After that brief moment, the legislator gave no other sign that she even knew Tennal. She approached the other side of the long oval table and touched her throat in a civilian salute to Oma. Oma responded in kind; both were wary, peremptory.

“Governor Oma,” the legislator said, in that political way she had of sounding like a pleasant person who just happened to be holding a chain saw. At least she wasn’t swearing. “In light of our long work together, I’m glad you finally agreed to this meeting. I don’t have to tell you this contravenes—”

Oma pulled the burn gun at her side and shot the legislator in the chest.

It was, Tennal thought later, such a small, unfussy movement.

The burn gun left a tingling path behind it across the silent room. The legislator crumpled over her stomach, to her knees, to the ground.

The room broke into chaos around her body. Oma’s architects shoved back their chairs and drew their weapons. The legislator’s bodyguards shouted and tackled the politicians to the ground, but the military ones had come armed themselves and pulled their cappers to retaliate. Oma aimed at another politician, but she didn’t get a second free shot; one of the bodyguards tackled her as the table went over with a crash.

Tennal felt the first architect command slung with the weight of a bulldozer, making one of Oma’s soldiers drop their gun. In less time than it took to breathe, the air was thick with physical gun rays and the mental shrapnel of write commands.

“Sir!” an aide shouted to Oma, crawling behind the upturned table toward her. “They had reinforcements! Forty ships out of chaotic space!”

“Forty,” Oma said, and swore. “Divert the first and seventh wings.”

Tennal stood as if his feet were rooted to the floor. Everyone apart from Tennal and Surit had known this was the plan.

The legislator’s body was so small on the ground of the meeting room. Oma didn’t have to avoid consequences for starting trouble. She just had to be willing to make sacrifices.

Tennal lifted his foot, muscle by muscle, and took a step toward Oma. He took another. The vortex in his mind slowed, calmed, changing into a strange clarity. A shot from a burn gun crackled past his face. He barely noticed.

At least he knew who his enemy was.

When a soldier backed into his path, aiming at someone else in the chaos, Tennal’s mind saw them before his eyes. In that peculiarly calm state, he read every flash of intention that went down the soldier’s nerves and synapses. Whatever part of his brain was in charge, it gave his movements a new surety: he shoved an elbow in the soldier’s back and threw them to the side.

He carried on walking into the firefight. His enemy was close enough to see.