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over from the Titans, clung to his foolish belief that he could regain respect.
    Now the Titans arrived in four specially configured ships. Manipulator arms from Agamemnon’s spacecraft installed the general’s preservation canister into a serviceable walker form. Thoughtrodes connected his mind to mobile systems, and he stretched arachnidlike mechanical limbs before walking out under the blood-red skies. Juno, Dante, and Xerxes emerged from their own ships and followed their leader toward Erasmus’s opulent villa, which bore a strong similarity to an estate that had been leveled by the League Armada in their attack on Earth.
    Erasmus fancied himself a cultured individual, an admirer of past human glories. He had modeled this grand estate on ornate historical palaces, though the Corrin landscape necessitated certain modifications, including diffusion devices to keep the human slaves from being poisoned by concentrated emissions of groundgas.
    Corrin was a rocky world, originally frozen and dead; when the sun had swelled to its red-giant phase, incinerating the system’s inner planets, the once-uninhabitable lump had thawed. Back when the Old Empire of the humans still retained a few sparks of genius and ambition, hardy pioneers had terraformed Corrin, planting grasses and trees, bringing in animals, insects, and colonists.
    But the settlement had not even lasted as long as the short lifespan of the red giant, and now machines ruled here under ruddy skies, with the baleful eye of the bloated sun peering down on dirty pens of slave workers.
    The cymeks marched through villa gates made of treated metals twisted and looped into curlicues. Lavish vines bursting with scarlet flowers draped the walls and open ceiling grid. The air must be stiflingly heavy with perfume; Agamemnon was glad he had not taken a walker form with olfactory sensors. Smelling flowers was the last thing he wanted to do right now.
    With an artificial grin on his flowmetal face, Erasmus glided up to the visiting dignitaries as they entered his courtyard. The independent robot wore a foppish robe trimmed with a spray of plush fur in imitation of an ancient human king. “Welcome, my colleagues. I would offer you refreshments, but I suspect the gesture would be wasted on machines with human minds.”
    “We aren’t here for a party,” Agamemnon said. Xerxes, though, had always seemed disappointed that he could no longer indulge in fine foods; he had been a soft hedonist in his human days. Now he just gave a mechanical sigh and admired his surroundings.
    Omnius screens were mounted on the walls, and floating watcheyes drifted about like fat mechanical bumblebees. While the actual nexus of the Corrin evermind was housed in the Central Spire elsewhere in the city, Omnius could watch from myriad viewers and hear every whispered conversation. Agamemnon had long ago grown accustomed to, and annoyed with, the constant surveillance, but there was nothing he could do— until he got rid of Omnius altogether.
    “We must discuss this war against the irrational humans.” The evermind’s voice boomed across speakers like an all-powerful, omnipresent god.
    Agamemnon dampened his listening receptors, reducing the evermind’s thunderous commands to small squeaks. “Lord Omnius, I am ready for any further aggression against the hrethgir . You need only authorize it.”
    “General Agamemnon has been advocating such action for years,” Xerxes said, too eagerly. “He’s always said that free humanity is like a ticking bomb. He warned that unless we dealt with the hrethgir, they would eventually reach a boiling point and cause great harm— exactly as they have done on Earth, Bela Tegeuse, Peridot Colony, and, more recently, on Tyndall.”
    The cymek general controlled his annoyance. “Omnius is fully aware of our previous conversations, Xerxes. And our battles with the humans.”
    Erasmus’s voice was erudite. “Since we have never seen an update of the final