This is starting into Part 3 out of 4/ 5. This is the chapter that took more revision time than anything else. It definitely showed. This is a very early draft with the stuff that was actually good from the later edits worked in. I went overboard making fun of the source games, which I only tried to sort out when I was writing this. And the reveal this will all build up to was never supposed to be ambiguous.

It was another day and another voyage. The strike ship Amphion hurtled through hyperspace, with only two aboard. Meliboia showed King Ajax a chart on a touch display on one wall. "This is the core Star Union space," she said, waving over one arm of the spiral galaxy. She pointed at the rough arm of the next arm over. "This is Diaspora space, where the Hellenes are. Some of them settled down, others wander like the Misthioi. The Union has claimed authority, but they don't have enough muscle for push to come to shove. Not yet. For now, they work with the local powers, which means Myrmidons and Misthioi. The edges of the Diaspora aren't too far from the Disc." She tapped one particular star. "This is where I came from."

"My Queen," Ajax said, extending his hand, "are you sure you want to do this?"

"Yes," she said. "I need to." She clasped his hand. "It will be another 12 hours before we arrive. We should rest." Her eyes had turned toward the lavatory.

"Perhaps we could clean up," Ajax said. His eyes followed hers. The lavatory was a single stall, effectively a combination shower and floor toilet. Overhead, there were handholds, straps and even moorings for a harness.

An hour and a half later, he managed to carry Meliboia to the bed in her cabin before they collapsed. "I see… the appeal," he gasped.

"Ah… I think I'm starting to see why people planetside go for beds," Mel said. "Makes things… simpler." She buried her head in his chest. "Cal, wake us up in 8 hours. Hells… make it 9."

The ship emerged before an enormous ball colored in bands of varying shades of blue-gray. It was a gas giant half again the size of Jupiter, with a similar spot where the nearly pure-white clouds of a storm swirled around a deep blue-green eye the size of Eurasia. A little to the side of the heart of the storm was another, darker spot that already seemed to grow.

"That's Caledon," Mel said. "It's a Class 4 satellite, twice the size of Earth's moon. It has a limited atmosphere, about the same density as Mars. There was talk of setting up atmosphere plants to churn out breathable air. It was just crazy talk. Nobody wanted to come out here. Even the platinum mine barely paid for the trip there and back. There… that's it."

They flew over the planet. It was dimpled with craters large and small. One particular one stood out. It was small, barely half a mile wide, but distinctly fresh and sharp. As they flew over it, Mel separated the bridge module and circled around and down. Another half mile away was a dome 3 Stadia wide, half caved in. He could see flash-frozen crops, still undisturbed. Next to the dome were what looked for all the world like soup cans, corrugations and all, two dozen in total. They were laid out on either side of a path, which took a diagonal jog a little ways from the end. On the other side of the dome were the landing pad, equipment depots and the pits and leavings of the mine itself. Ajax's gaze stayed on the modules. It was evident that they had originally been half-buried. Now, there were several barely visible, and several more that were fully exposed. Two had been knocked on one end, and another appeared to have flipped and come to rest on top of another. He shook his head. "Does anyone come here?" he wondered.

"Oh, lots of people try to come," she said. "All for me. I've got millions of what you could call fans. They would love to have a piece of this place. They would pay for it, too, and they have. There's one who has a little museum in what she says is the module the Myrmidons found me in. I looked through it; it was three-fourths fakes and about a fifth things I had sold off when I still needed money. Those are the benign ones. The ones that aren't so nice want in on the legend. There's thousands of them who will say they were my lovers, men and women. All Hells, I've seen them fight because they both said they were with me at the same time. Then there's the ones who say they worked with me, or fought against me. The real fringe are the ones who say they were part of the raiding party that did this. I looked into all of those. There was one who might've known something, but he was too far gone by the time I got to him."

Ajax nodded. "So why didn't the owners of the mine sell off the modules and equipment?"

"Like I said, it wasn't worth it, at least not then," Mel said. "It was easier for the company to zero out and take the insurance payout than try to send a crew to sort everything out. The Myrmidons had the salvage claim on the platinum, which I had the right to half of. As sole survivor, I also have an equal stake in the mine if it ever reopens. Obviously, it never did. I set up a few measures to run off the freaks. The one nice thing about them is that they want to believe this place would be guarded. If they detect a transponder for a Fleet Cruiser or an Ostrakoi life signature, they don't ask questions."

