The trooper struggled weakly to rise, but Erik was moving again. It was only a second before he dropped his right foot on the struggling man and pressed down. The ’Mech’s foot settled onto the rocky ground.

Erik turned. The other Purifiers were fleeing as fast as their jump jets would take them. The artillery fire had stopped, and he heard one of the bikers calling in a bearing on their location.

In the confusion, they were moving right toward Erik’s formation, and Erik would quickly be within range of their guns, helpless. While not as satisfying as taking out a ’Mech, Erik would be happy to settle for taking out what must be several units of House Liao artillery. To his right, he could see the crew of the crippled M1 transferring to an Armored Personnel Carrier, as the rest of the column charged after the artillery. He radioed in a recovery unit for the M1. Then he fired the Centurion’s jump jets. The nozzles in the ’Mech’s legs blasted out streams of glowing plasma, sending the ’Mech in a high arc over the formation, allowing him to take point. At this moment, Erik Sandoval wanted to kill something. He wanted to kill a lot of somethings.

Duke Aaron Sandoval leaned back in his couch overlooking the DropShip Victory’s command center. In the center of the crowded room, a holotable flashed three-dimensional maps of the ongoing battles, the view changing every ten seconds or so as the display rotated through the various hot spots scattered around New Aragon’s two continents.

Around the room, a dozen combat controllers sat at individual consoles, relaying orders and situational data to the field commanders. The room buzzed with many voices talking at once, yet it was also strangely calm as each controller focused intently on their own console.

A few supervisory controllers walked the room, observing and stopping to intervene with some detail. Occasionally a runner would come through to hand a document or a cup of coffee to one of the controllers.

From Aaron’s seat, he could look down on the controllers and their consoles, as well as on a ring of holodisplays that surrounded his position. He seemed quiet, but nothing escaped his attention.

There was one overarching pattern: The red icons representing House Liao forces were all on the retreat, falling rapidly back to beachhead areas where DropShips waited to spirit them away, or to the spaceport in the capital city of Argos, still nominally under their control.

To a casual observer, the victory for Duke Sandoval’s forces seemed decisive and overwhelming. But the Duke fully appreciated how fragile the situation was. As House Liao forces fell back nearly as fast as the Duke’s forces could follow, they collapsed their own supply lines in front of them, even as his were stretched ever thinner.

House Liao seemed on the verge of withdrawing from the planet, but Aaron had studied just enough Aikido to know how an attacker’s own energy could be turned against him. The greater it was, the more it could be used to the attacker’s disadvantage. His troops—his SwordSworn—were pushing hard to keep up with the retreat.

The door to the room slid open with a hiss, and a handsome woman with streaks of gray in her shoulder-length brown hair entered the room. She wore a trim black suit with pale blue piping; loose sleeves framed her carefully manicured hands. Her perfume was musky and, to Aaron’s taste, rather unpleasant. Apparently the scent was quite popular among both women and men on New Aragon, but he had heard some of his troops jokingly refer to the scent as “swamp cabbage.”

Her makeup was immaculate, but she looked tired. Like many people, she apparently had trouble sleeping under stress, a problem Aaron had never shared. Ostensibly, she had no business in the command center. This was a military matter, not a civilian one. Another military commander might have asked her to leave, especially at such a critical juncture, but Aaron’s political sense would not allow it. New Aragon would not always be at war, and Marilou Grogan was the planetary governor, after all.

He repressed a sigh. She remained his major stumbling block to bringing New Aragon under his influence—a possibility that had seemed remote when they’d first arrived. To Aaron’s distress, he discovered that Prefect Shun Tao, Prefecture V’s supreme military commander, had stationed himself on New Aragon in order to be closer to the line of resistance against House Liao’s invasion.

While Shun Tao was in no position to refuse Aaron’s aid, he was a fierce Republic loyalist, and justifiably suspicious of the Duke’s motives. Aaron was well outside his own Prefecture, meddling without invitation from the local government. From Aaron’s standpoint, it was as though he’d been caught with his hand in the candy jar. Their relationship had been chilly, and Aaron knew that his presence on New Aragon would be welcomed only so long as his forces were militarily necessary.

Then there had been an astounding reversal. The official reports said that Shun Tao had been wounded in early fighting. The Prefect had been evacuated from the planet, and simultaneously the Prefecture’s forces had begun pulling back, abandoning the world to the House Liao advance. Aaron suspected there was more to Tao’s withdrawal than that. Perhaps the man had been recalled, or had simply cracked under the strain.

Though he was too pragmatic to put much stock in such things, Aaron could not help but think of it as divine intervention—a sign that his campaign was meant to succeed. He would repel House Liao’s aggression, and bring many new worlds under his banner, ultimately to pledge them to the renewed glory of House Davion, from which his family had drawn power and prestige. The Republic, though a noble experiment, was rapidly proving itself a failed one, and Aaron wanted to be ready when its remains were divided.

But every journey was a series of steps. Divine intervention or not, the traveler could stumble, or even fall. First, he had not only to win New Aragon, but to gain its continued allegiance to his cause. The ongoing battle with Liao would justify the alliance for the foreseeable future, but Aaron hoped for more than that. He could see The Republic crumbling around them, Prefecture V more than most. If the people of New Aragon could not count on their own Prefect and Lord Governor for protection and stability, they would turn elsewhere. Hopefully they would turn to him.

Much could go wrong. Much had gone wrong already. Aaron tried not to let it concern him. His grandmother had been fond of telling him that, “For the wise, each failure teaches fifty lessons, and with each setback comes fifty opportunities.” He had always tried to live his life by those words, seeing each day, good or bad, as a springboard to an infinity of bright tomorrows.

This philosophy had led many to criticize him as being a reckless dreamer. He suspected that some even thought him mad. He didn’t care. He had noticed that those criticisms became more muted each time his power and status increased.

With Shun Tao out of the picture, a new range of possibilities had opened, and Aaron was quick to position himself in response, establishing relations with the remaining local powers. He’d had no trouble with the Legate, New Aragon’s military commander. He’d immediately seen the Duke’s forces as the saving grace they were, and he had no desire to try and step into the Prefect’s shoes. Aaron had put him in charge of operations on the other continent, and the Prefect willingly placed himself under Aaron’s authority, a neat arrangement that kept him out of Aaron’s hair.

The Governor, on the other hand, had no real authority over the military, which was Aaron’s immediate concern, and yet she was too politically valuable to ignore. Should their forces be successful in this theater, Aaron would later have need of the resources, manufacturing capabilities, money, and public support that were within her sphere of influence.