Margaret realized deep in her heart that the Klikiss robots could never allow any of that damning information to reach the other civilizations in the Spiral Arm.

“Now what?” Louis whispered to his wife. “Are they just going to stay down there and keep us treed like squirrels?”

As if they had heard him, the three Klikiss robots stood apart at the base of the cliff. Their black carapaces split open at the back to reveal emerging wings. Ignoring the broken scaffolding and discarded stairs, the Klikiss robots easily took flight and rose toward the cliff city.

114: BASIL WENCESLAS

114BASIL WENCESLAS

Devastating reports came to Basil Wenceslas, one after another, like a succession of death sentences.

From his executive suite atop Hansa headquarters, he stared out into the setting sun. He received each message with growing dread. He read the war reports, watched the scant but terrifying footage. The hydrogues were unstoppable.

For the first time in his successful career—in his entire life—Basil Wenceslas wanted nothing better than to hide, to find a place of safety where he could avoid the responsibility and the dangerous times ahead. He didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. More than anything else, Basil hated feeling helpless.

After the EDF debacle on Jupiter, the deep-core aliens had launched repeated attacks with a vengeful thoroughness, emerging from dozens of gas giants. Crystalline warglobes had destroyed all ekti-harvesting operations across the Spiral Arm, everything from the outdated Ildiran factories, to the cumbersome processing facilities the Hansa had fielded, to the remaining Roamer skymines that had refused to evacuate.

More than any other group, the Roamers were suffering from the full-scale crackdown, unable to obtain or market stardrive fuel… but they would merely be the first victims. As word spread of the complete futility of attempted cloud mining, the hydrogue attacks had slackened. There was no one left to threaten.

Without ekti, all Hansa commerce, all interaction with the Ildiran Empire, would grind to a halt. The business of the Spiral Arm, and then the livelihood of the scattered colonies, would slowly wither.

Most of the settlements had come to depend on regular shipments, resources, foodstuffs. Travel between the nearest star systems would now require years, decades, at top speeds available to conventional propulsion systems. No colony was an island, cut off, meant to exist all on its own. The infrastructure of many worlds simply did not allow them to be self-sufficient. Now they would have to learn—or die.

On the images transmitted to his table update screens, Basil looked down to watch newly crowned King Peter on his throne, delivering well-scripted proclamations, demanding increased weapons development, calling upon the population for additional EDF recruits.