The creature hovering above the burning wreckage of the dreadnought was not an enlightened sage.
It was a heavy-duty combat chassis wrapped in dying meat.
Envoy Chu Rong tore the smoldering shreds of his silver silk robes from his torso. It cast them into the flames below.
Beneath the silk, his human chest was gone.
In its place was a ribs of polished, chrome-colored Void-Forged Starmetal, its seventeen said clearlyribs expanding and contracting with the high-pressure hiss of air-powered pistons.
Running up his spine was an exposed channel bus of glowing starmetal cables, pulsing with high-voltage emerald light that linked directly into an uplink receiver implanted at the base of his skull.
Both of his arms from the biceps down were triple-jointed sky prosthetics, tipped with four-inch fingers of sharpened diamond plate that crackled with arcs of violet Saint Elmo’s fire.
His voice was no longer human. It sounded like two brass gears grinding together under fifty tons of dry friction:
