In my chamber, there is a desk that holds a computer, a lighted plexisteel tube and a bundle wrapped in cloth, a recharging rack, an end table, and, laughably, a chair.  Though the furniture is scaled to my small size, there have been no further concessions made to the fact that I am a quadruped with no humanoid robot mode. 

I have held quarters in Darkmount for many vorn, but I so rarely used them.  It is strange to be in these chambers now, and to know that in the future, if anyone asks me where I was on this day when history was being made, I will have to answer in my chambers in Darkmount.  I have lain in these rooms for the past six cycles, ever since Lord Trannis died, waiting for the Decepticons to crown a new leader.

Garboil knocks on my door with his wing.  The tiny security camera mounted over my door projects his image onto the corner of my computer secreen.

“Commander Howlback, the battle downstairs is over,” he says.  “Lavasteam’s dead and Straxus is victorious.”

Straxus.  If Trannis were alive, I could imagine his fury.  Those two had never gotten along, Trannis and Straxus, and I know the former Emperor would have preferred Lavasteam as his successor.

Too late now.

My paws are not shaped for standard remotes.  I have wired my chambers to respond to the frequencies of the transmitters in my body.  The door of my room opens with a thought.

“Where’s Thunderwing?” I ask.

“Brooding in his hereditary territory, poring over arcane books and waiting for the stars to tell him his time is nigh.  Just like when Trannis took over.”

“Useless,” I mutter.  “Shockwave?”

“We don’t know.  My personal opinion on the matter is that Straxus does not trust Shockwave to let him keep the throne, so he’s done something about it.”

“Hnh.  You should locate him.  Make sure he stays alive.”

“Consider it done.”

“Mori?”

“Our Underrealm Warlord is staying out of it, as always, and Straxus isn’t stupid enough to march on the subterranean layers to try to take her power.  This is it, Howlback.  Welcome to the new Decepticon order.” 

I briefly ponder what Garboil has told me.  My allies, these days, are few.  In desperation I will have to choose between Thunderwing and Mori, but I am not desperate…

…not yet.  Struggling for survival in a world ruled by those with two hands and two legs, desperation may still come.

But not yet.

Garboil’s attention is drawn to the objects on my desk.  “Nice night light,” he says, eyeing the plexisteel tube, “and what’s that other thing?”

I click my jaws together.  “Did all your vorn in the secret service not teach you that sometimes it’s wiser to keep your beak shut?”

Garboil clears his voxcoder with a crackle of static.  “Straxus will want to see you.”

“No,” I say wearily, rising to my feet.  “Straxus will want to see the leader of the Cobalt Sentries.”  I give him a feline smile with no warmth in it.  “You should report to him right away.”

Garboil’s look is blank.  “You’re giving me command?”

“That’s correct.  We both know Straxus is well aware of my loyalty to Trannis, and that is…not condusive to my continued survival.”  My optics narrow.  “I would hope we are also both well aware that I will not bow to Straxus.”

Garboil shrugs.  “Your choice, Commander.  And what of you?”

“Exile,” I reply, hoping I sound casual, hoping he cannot hear what it means for me to lose my home and my job, my public respect and my…and my…and Trannis, after all this time.

“If you think it’s best.   Ah….the keys to cobalt.net?”

I knew he would ask.

I fix him with a hard glare until his nerve fails him.

“You want me to go to Straxus and tell him that I am the new leader of the Cobalt Sentries, but I don’t have the keys to cobalt.net?”

“Tell him the keys died with Trannis.”

“But you know them and you’re still alive!”

“Tell him,” I growl, with all the fury of the Smelter in my voice, “or I will break your neck, let the Sentries fight one another for leadership, and deny Straxus the keys no matter what.”

Garboil retreats, wisely fearing for his life—he is more administrator than warrior, and his beak cannot match my claws and fangs—but over his shoulder he says, “Straxus will send his best to hunt you down.”

