“We can’t all have it! [We treated Mycroft like family, and they ripped out seven of our bash’members’ hearts and ate them. Ripped them out and ate them!]” Tully’s fierceness stirred the Pillarcat, Halley, which coiled about his ankles like a great, furred muff. The U-beast yawned, green cheeks stretching cutely too far around its feline fangs, while the yawn’s ripple bristled down and down and down and down the fur of its snakelike length, each pair of legs stretching in turn in a slow, drowsy spiral. Even Tully’s obscene vapors dared not touch Apollo’s dear Halley. I hungered to stroke its velvet length, to coax it to wind about my shoulders, as it had so often before they widened to a man’s. Tully did not give the dear beast a glance. “This is war.”

Sniper frowned. “It’s not war yet.”

“Yes it is.” It was I who answered, or rather Hobbes through me. “War is not just battle, but that tract of time wherein the Will to Battle is so manifest that humankind can no longer trust itself to keep the peace. We are at war.”

Sniper gazed down, not frowning, a clean face, like those contemplative angels that Botticelli or Raphael achieve, where the seraphs and cherubs are not mere rows of hosanna-singing ornament but intellectual beings, gazing with a complex, inhuman awe on Christ or Mary, whose coming sufferings their eternal vision makes so clear. “The only one that has to die is J.E.D.D. Mason.”

“That isn’t true.” I nearly threw up hearing myself and Tully speak the words in synch.

Sniper shook its head. “If J.E.D.D. Mason dies then the plot to merge the Hives ends, instantly and forever.”

“They aren’t the one plotting,” I corrected. “Ἄναξ Jehovah has no interest in ruling anything. It’s others plotting, using Them.”

“That doesn’t matter. J.E.D.D. Mason could be an evil mastermind or completely innocent, the plan still ends when they die.”

“But that won’t stop the war,” I countered. “There’s still O.S., the Mitsubishi landgrab, the Nurturist anti-set-set violence, the CFB. Why make things worse? In the Senate yesterday it was the Masonic bloc that voted down the motion to disband the Humanists. Do you think the Emperor will continue to protect your Hive if you kill their Son again?”