If there is anything more boring than a state dinner, I haven’t seen it yet. Harper stared at the people watching every move he and the others made. If he tasted something and didn’t take more of it, then the various engineers, who Harper recognized from the earlier meeting, wouldn’t eat it.

"Tyr?"

"Yes, Harper?" Tyr replied, never taking his gaze from a young man who sat across from him.

"Why are they looking at me that way?" He pressed.

"The engineers? Easy. Some foods can help increase brain activity. Everything you eat, they will most likely copy in an effort to understand your intelligence."

"Wonderful, I can get them addicted to Shock Cola!"

Tyr and the other Nietzscheans at the table turned to look at him. "That would not be... one of your better ideas, my Harper." Tyr quaked inside at the thought of Nietzschean Harpers. Hyped up on that Cola and all in one room. It was the stuff of nightmares.

"No, but then kludge like that don’t have good ideas, they merely repeat the words of their betters." The young man across the table said to them.

Tyr turned to him, a fire building behind his dark chocolate eyes. "What did you say?"

"Well since you have spent so much time with kludge, I guess you have gone down..." The young man sneered.

A little higher up on the table, Dylan put his head into his hands, turning to Onnika, he announced in a clear voice, "I am sorry about this Onnika, I promise we will clean up the larger pieces but I can’t promise we will get it all. People should know not to bait Tyr, he tends to start shredding and not stop."

"Boy. You have no idea who you just insulted and I don’t mean Dylan." Tyr looked around. "You think Dylan is so great, well you just insulted Seamus Zelazny Harper Anasazi, the Angel of Death. All of you know of the Battle of Witch Head. But we know something about it you don’t.

"It is said that we had 500 ships, this everyone knows. Nietzscheans know that we had 1500 ships but it is told that at the ‘critical hour, the angel of death appeared summoning forth the fires of hell’ and our fleet was destroyed except for 500 ships." Tyr paused and smiled at his mate, "I never saw an angel before I saw him.

"We really aren’t sure what Trance is but somehow... some way, she managed during a lesson in slipstream piloting to send us back over three hundred years. I saw the ships at Witch Head. I desired to go with them but the price was too high. Harper managed to find within the nebula... a small amount of mineral, that he could trigger, a fusion catalyst. Harper destroyed 1000 of our ships, 100,000 of our people. With one finger, with his idea, he became the Angel of Death. Who better to have at my side? The Angel of Death and a mechanical genius. And I knew they would die.

"I never warned them. If the Nietzscheans had won the Battle of Witch Head, we would have reigned supreme for a small while before infighting collapsed us. Now there is a greater danger, and maybe it’s only Harper who will be able to help us.

"Recently we have found proof that the Magog are bioengineered. They could never have gotten into space by themselves. More over, that this same intelligence guided their attacks, such as the one of Brandenburg Tor. Another of this intelligence was guiding the Consensus of Parts, the machine collective. Back then we were not prepared to fight them. Now we are almost ready. For do not doubt they are coming. And they will kill us." Tyr sat down and started in on his food again, using his fork to eat of his mate’s plate.

"Oh yeah... that’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about Onnika." Dylan smiled.

* * *

In a corner of the room, Kaeg sat. I must tell them to hurry.

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