The purple-gold alarm horns across Planets 7 through 12 wailed like a flock of strangled geese.
Out of the ten black-iron garrison fortresses marched twelve thousand thirty-foot Script-Enforcer Iron Puppets. Their heavy titanium boots slammed into the frozen tundra in mechanical lockstep, shaking snow loose from the jagged canyon walls.
Every puppet’s chest cavity glowed with a cold blue frost-core. Mounted across their iron shoulders were heavy Soul-Freezing Crossbows—and every single bolt was aimed squarely at the barbed-wire hostage cages holding the prisoners’ elderly parents and young children.
Up in the central command spire of Planet 7, Puppet Commander Tie sneered behind his thick quartz visor. He tapped his silver control baton twice against the master array console.
“Attention, rebel scum from Planets 1 through 6!” Commander Tie’s voice boomed across the planetary communication speakers. “My twelve thousand Iron Puppets are forged from meteoric black-iron!
They have no souls to burn and no flesh to cut! Better yet, their frost-cores are wired directly to the dead-man switches on these hostage cages!”
He pointed a gauntleted finger at the thousands of shivering children pressed against the frozen iron bars below.
“If a single sword beam or spiritual flame scratches one of my puppets, the dead-man switches will detonate and freeze two billion hostages into ice sculptures!” Commander Tie barked coldly. “Drop your pickaxes and crawl back into your cells before I count to three!”