They set down on the landing pad. They exited in basic pressure suits. Ajax glanced at an overturned excavator. They paused at a module that looked intact. It was 4 meters wide and 9 meters long. Its airlock hatch had been blown off. The insides were scorched black. The frame of what might have been a bed was twisted from heat. "This is where the colonists might have put up a bit of a fight," Mel said. "There was damage consistent with small arms fire and maybe a light demolition charge or two. The modules are completely standardized, by the way. They hold 10 to 20 each. Identical ones are still being manufactured. That's where the fake stuff comes in. Usually, the junkers will at least find one that's of the same age. Sometimes, they don't bother."

They passed the jog in the path. "Now, here is the legend," Mel said, pointing ahead. "When the Myrmidons arrived, they detected one life sign, weak, abnormal or both. That's in the sensor logs; there was enough of an inquiry for those to be reviewed. Aeacus himself took the bridge module of the Geryon to the surface to investigate… And you're thinking about whether you believe it, aren't you?"

"I do not doubt you, nor would I disbelieve Aeacus without cause," he said. "But this is what Persephone was talking about, wasn't it? I could tell it hurt you. I wanted to see when you were ready to talk."

Mel sighed. "The people I told you about always say they're asking questions," she said. "It's always that they want a story, and the story is always that I'm more than just me. Sometimes, I'm a robot, maybe a cyborg kind of deal; they are out there. Or maybe it's an alien hybrid, or a genetically engineered super warrior, or a hyper-evolved human from the future. I've heard one that I started as a man; that one's kind of cute. The Myrmidons already checked me out for anything like that. I have a few genetic anomalies, like the hair, and some extra static that's probably from the same gamma blast that scrambled things downstairs. Everything that matters is baseline H. sapiens. I told you, what you see is what you get… and I'm blowing up at you, aren't I?"

"I understand better," Ajax said. "Let us go."

They approached the module. It too appeared intact, except for a visible fracture where the rear end met the rest. The airlock still stood open, one edge visibly deformed. Mel motioned for Ajax to go inside. He had to stoop to enter. As he crossed the threshold, he took one more glance at the airlock.

"Aeacus had to force the airlock," Mel said. "It was damaged too badly for the mechanism to work." Ajax looked to one side and the other. The module was considerably more cramped inside than was evident from its exterior. He was astonished that anyone would have considered it suitable for 5, let alone 20. There was a splash of blood on the edge of a kitchen sink, and another on the frame of a double bunk. He considered a box of translucent explosive charges, about half empty. "They found 8 bodies in here, 5 women and 3 men. They had implants that were meant to identify them, all blanked. And there was this." At the far end of the module, behind a curtain that had been set up to conceal it, was a crib.

"This is where Aeacus found the survivor," Mel said. "He reported that there was a woman standing over the crib, like she had been guarding… me. They all call her the mother, but nobody really knows... He called for his second to bring an incubator directly to the module. A day and a half later, the Geryon pulled into Philippi with me aboard."

Ajax nodded. "You said that nobody knows who did this," he said. "But why?"

"That's the easy part," Mel said. She gripped the railing of the crib. "It was me. Really. Nobody ever said so, but I figured it out once I talked to people from other Colonies. It was enough to see what Apoikoi are really like. These people couldn't just come clean, that was the thing, or their Syndicate would have zeroed their contracts and maybe faced liability themselves. And nobody else could figure out what it was, because they only thought to look for the things that would turn a profit. Do you see now? Maybe you can't, unless Boston was a lot worse than you ever let on. There's a point where people stop even being greedy, just miserable, spiteful and mean. Think of the Ballade of the One Tin Soldier. Think of the fans who say they had me, fighting over who had the best lie; yeah, you get that. The Apoikoi had passed that a long time before this. So what do you expect from people like that, when the only thing they know is that you think you have something worth hiding? Nobody cared who did this, because there was nobody who wouldn't have done the same thing, Caledon included."

