“Oh, my sweet, you don’t know … Well, how could you? It’s not as though anyone’s told you; you were too busy with your binary of throwing up or being murderous. Well, Nonagesimus, they do see action when the Cohort suddenly loses three warships to as many orbital radiation missiles, which is three more warships than we’ve lost in the past thousand years,” said Ianthe. Were it possible for someone to puff more with self-satisfaction, she would be swollen and gouty and dead; but rather than irritated, you found that Ianthe just made you feel tired. “Eighteen thousand dead soldiers will grab the attention … Corona would love it. She’s mad for military funerals.”

It was difficult for you to muster empathy. You had nobody at the front, or indeed in the Cohort. The last Ninth House chaplains and construct adepts had, as you recalled, been lost in action five years back. The numbers remained numbers, lacking context. You were more interested in the conversation happening outside the shuttle’s docking doors, before the ramp: an unfamiliar voice saying steadily: “Holy Saint, the Erebos is his vessel. I speak for every commanding officer aboard when I tell you how reluctantly we would see the end of his eighty years aboard.”

“Eighty years!!” was the response, again with that articulated extra exclamation point. It was the result of extreme irascibility: the saint had a high, fluting voice, a young voice for someone who had now accused both you and Ianthe Tridentarius of actionable puberty, and it was piercing now. “Eighty is shameful—you knew the writing was on the wall when the call came for more Lyctors. His seat is elsewhere, and there he must return, and should have returned thirty years ago. You’re now Admiral Sarpedon? Really? It is Sarpedon, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said the admiral, whose title had been suggested by the Lyctor in the same tone of voice as might be said Chief Leper. “And it has been … twenty years since we last met, Most Venerated Saint?”

“Around that,” agreed the most venerated saint, whose office had been enunciated by the admiral with the faintest and most well-bred suggestion of motherfucker. “In any case, you’ve had him eighty years, and the Mithraeum has lacked him for a hundred.”

“You are invoking throne silence,” said Sarpedon. “You are removing him from the Empire.”

“I can’t very well invoke throne speech. We’ll be forty billion light years away.”

The admiral said, through a thin rime of ice: “He has expressed, in no uncertain terms, his close personal interest in this war.”