“Let him try,” I say, and my bravado holds, for his expression as he scuttles away is one of fear.

Garboil does not yet know what fear will come.  Straxus is one of the most biased of the two-legs I know.  The new Emperor will not let an animal-mech hold the Director of Intelligence post. 

Neither does Garboil know that I am far, far more afraid than he will ever be.

Before I vanish into oblivion, there is something I have to do.

I nose the cloth-wrapped bundle until I find a place where my jaws can grip it.  It is heavy as I lift it from the desk.  I could put it in subspace, if I wanted to, but the cloth smells of Trannis and cordite and oil, of battles and victories, and of quiet moments in his chambers with his hand on my head and my snout in the folds of the cape.

I will carry it, and I will take a journey for my Emperor’s sake.

For the good of the Empire, I should be in Polyhex, bowing before Straxus and swearing my fealty, offering to unlock the secrets of cobalt.net for Straxus in exchange for my life.  For my own survival, I should take a lower-ranked job and fall into step alongside the others in the new Decepticon order.  Instead, I am deep in Autobot territory, on the outskirts of a town where Autobots mine crystals from the depths of Cybertron. 

The mine is between shifts.  Half the locals are at work in the mine or the handful of businesses supporting this town; the others are at rest in these, the hours of sleep. 

The security here would stop most Decepticons.  These Autobots are not fools; they know that their mine is a strategic target and they are prepared to defend it. 

But I am four-foot, close to the ground, and I am modeled after a species native to this area.  I cannot blend into the shadows like Ravage did, but I do not need to.  The Autobots’ searchlights pick me out from the darkness just before I set down my bundle.  I curl my lip and arch my back as the light illuminates me.  They dismiss me, dumb animal, and shoot their guns into the air to drive me off.

I grab the bundle, circle and come around behind them, slipping into their town under their noses.

The Cobalt spy network has a million tendrils, reaching into the very stronghold of Iacon and also into the Autobots’ other settlements, even a mining town like this one.  I know which house I am going to.

As my paws carry me down the sleeping streets, I wonder how this situation had ever come to pass.  If nothing else, I will have my answers.  That small satisfaction at least, I am guaranteed.

The house is very small and simple and unoccupied when I arrive.  According to my intel, its owner lives alone and will be coming home from work shortly.  The security system was high-end, but not good enough to defy the chief of Decepticon Intelligence.

…the former chief of Decepticon Intelligence.

And so, I lie in wait.

When the lady of the house opens her front door and activates her lights, I am there, lying on her bunk, with my bundle resting at the foot of her bed.

Her optic flickers only once in surprise and then I hear the whine of her frame-mounted weapons powering up.

“Decepticon,” she spits, her single optic glowing icy blue.

I look up at the Autobot that towers over me and that is all it takes for me to regret my course of action.

 I had thought I could keep my professional demeanour, but now I realize, too late, that the unfamiliar surge of pure hatred setting my circuits on fire is going to be hell’s own effort to control. 

I want to kill her.  I am almost consumed by the need to rip her apart.  And yet, I don’t, and I won’t, because I know Trannis would not have wanted me to. 

This is what devotion means—when you do what is right for the other person, even when it is destroying you.

Instead, I nose the bundle at the foot of her bed.

Unlike most Autobots, she has mounted weapons.  When I look up, I am gazing down the barrel of her arm-mounted gun.  Her other arm boasts a shining energy blade.  Otherwise, she is not much to look at.  Her face reminds me of Shockwave, except that it is a pentagram-shape, and the spires on the side of her head are reminiscent of feathered wings, delicately curved.  Her armour is heavy, as befits one of her position, and her paint is a dappled gray, slate and smoke, the colour of crumbling alleys.  I remind myself that she is a dangerous opponent and I must respect her battle skills, if not the rest of her.

I grit my jaw and address the new arrival.  “Are you Bulwark, Autobot Warden, one time second in command of the Autobot prison called the Grid?”

