay, once he was high enough he kicked them up again, climbing with such velocity that his surroundings would have been an incoprehensible blur without his finely-honed warmaster senses. The gravitational engines strained to protect him from the g-forces once he had cleared the atmosphere and accelerated to speeds that even a slamfighter couldn't safely achieve with aerodynamic resistance hindering it. Actually, now that he thought about it, this was the first time he'd ever flown a slamfighter fast enough for him to actually feel the g-force at all, most of the time the contra-gravitic shielding provided by the engines meant that he felt nothing more than a slight shift of weight or inertia, nothing strong enough to force him back in his seat. But now he felt it, and if it was that strong then with the velocities he was travelling at he'd be turned to soup if the contra-gravity failed now.

Pushing that rather disturbing thought to one side, he aligned the targeter diamond dead-center in the middle of his HUD and checked the tac-com. He had just shy of thirty minutes remaining, taking into account the amount of time it would take to expand the gate. That was a lot of distance to cover in not a lot of time, but while a slamfighter was hardly capable of relativistic velocities, it was still faster than anything else in space, at top speed he could still make it... with approximately eleven seconds to spare, unless he did something very clever or very stupid.

'No pressure then.' He thought, his mind somewhere between cold determination and blind panic.

Nevertheless, he wasn't going to fail, he'd made a vow to treat this Baronet Wei with honour and letting him die in a damn waygate malfunction was about as far from honourable as he could think. A traitorous thought occured that if the waygate did malfunction then there would be nothing keeping Uelo away. It died instantly. He was going to hold Uelo again, but there was no way he was going to do it with the hands of a murderer, even if it was a murder of inaction.

A sudden burst of renewed conviction came upon him as he locked the piloting computer on-target. There was an old trick dating back to the earliest days of the slamfighter pilots in the times before the coming of the Empire. When they wanted to cover great distances in a short space of time they would program their navigational computers with their destination and allow their slamfighters to accelerate to the point where they blacked out and carry them there on autopilot. Once there they had moments to recover their wits and enter the fray. And gravitational engines were much more advanced now than then, they could handle much greater forces before they couldn't protect the pilot enough to stop them blacking out. As a result the Ro'Xanshin pilot academy didn't teach the technique any more as anything outside of military history.

After all, there were good reasons why it was called the 'deadman maneuver', not all of them immediately obvious.

From behind the pilot seat he recovered a high-pressure oxygen mask and strapped it in place, gagging at first when it rammed air into his lungs in near-painful ammounts.

Calculations complete, Toroi gathered himself, keyed the entry button, and immediately felt his chest begin to constrict as the samfighter lurched violently forward. A strangled cry rose up from his throat as his vision tunneled, even were it not for the fact that his noetic senses were no longer able to handle the massive imput he could barely see a thing anyway.

