"I'm sure I am," said his father. "If Edmund has a grain of sense, he'll have been keeping his sensor suite trained on Umoja since I left the command ship. With any luck, he'll have come running as soon as he picked up the weapons' discharges."

Valerian cocked his rifle as they heard the sound of voices from outside.

He peered through a shrapnel hole and saw marines, ten of them—fully armored and loaded for bear—negotiating their way through the blasted debris that filled the chamber.

Valerian and Arcturus were on their own now, and with only two gauss rifles between them. Valerian knew they didn't stand much—or indeed any—chance of defeating their foes. He decided there were worse ways to end his allotted span than to die fighting next to his father.

"We won’t stop them all," said Valerian.

Arcturus grinned. "Speak for yourself."

Valerian nodded, emboldened by his father's attitude, and shouldered his rifle. The marines saw them and charged.

Valerian and Arcturus opened fire at the same time, their Impaler spikes hammering the nearest of their attackers. The marine stumbled and fell, but his armor protected him from injury. Valerian ducked back as a spray of spikes hammered the cutter, tiny pyramids punched into the internal skin of the fuselage by their impacts.

His father squeezed off a burst of fire and whipped back into cover. The roar of gauss fire filled the cutter's interior, a shrieking howl of metal slamming on metal. Once again, Valerian aimed his rifle through the ruptured hull of the cutter, opening up on a red-armored marine as he clambered over the remains of one of their juryrigged barricades. Impaler spikes hammered the man, but he shrugged off the impacts and kept coming.

More fire sparked off the cutter's hull and Valerian knew they could not hope to stop these marines. Where their previous attackers had come at them with fatally misplaced confidence, these were taking no chances, operating in pairs and covering each other's advance with suppressive fire.

Valerian slammed in a fresh magazine, his last, and took a deep breath.

This was it, this was the end, and what better way to go out than in a blaze of glory.

He looked over at his father and saw the same determination to make their ending one worthy of remembrance.

"You ready?" he asked.

"I'm ready," replied Arcturus.

They whipped around together, rifles raised, and opened fire.

And the landing shaft was suddenly filled with a cascade of incandescent bolts of blistering light that slammed down from above. Percussive explosions bloomed skyward and the cutter rocked backward as a wave of heat and pressure washed over it.

The tremendous impacts shook the damaged vessel so violently its keel split in two. Arcturus and Valerian were thrown to the deck as the streaming torrent of light hammered the world beyond the interior of their refuge to oblivion.

Al last the waterfall of molten light ceased and Valerian blinked away the starbursts behind his eyes. His ears rang with the concussion of the explosions, but he was alive, and that was something he hadn't expected.

His father lay across from him, looking dazed but otherwise unhurt.

"What the hell?" gasped Valerian, seeing nothing but blackened walls and complete annihilation outside.

Arcturus laughed. "Told you...." he said.

Valerian looked up.

Blocking the light from the open shaft was an enormous steel behemoth that floated above the landing hatch in defiance of the laws of gravity.

As a monstrous, rippling heat haze surrounded its engines, Valerian covered his ears against the teeth-loosening rumble. The insignia of a red arm holding a whip on a black background was emblazoned on either side of a cavernous docking bay, and it took Valerian a moment to realize he was looking at the underside of a Dominion battlecruiser.

A voice, heavily accented and with a thick drawl, blared from an external loudspeaker.

"Someone order a heroic rescue?" said General Edmund Duke.

In the immediate aftermath of the fighting, no clue could be found as to how these Confederate diehards had managed to learn the particulars of the emperor's visit to Umoja. Nor could any light be shed on the identity or allegiance of the UED that Angelina Emillian had spoken of before her death—though this mystery would have a bloody answer soon enough.

Arcturus promised Ailin Pasteur that a full and thorough investigation would be undertaken, and while no direct accusations were made, it was clear the emperor suspected the Umojans of a degree of complicity in the attack.

More Dominion ships were on their way to the emperor, and in response, capital ships of the Protectorate were en route to persuade him that it would be in his best interests to withdraw them as soon as possible.

The survivors of the attack gathered in Ailin Pasteur's cavernous dining room, shaken and bloodied, but glad to be alive. When Valerian saw his mother he raced toward her, dropping his rifle and embracing her as she wept tears of joy to see him alive.

"I thought you were dead," she sobbed.

"I'm a Mengsk," he said. "We don't die easy."

ENDINGS

BUT FIRST WE HAVE TO BURY HER...

Valerian sat in the leather armchair before the dying coal lire, swirling another tawny port in his glass as his father poured himself another rich amber brandy. That wasn't his usual drink of choice, but he'd always drunk brandy when in Ailin Pasteur's home and didn't see any need to change now.

The funeral service of Juliana Pasteur had been brief, but dignified, attended by the majority of the Umojan Ruling Council and a few of the emperor's closest advisers. Ailin Pasteur had read his daughter's eulogy and no one had been surprised when he did not ask Arcturus to say anything.

Valerian had planned to speak, but when the moment came he had been unable to move, such was the weight of grief pinning him lo his seat.

His mother's death was the most painful thing Valerian had ever endured.

It had taken a further eighteen months after the attack on her father's house for her to die, her last breath taken a month before Valerian's twenty-first birthday. It had not been an easy death: her last year had been spent confined to bed with only infrequent bouts of lucidity.

Valerian had spent those months at her side, holding her hand, mopping her brow, and reading passages from Poems of the Twilight Stars. Often she forgot who he was or believed him to be her long-lost love, Arcturus: her great and glorious prince.

That had been hard to bear, for she recalled a man who no longer existed, if he ever had.

Her last morning had been glorious, the sun a brilliant bronze disc in the sky and the wind fresh off the river, carrying scents of far-off provinces and the promise of undiscovered countries.

Valerian had opened the curtains and said. "It's wonderful out there today."

"You should go for a run," replied his mother. "It's been so long since you went outside."

"Maybe I will," he answered. "Later."

She nodded and propped herself up in bed.

Though her illness had robbed his mother of much of her former beauty, the copper light from the newly risen sun bathed her in a pearlescent glow that most healthy people, never mind cancer sufferers, could only dream of.

"You look beautiful today," said Valerian.

She smiled and said. "Sit with me."

Valerian sat in the chair next to her bed, but she shook her head. "No, on the bed."

He did as he was bid and she slipped her arms around him, pulling him to her as she had done so many times when he was a little boy. She stroked his golden hair and kissed his forehead.

"My dear boy," she said. "You are everything I wished for. Do you remember that day beside the river before the attack on your grandfather's house?"