I bark out my question as I would address any Decepticon recruit.  I do not power up my missiles.  I do not bare my fangs.  I speak not with menace, but with authority, and she responds to it.  Bewildered, her feet move together, her back straightens, and though there is confusion in her voice when she says, “I am,” she is still acknowledging me as a superior.

I am slightly mollified.

“Warden Bulwark, I have brought to you an inheritance.”  I nod my head towards the bundle I carried here.

The Autobot cautiously lowers her gun and advances slowly, as if expecting me to spring the second she takes her gaze off me, but I am rooted to the bunk like stone, willing the light in my optics to stay steady.

She picks up the object and unfolds the cloth, and I think she knows what it is before she opens it, because she sees the clasp that tells her the cloth is the cape of a warlord, and the shape is so very distinctive, because who else carried a four-barrelled cannon designed for a left-handed warrior?

“He’s dead?” she whispers, knowing the answer. 

Trannis had many secrets, from everyone except me.  After years of placing our lives in one another’s hands, we knew each other in a way that lovers did not.  We knew each other’s normal and anything that deviated from it was immediately obvious.  Most of the time we did not need to put it into words.

It was different, the time he came back from the Grid.  I knew he had changed, but I misinterpreted the reasons for his brooding silences and thirst for privacy.  I had expected the Autobots to torture him, to break his body and meddle with his mind, but never did I imagine they could make an assault on the impenetrable fortress that was Trannis’ fighting spirit.  That it happened by accident was even worse, for as an agent myself, I can respect the art in an adversary, but to have it happen despite the best intentions of Decepticon and Autobot alike…

No, he had to resort to words to explain to me his grief, and when he spoke those words, I could hardly believe them.

Warlord Trannis had no intention of taking a lifelong partner.  There was an endless parade of mechanisms, mostly lithe jets and sleek sports cars, who passed through Trannis’ “guest quarters” in the Citadel—mutual entertainment and then a parting of the ways.  I did not mind his dalliances.  It was known, though never spoken, that deeper emotion…the unquestioning trust of one’s life in the hands of another, a thing so rare and precious among Decepticons, a thing much less common than mere attraction…that, I knew, was mine.

And then came the Grid and the world I thought I knew was shattered.

Bulwark sits back in her chair now, and though she looks dazed, the weaponry hard-mounted on her lower arms is pointing in my general direction while her hands stroke the barrels of Trannis’ signature weapon.  I keep my hydraulics pressurized, ready to leap clear the second I hear her gun powering up, but I remain on her bed as if I owned it.

“I should thank you, Howlback,” she says at last.

I had not told her my name.  It’s a classic rule of interrogation, not to tell the prisoner your name. 

Did he tell her my name?  Did he speak of me to her?

She is not my prisoner, though if she were…

I push the thought aside.  I cannot be distracted with daydreams of sweet fuel in rivulets on the floor, with the scent of fear and the taste of triumph.

“Don’t thank me.  It’s what he wanted.”

She looks at me.  I turn my head away from her.  Decepticons…particularly Cobalt Sentries…particularly the chief of the secret police, are not supposed to empathize with Autobots.  I cannot meet her gaze or I will betray myself.

“Tell me how it happened,” I say slowly, still looking at the floor.

“What did he tell you about me?”

“He said very little about you,” I tell her, and it takes all my lifetime of accumulated skill to make the lie sound believable.  No, I will not give her the satisfaction of telling her how long it took him to forget about her.  “But he did say you should have that cannon.”

“Then there was no one else.”

I snort.  “I can’t count how many others came after you.”

Her optic is cold and angry when she looks at me.  “But they haven’t got his cannon, have they?”

And neither do I.  Even though I can’t hold it.

