Achilles: A long pause. “True. But what about all of you? I won’t trust anyone with mixed loyalty to guard my back. Think carefully, each of you: will you genuinely follow me, obey me absolutely, even against the world order you’ve grown up in? Will you generally serve whatever side I take? Wholeheartedly? I could decide to join the Masons and make them masters of this world, or I could decide to wipe their Empire off the face of the Earth. Following me means accepting either path, any path, and dying for whatever side I take. Will you do this?”

Menestius: “Yes.”

Achilles: “Why trust me that much? What if I exploit that trust? What if I use you to make myself Emperor of half the world, and then throw you away?”

Phoenix: “You would never do that.”

Achilles: “You’ve only known me ten days.”

Phoenix: “We’ve known Homer a lot longer, and from Homer we know how much you hate war.” Old Phoenix choked up saying it. “You don’t want to rule, you want to live. You wouldn’t fight for selfish reasons, only when there’s no other choice. Most of us believe you are what Mycroft claims, Achilles. You may be the greatest soldier who ever lived, or didn’t live, but even you need an army at your back to win a war. You need us. Why are you trying to convince us not to fight for you?”

The hero paused, and I wondered briefly whether he was listening once more to the Senate. Now our law’s great scales were weighing two fates for the Humanists: give them a second chance to defend their actions and revise their ways? Or issue an immediate demand that the Humanists dissolve and become Graylaws, or else be expelled en masse from the Alliance, and made in one stroke all Earth’s enemies. The problem and its banter were enough to distract me—child of this era as I am—but I doubt the son of sea-nymph Thetis heard a word of it; when Achilles’s mind strays, it strays far.

“How many of you are there?” he asked at last.

The assembled captains reviewed each other. “You mean Servicers total, or just those that want to follow you?”

“Both.”

Old Phoenix answered. “There are just under two million Servicers in the world right now. Last tally about a hundred thousand are ready to take up arms for you. Another five hundred thousand definitely don’t want to. The rest are undecided, but I suspect a lot will join up once there’s something more formal to join.”