General Tie Canghai stood up.
The deck plates beneath his heavy iron boots groaned under his immense weight. He wiped the tears from his bearded cheeks with the back of a gauntlet. His breath came slow and deep, like a dormant volcano waking after ten thousand years of silence.
Commissar Gu-Du stumbled backward, his dislocated jaw hanging at an ugly angle.
“Tie... Tie Canghai!” Gu-Du slurred frantically, clutching his velvet collar with bleeding fingers. “Put that halberd down! You are an officer under contract! If you disobey, your credit score will drop to negative nine thousand! You will be blacklisted across thirty-three heavens! You will never receive a pension!”
Tie Canghai did not even look at the screaming commissar.
To Tie Canghai, Gu-Du was no longer a feared bank overseer. He was just a noisy bug squirming on the floor.
Tie Canghai reached out his massive hand, grabbed the main broadcast microphone on the helm console, and ripped it free from its housing. He slammed the bronze communication rune on his chest, opening an unrestricted fleet-wide channel to all three thousand war vessels and twenty-four hundred planet-sized star-fortresses.
“Brothers of the Frost-Border Legions!” Tie Canghai’s voice boomed through every speaker, every warship corridor, and every gunner battery across three star systems.