I turn my amber gaze back on her and I am cold again, diamond tipped ruthlessness, strong and hard and in control.  “I fulfilled his request and brought you his weapon as he asked.  This is what I want in return.  I want to know how the Decepticon Emperor fell in love with an Autobot Warden.”

Her simple face was almost expressionless, but the scowl in her voice was clear.  “Love?  Two individuals thrown together in extreme conditions, forced to rely upon one another for survival, and desperate for anything that would remind us that there was hope in life, that there was joy in living, that we weren’t alone and forgotten down there?”  She snorts.  “Those circumstances would throw anyone into their companions’ arms.  It wasn’t love, it was desperation.”

“Now I see why Autobots aren’t supposed to lie.”  My optics narrow.  “You’re all so incompetent at it.”

Bulwark is furious, and she rounds on me.  “What would you know about love?”

“Nothing,” I reply mildly, as I lay myself down on the floor of her home.  “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“I can’t believe you,” Bulwark says, watching me in disgust.  “You’re supposed to be the Chief of Decepticon Intelligence.  Trannis is dead, the Empire is in turmoil, and all you can think to do is sit here tormenting me.”

“What am I supposed to do?  Hunt down the Wreckers for killing him?  You want me to kill your own warriors?”

Silence.

I think I have lost, and then she begins to speak.

“If you think I had a master plan,” she begins, “I didn’t.  Because while those bars were between us, we each knew we were…an Autobot Warden, a Decepticon Warlord…and we knew what we felt for each other was a carefully measured mix of mutual respect and mutual disgust.”

She runs her hand over the cold barrels of the cannon.  “Then the walls came crashing down.  Some of my comrades got out, and a handful of the prisoners too.  Many others were killed in the Grid’s collapse.  I was on the bottom level when everything came apart, and I fell so far…  When I awoke, surprised to be alive, I was fumbling in pitch-darkness for a way out.  In one direction I heard noise, saw lights, and when I arrived, I saw Lord Trannis in mortal combat with a demon.”

She dares to call him Lord.

“Between the two of us, we managed to escape alive.”

“So you saved him,” I say, my jaw tight.

She replies coolly, “I had no chance against a demon alone.”  She did not add neither did he, but she thought it, and she knew I read that thought.  “We realized we had better odds of survival together than apart.  Neither of us wanted to die down there.”

No.  I had not wanted to die down there either.

 Her gaze raked over me.  “Do you think it would have been nobler to die down there?”

I flex my claws.  “Do you see me falling on a sword now that Trannis’ reign is through?”

She tries to change the subject.  “You won’t hold your position without him, you know.  Lavasteam or Straxus or whoever takes the throne, they’re not going to stand for an intelligence chief with four legs and no hands.”

“I thought you Autobots were supposed to be the great equalizers.”

Her gaze grows hard.  “And I thought you Cobalt Sentries had your sensors in everyone’s dirty secrets.  I don’t need to tell you that regardless of faction, this is a two-legs world.”

“We were talking about Trannis.”

Bulwark’s spires flick back and forth.  “Do you really want me to tell you all the details?  Do you really need me to remind you that intimacy is a natural byproduct of trauma, that when faced with one’s mortality over and over and over again, that there is nothing more natural than to turn to one’s comrade and celebrate one’s continued life in the most primal way possible?  Do I need to say again that neither of us had the kind of comrade on hand that we would prefer, that we had no choice but to turn to each other?”  She folds her arms. 

“Afterwards…you told no one?” I ask.

“I have no desire to be exiled.”  Her spires flatten.  “If you wish to wreak your petty revenge, you can broadcast it to the world.  Let Ultra Magnus decide my punishment.”

“I would not sully the Warlord’s memory.”

“The complaint should be mine in any case.  I told no one.  He told you.”

“To be fair, I wrestled it out of him.  We could always read each other that way.”

She barely has a face.  Her spires twitch with shudders.  I wonder if she is trying to express envy.