He struggled against unconsciousness for as long as possible, but when it finally came it came as suddenly as a hammer-blow to the head.

~~~@*@~~~

"Toroi...-an you re-...me?" Came a tinny voice, it sounded familiar even though it did seem to sway in and out of his range of hearing.

"Urgh...Whu?" He slurred, vision unfocussed and brutalised lungs aching like fire as he ripped the oxygen mask from his face in a frenzied panic, fighting down a wave of nausea, one hand clamping his muzzle shut as he dry-heaved. "Gah, I'm never doing that again."

"Toroi! Good, you're awake," said the voice again, Toroi was about to tell it to go away when he saw the image of Jashiid on the tac-com screen.

"F-father?" He mumbled groggily before remembering where he was. "Oh, hells, the gate, I've got to-"

"You've got to get out of there, there's no time left, even if you destroyed the segment there would be no way for the gate to expand fast enough now. Get out of there before you're killed too."

The words took a moment to sink in, but when they did it felt like icewater running down his spine.

"That's... no, I calculated-" He began to protest.

"You were out too long, your body couldn't handle the strain, there's only ten minutes left, that's nowhere near enough time for the gate to expand, just get out of there before the explosion takes you too." The Archduke said, his voice heavy with sadness. "Toroi, there's nothing you can do, clear the area immediately, I order it as your lie-"

"No, stop, don't give that order!" came another voice from the comm, another Toroi recognised; the Maestro, Rethan. "Cut the gate in two!"

"What?" Toroi said, dumb with indescision.

The image of his father was replaced by that of the robed grey fox, his hood was pulled back so that Toroi had a rare view of his face. Dimly, he noted that Rethan looked surprisingly young, his voice hunched and posture made him look like a shrunken elder when his face was obscured by the hood but with it gone and him standing straight he looked barely older than Toroi himself.

"Don't waste your missiles on the gate segments, they're too large, destroy the linkages and the detonation will throw the gate-halves appart, if we expand them remotely at the same time then there should be enough room for the Yusho transport to pass through."

Toroi could have laughed were he not still afraid he might throw up if he did, he had no idea if such a scheme would work but if a Maestro said it would then it was probably worth a try.

"Can you give me bombing coordinates?" he said, hurriedly.

"No time, you'll have to do it freeform." said Rethan. "No more talk, time is precious, do it now."

His hands were on the control sticks before Rethan had finished talking. Looming before him was the impossible bulk of the waygate, too vast to fit into his entire field of vision, a leviathan construction of hollowed-out and shaped asteroids the size of towns, each one filled with wayspace technologies he could barely imagine and strung together like beads on a necklace by piston linkages. For one brief moment he imagined it to be the spine of some massive creature, the gate segments strung out like vertebrae. It was a dragon, an ouroboros.

And he was the dragonslayer, come to break its back.

Like the flaming spearhead of an angry god his slamfighter found a space between those vertebrae and unleashed a wave of twenty shining pearls that glowed with a light that mocked the sun, each one striking home and releasing their eschatonic payload. Expanding spheres of liquid heat destroyed the linkages, leaving the ends glowing with an angry orange light, already he could see the gap they had created closing as the gate expanded further.

With a twist and a wrench of the control sticks he shifted his flight-plane ninety degrees in a heartbeat. He had to keep the speed steady because he was in very real danger of blacking out again but at this range it hardly mattered.

A second wave of missiles flew from his wings, their formation making them look like a blade of stars as they slammed into the linkages. This time the effect was more pronounced, freed from the bonds that held them together and with the concussive force of the missile explosion pushing them appart the two halves of the waygate began to drift appart. To an onlooker at a distance the scale of the gate would work an illusion on them that the seperation was slow, to Toroi, closer than comfortable by far, it was almost blurring.

"There, it's done, is it working?" Toroi sent into the comm.

There was a long anxious minute before he finally got a reply as Rethan's image appeared on the screen.

"Aye, it bloody well worked!" The Meastro crowed, joyously, the sounds of relieved merriment from the astrometics crew coming in over the speakers along with him. "With the current rate of seperation we'll manage to get the gate wide enough in time, it'll cost a fortune in power until we can get it repaired, keeping it that wide, but it'll still work."

Toroi slumped back in his seat and sighed, more exhausted mentally and emotionally than in body but the exhaustion was real enough.

"If you've still got it in you, lad, I advise you get your ship to one side." Rethan advised.

"Why, what's wrong now?" Toroi moaned, wearily.

"Nothing, lad, it's just that the Dragonfly is due to breach the meniscus in... around two minutes."

"What? Oh hells!" Toroi cried, and grabbed the sticks again, making for Byzantium Tertius at a relatively sedate pace.

He looked over his shoulder and saw the space between the two gate-halves ripple, distend like a rubber sheet with a heavy object placed on it, and finally crackle with discharges of shorn molecular force as a shape took form at its center, small at first then widening rapidly like a burst baloon as the neutrino-sails of the Dragonfly appeared, a flat, second moon of mirrored film, trailing behind it the comparatively tiny vessel that shimmered into being, translated back into realspace.

"And now comes the hard part." He whisperedd to himself, giddy from the adrenalin.

As he turned back to the controls he caught a glimpse of his faces reflection in the screen, the mark of Xanshin giving him a feral cast to his features. Once, he remembered for the scond time that day, it had been warpaint.

'No, nothing has changed.'