"This can't be... How can..." Primus Marcellus gasped out between coughs that brought up more blood. He watched in horror as his wounds failed to mend, far too severe for the free nanites in his body to repair. Around him dozens of his coconspirators gasped out their final breaths or stared unseeing into the dark sky.
Where had they gone wrong? Seven Great Houses had collaborated to take out a single growing rival. Many political maneuvers had been required to isolate the young tyrant and his wife. The cost of isolating the target from his own family had been enough to beggar any two Great Houses and yet together they had persevered. Generous bribes and riots instigated by their lackeys had drawn away the law keepers for the duration of this operation. Mercenaries hired through tertiary brokers had been hired to break through the household guards and enable them access to their targets. Then they attacked with almost every expert available to their Houses. Even calling in favors, conscripting the experts of their client Houses, and hiring Assassins. Almost three hundred experts. a force capable of rocking the foundations of any Core world, even capable of seizing control over several star sectors if need be, had been gathered for this operation. Yet, it had all gone wrong.
“How…” He asked before another round of coughs racked his body and still more of his blood escaped his lips.
There had been no problem with the earlier preparations. The Tyrant’s own recent political maneuverings and the announcement of his wife’s pregnancy had driven away many of his allies. Those that had believed that bowing before his power would only last for his generation had come to a dark realization the moment he announced that he would soon have an heir. From there it had only been a matter of political will and a discrete but extensive expenditure of wealth to draw others into positions where they could not assist him in time even if they desired to. The correct magistrates had been bribed, the riots started earlier in the evening drew the law keepers. All of these earlier efforts had almost made them believe as if they were blessed by their ancestors going into the next phases of the operation.
But then things started to turn for the worse. The household guards had fiercely protected the perimeter of the compound causing terrible damage to the mercenaries hired to deal with them. After half an hour of pitched battle and warnings from the bribed officials that the Law Keepers could not be delayed much further, they committed their experts. By the time the interior of the compound had been breached, fully a third of their experts had been slain and the mercenaries they had hired had broken and run from the fight. Marcellus could only be grateful that most of the guards had been slain as well. Merely one hundred guards had managed to face over a thousand mercenaries and almost three hundred experts and had managed to trade casualties almost one for one with the experts while killing the vast majority of the mercenaries.
He could have sworn that the hardest part would be behind him then. Other than the Tyrant himself and his wife, there were only a few known experts in the place and fifteen to twenty suspected ones among the servants. After that, one hundred guards and twice that in servants should have been quite easy, but the guards had already proved to be almost too much. Yet the Primus and his allies still had the cream of their forces available to them, a little over two hundred experts. Nearly ten experts for every suspected one in the compound. A portion of his mind had balked at pushing forward, a niggling suspicion in the back of his mind telling him that they should cut their losses and go, an understanding that what they had seen so far had been only the tip of the iceberg. As he coughed out more of his lifesblood, he knew that that suspicion had been correct.
At first, they didn’t encounter any of the servants, who had withdrawn into the depths of the mansion. Instead they came upon the Tyrant himself in his main hall flanked by his remaining guards and most of the suspected and known experts. The fighting had been harsh and it had cost them half of their surviving numbers there. The Tyrant himself had claimed the lives of almost a score of the greatest fighters they had, his movements too fast to track much less to target, he had forced the fight into melee and this had cost them dearly. Marcellus remembered the pain and horror as he watched the elders of his House and the others sacrifice themselves just to slow him long enough to allow someone else the killing blow and yet, empowered by the nanites as he was, he had managed to kill half a dozen more even after his apparent death. One hundred and forty bodies had been left in that room and most of those had been the experts brought by Marcellus and his allies.
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The Tyrant was dead, their mission had been mostly successful, but the grim fact was dawning upon them that after this night, their Houses would be defanged and vulnerable to the predations of the Houses that had watched from the sidelines. Even worse was the guaranteed reprisal of the Tyrant’s House. While the wife’s family was unknown, the Tyrant’s was one of the most powerful in Core Space. The primary target was dead and now all that remained was the clean up. Knowing the cost that they had spent to get this far they could only push in further.
But the nightmare only continued to get worse. Pushing further into the house, the tired conspirators were set upon by the servants of the house that fought with manic vigor and strength that would have placed them on par with the most elite soldiers in the Core. By the time they had made their way to the room in which the lady of the house was birthing her child, they had lost dozens more of their experts to the suicidal attacks of the servants.
“How could this have happened, you ask?” He heard from a melodious voice. A shiver ran down his spine as he looked towards the woman standing in the center of the room. “You came into my house, you killed my guards, butchered my servants, slayed my husband, and wanted to do the same to me and my newborn son. How could this happen? Because you chose this path. When you decide to kill others, you must ready yourself to be killed, and yet like a child you failed to do that. You considered the sudden rise of this ‘Tyrant’ as just one of the permutations of the typical plot in a Core World power struggle. You didn’t even think to question where his power came from or that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t the most dangerous person in the room. ‘Tyrant’, if he was a ‘Tyrant’ then what would you call me?”
As she stood over him and his fallen companions, he watched the nanites stream from their bodies and into her and the servant next to her. In her hands was the simple blade she had used to kill his allies and leave him on death’s door. The floor and ceiling of the room pulsed as nanites streamed in from other parts of the dwelling through passages into this space. They quickly joined the stream and became a flood. Her injuries healed in real time and her pallid face became hale and hearty again. The old servant next to her straightened his back and he clasped the bundle in his arms tightly to himself as he watched the conversation between the two. As Marcellus watched his fear grew even more palpable.
“Monster,” he gasped before coughing once more. Horror filled his eyes as even the nanites that had been trying to repair his body quit in favor of joining the flood towards the woman and her servant.
Melodious laughter entered his ears before she replied. “Yes, perhaps that is what I am. A monster. A monster that you in your ignorance decided to offend.”
After watching him quietly for a moment she turned towards her servant. A brief melancholy crossed her beautiful features as she looked down at the bundle in the servants hands and caressed it gently. “Take him to my holdings in the Rim. Lotus will be perfect for his growth and far enough away to avoid any future schemes by my enemies.”
The old man looked at her quietly for a moment before bowing, “Yes mistress, it will be done. What name do you wish to give this one?”
She thought for a moment and then sighed, “That fool of a man wanted to name him Dain after himself. We might as well give him that much. Call him that. I will take care of things here so go quickly before others arrive.”
She watched quietly as the servant walked away and when she turned towards Primus Marcellus again any sense of humanity was gone, only the monster he had seen before was there. He couldn’t even move as she approached him, and her words were the last thing he heard, “Your Houses have taken quite a bit from me. Know this before I am done I will have taken everything from your Houses. There will be nothing left.”