Her voice is thick with self-disgust when she speaks.  “I never would have done it in any other circumstance.  I don’t believe he would have either.  It was an aberration, a twist of fate that threw all the normal restraints to the four winds.  We were lucky to be alive.  We were unlikely to survive.  In those moments we had nothing to lose, and we had to take what hope we had while we could.  When we reached the surface, everything changed.”

I snort.  “So, the first shimmer of starlight and you were back to hating each other again.”          

“For all the time I looked through the bars, I saw an enemy, a monster.  I’m sure he saw the same thing looking out.  When we saw the sky again, the old order fell back into place, and those bars came down between us.  If you want to blame someone for what happened, you should blame whatever there was in those lower levels of Cybertron that knocked out the supports to the foundation of the Grid.”

She speaks rhetorically, looking off into space.  If my mask slips at all, she does not see.

Were those explosives a mistake?  What else could I have done?  Bulwark had built impressive security measures into the Grid.  I had found no other chance to get him out. 

The Warden shakes her head.  “What else could I do?  We are, what we are.  That cannot change.”

“It could,” I say, “if you’d wanted it badly enough.”

Her optic narrows.  “What would you ask of me, Howlback?  That I turn my back on my comrades in arms, on my beliefs, on my life?  That I sacrifice everything I hold dear for the sake of a handful of nights of chaos?  You wanted me to be his life-mate?”

My hackles rise and I speak without thinking.  “He was distracted during the siege of Iacon.  He should have noticed Xaaron’s escape, should have crushed the Autobot resistance right then and there…but he didn’t, and I want to know, was it because of you, was it something you did to him in one week after the collapse of the Grid that all the rest of the Empire couldn’t do to him in months or years or lifetimes of trying?  What I want to know is, did he love you?  And did you love him—were  you worth it if he did?”

She looks at me and that blue optic pierces right through me.  “I don’t know why the siege of Iacon failed.  I don’t know if he was still thinking of me, but do you know, I hope he wasn’t.  I mean that.  I moved on, and I hope he did too.”  She studies me.  “He didn’t, did he?”

“He had a lot of partners after you,” I mumble.

“Nothing that lasted.”

Nothing that lasted but that loneliness, that awful brooding silence, those monsters in his mind, and me lurking outside his chambers night after night, not certain what to say, and in the end saying nothing.  Abandoning him to his solitary battle against the desolation that ultimately claimed him.

“Nothing that lasted,” I admit.

Bulwark parries me.  “Why didn’t you ask Trannis why he didn’t leave the Empire for me?”  Her optic dims, and I do not decipher this signal in time.  “You already know why not—because we loved our causes more than each other.  So don’t you blame me.  He didn’t waste away for me, he wasted away in his own loneliness and despair, locked away from everyone else by the burden of his command.  And the blame for that falls back onto you.”

Her words are lightning to my core.

I drew myself upright and with the ultimate look of feline scorn I deny it, looking right into her optic.  “Whatever do you mean?”

On the last word, my voice breaks.

She closes for the kill.  It is far too late when I see her coming.

“Because there was someone he loved…someone as brilliant and as savage and as dedicated as he was, but someone who lacked his courage.”

I sense something predatory in her.  I remind myself that she is a Warden, an Autobot responsible for the imprisonment, interrogation, and occasionally execution of Decepticon prisoners.  She is, in her own way, as disciplined, cold, and ruthless as…

“Someone who missed her chance.” 

…as I am…

Her spires flick when she drives the blade into my core.  “Someone who now has nothing better to do with the wreckage of her life but torment me.”

She cannot, must not, mean me.  It makes no sense.  It is impossible.  It is ludicrous.

And it is true.

She knows me, better than I know myself, and I am helpless before her.

Bulwark presses her assault.  “Don’t you dare try to blame me for causing the failure of the Iacon Seige because I didn’t leave the Autobots for Trannis.  You know exactly how it feels to make that choice, to know that the last step is a step too far.”

“Look at me!”  The words spill from my lips in a rush.  “Do you know what I transform into?  I’m a data cassette.  A data cassette and a felinoid…half animal, half object.  And this is a humanoid society.  There might be some who can overlook the extreme difference in forms, some who would even enjoy it,  but to suggest that of most mechs, let alone the Emperor, would be…”

“Would be more ludicrous than the idea of Lord Trannis with an Autobot?  You think I don’t stay awake wondering at what I did with a mechanism who embodied a political movement demanding the extermination of everything I hold dear?  Or how he might have felt the same way about me?  I dared, and you didn’t, and you can’t forgive me for it, can you?”

I recognize my error too late.  She is a Warden and every bit the interrogator that I am.  I have told her too much. 

“You think this society’s prejudiced against your kind?  You’re right.  Autobot Intelligence thinks you only became head of the Secret Police because of Trannis’ patronage.  But I heard this story from Trannis’ own voxcoder and I know how you two worked…you gave him the information and he used his strength and cunning to seize power.  Then he formalized your role with a title and forced the others to respect you.  Over and over until he was Emperor—and you were the power behind the throne.  So don’t you lie to me, Howlback, because I know you made Trannis the king.  The only thing I don’t know is why you didn’t finish it.  Howlback—why didn’t you make yourself the queen?”

My hackles rose.  “You think I could have taken his love by force?”

She snorts, contemptuous.  “You didn’t even try.  You could have asked for an upgrade.  You could have changed to a bipedal robot mode.  For Primus’ sake, you were second only to Trannis himself.  You could have told the Empire’s best scientists to rebuild you in the image of Trannis’ deepest fantasies and they would have done it.”

Her optic seemed to narrow, its light becoming a cold little hyphen in her face.  “You know more than anyone, I think, what Trannis would have found attractive.”

Her words were a saber to my core.  “And do what in the exchange?  Look at me, Bulwark, this is what I am.  A predator, a lurker in shadows, an animal.”

“So you tell yourself that you can’t deny what you are.  Maybe you’re right.  But you wonder, don’t you?”

I look within and I do not know whether I refused to change because I knew myself too well to think that I could live without my natural form…

….or whether in the end I was simply afraid.

“I don’t wonder.  I am happier to be an Autobot than Trannis’ queen.  And you—you’re not.  Not happier to be what you are now.  No, you stay awake wondering if Lord Trannis was really married to the Empire or if he was waiting for a love that never came.  You chose this path, Howlback, and here you are.  Here we are.”

I don’t need to be lectured by some Autobot.  I don’t need to feel kinship with this red-symboled bitch.

I turn my head around and fixed her with my glare, and I think she realizes that she, too, has made a dangerous mistake. 

I want to kill her.  I don’t know if I can take her, but I have so little to lose… 

I would have tried, were it not for the knowledge that I still had one thing to lose, the thing that meant that in the end I had beaten her in the only way that counted.

Bulwark has Trannis’ cape and his cannon …

…and I have…

I bolt from the bed, leaping over the Autobot Warden. 

I put my tail between my legs, and run.

The Citadel overlooking the Tagon Heights is silent now.  Though Trannis had ruled his Empire from Polyhex, the traditional seat of power, the Tagon had been his home and he always felt most comfortable in the Citadel.  It was here that he retreated when the Empire began crumbling, and it was here that he had met his death.

When the Wreckers broke into the Citadel, and Trannis had risen up fighting, killing one of their number, protecting the secrets of the Citadel, holding the line until reinforcements had arrived, though it had cost him his life…

My eyes shone amber in the gloom.  Trannis’ death had been a foregone conclusion.  Lavasteam and Straxus had both dispatched assassins so that they might take his place when he was gone.

I killed their assassins.  And then I contacted Crosscut, the Autobot intelligence chief.  I directed the rest of the Decepticon personnel out of the Citadel.  I let the Wreckers in.

And so I let Trannis go down fighting, a hero, a Decepticon to the last rather than a washed-out has-been, crippled by the pressures of command and the love of an Autobot.

As I walk past, a wraith in the night, I realize that I have never seen the Citadel dark before.  Always, before, there had been light and life and a sense of…strength, perseverance, hope……a sense of Trannis.

Promise, I suppose was the best word for it.  That someday, if only we worked and waited long enough, our dreams would all come true.

Dreams.  They taste like ash tonight.

I have a computer installed in my neurocircuitry.  I use it now, as I crouch in the alleys of Polyhex.  The strings of complex code that are called the Keys to Cobalt.net allow me to access the information network and discover what I seek.

It’s almost laughable, how much of the information is restricted without the Keys.  It will take Straxus and his flunkies a hundred years or more to equal the web that Trannis and I constructed.  In the meantime, I will string cobalt.net’s restricted sectors together into a shadow web and keep running the intelligence service from exile, from official and unofficial sources, known and unknown to the Emperor, watching all of Cybertron…

I would laugh if I did not need to cry.

First, though, there is one more thing I have to do.

The hidden doors of Darkmount open to admit me.  Cobalt.net’s fifth key, the Cloak Key, erases all traces of my passage.  The cameras do not record me.  The doors close behind me and their memory does not record their opening.

I know where I am going.

My internal circuitry opens the door with a thought, and I glance around the small chamber I called my room. 

There is a desk with a computer, a recharging rack, an end table and, laughably, a chair.  Though the furniture is scaled to my small size, there have been no concessions made to the fact that I am a quadruped with no humanoid robot mode. 

This fact will save me now.  I can journey to the Wastelands and disappear, living on the fuel in the lines of the indigenous wildlife, sleeping in the caves, watching the Empire from afar and waiting for my time to come.  This was my life before the night I met a young construction worker on the Tagon and made him into a king.  It can be my life again. 

There is really only one thing I need to take with me.

It sits on its side on my desk, a small cylindrical shaped object floating within a larger fluid-filled cylinder.  Delicate wires and neurocables attach themselves to the nodules at each end of the cylinder.  One end is a power source; the other, a sensor and speaker.

I flip the switch on the sensor with my claw, activating the device.

His familiar voice fills the room, emanating from the speaker.  “Howlback…”

“My Lord,” I reply in a whisper.

“…Why…am I not….dead….”

The laser core bobs ever so slightly in its tank, hanging between the plexisteel walls as Trannis himself now hangs in the limbo between life and death.

“You are dead,” I tell him, and add ruefully, “Straxus is Emperor now.”

“Straxus…”  His voice trails off.  “Straxus will….lead us to…disaster…”

“Maybe,” I say grimly, “but that is no longer our concern.  You are dead and I am exiled.”

He speaks abruptly.  “Let go of me…bow before Straxus and wait…your time will come…  Find another warrior…as you found me…and teach her…to be a…queen.”

I don’t know if he is jealous of the thought of me with another male or if he is thinking of Bulwark.

“Straxus will not accept me.  He knows I belong to you, and always will.”         

Trannis forces a disembodied laugh through the speaker.  “Belong?  You were always the power behind the throne, Howlback…why would you ever say you belonged to me?  What hold did I ever have over you?”

I am suddenly freed to speak because I will not have to bear the look on his face.

“Hold?  You need to ask?  I loved you, you fool, and everyone could see it but you.”

There is silence from the tank.  What does he think of me now?  Sorrow for the time we wasted?  Pity, because he cannot return that feeling? 

….disgust?

Best not to know.

The speaker emits a long and weary sigh.  “Too late…doesn’t matter any more.  Howlback…if you care for me at all…please…have some mercy…and let me die.”

“No,” I say.  My voice is cold and hard.  “I loved you.  I’ve lost everything because of you.  And now, from this day on, you belong to me.”