Ajax nodded. Bending down, he picked up a strand of hair. It was like platinum and pearl. "Are there many of the Hellenes with hair like yours?" he asked.

"Probably about 1 in 200," Mel said. She considered the hair herself. "It can occur a lot more frequently in the outlying Colonies."

"How often have you come here?" Ajax asked.

"This is the third time," Mel admitted. "The second, I did not come in here."

The King straightened and turned. He walked back to the airlock, hand in hand with his Queen. "You know, my brother and I started with demolition work," he said. "We used to say, it was easier blowing holes in things than fixing them. Have you done much?"

"Oh, I blow up plenty of stuff," Mel said. "Usually, I don't stick around to see the rest." She laughed, and Ajax laughed in turn. As they stepped out the airlock, he made a point not to look one last time at the mark on the inside of the deformed hatch.

"So," Mel said as they walked back to the ship, "I have something to do here on the planet. I thought about just having you go back to the ship and wait. But you deserve to see this." She turned aside toward the mines.

They passed a lesser pit that had clearly been refilled. "That's where the Myrmidons buried all the remains they could find," she said. "I let a team of scientists in once to look at the remains. One of the things they checked on was whether they could narrow down which woman had given birth. They confirmed two who had, and three more maybes. It could have been nothing. A lot of the colonists were older."

They walked among the main mining pits. One still held an enormous excavator, as big as a skyship, with an assemblage of enormous grinders and scrapers that made Ajax think of the Kophon's mouthparts. "That would have been the main digger," Mel said. "People get exactly the wrong idea about how that works. They picture great big drills boring tunnels through the rock. Nope. If what you've got is big enough, it's easier just to go straight down. There were a few tunnels, though. That was mostly exploratory, or to get to the rarer ores. And here we are."

They had reached the mouth of a tunnel. Mel shown a light inside. She flicked it on, then off in long and short pulses. When she stopped, there was a pointed silence. Then the rumbling came straight through the rock. She drew back, and gestured for Ajax to do the same. Then the first of them appeared, blue-skinned, armored creatures with mouthparts in place of jaws, walking on folded wings. The mass parted for the largest of all, a specimen with enlarged mouthparts and a vastly enlarged skull.

"They never really knew what they were doing," Mel said as they rejoined with the Amphion. "To them, we're like drones who outlived their Monarchs. They don't understand how we can do as well as we have except by coasting along. As far as they're concerned, the whole war happened because we wouldn't listen when they asked us to get out of the way."

"Maybe they aren't wrong," Ajax mused. "So you helped the Ostrakoi escape?"

"I was the first and last to go into the Quarantine Sector and look around," Mel said. "They were dying, Alex. The Hive where Cadmus was hiding was the last that was still functioning. I showed them a path through the Interdictors. Then I led them to a place to live."

"What happens now?" Ajax asked.

"I'm going to sell my stake," Mel said. "That means someone might reopen the mine. I had to warn them. The rest is up to them." She wiped away a tear. "I understood them, all right? At least, I could feel pity for them. Are you surprised?"

"No," her husband said. "I'm surprised you didn't tell me."

"All right, fair point," Mel said. "Next time I break Galactic law, we're in it together."

Mel played the full copy she had made of the library of the Music Box, remixed together. She drummed the console to "Ride of the Fire Mares" and "Prefabricated". She frowned at "Blue Lamp". They sang along to "Knowing Me, Knowing You", then Mel sang "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" in an ethereal contralto. Of the latter, she said, "This is a song of the Myrmidons. They just didn't know it."

"It was one of Hector's favorite songs," Ajax said. "He did not really understand it. Neither did I, for a long time. You sing it well."

"Thanks," Mel said. "What really happened with that tape?"

"You must have noticed, the music is from two different times," the King said. "I filled several tapes like that with music I heard when I was younger. I started letting Hector use the tape to fill it out. I tried to record the last song, a few months before we were transported to the World Island. When it didn't work, I gave Hector the tape back."

Another song started, Ajax knew from the Heavy Metal cassette. He suddenly felt déjà vu, which he realized he had felt once before. He finally rewound to the beginning. He told her the story of a lone warrior woman against an army possessed by a cosmic force of evil. "These notes," he said. "They are the same as The Dirge of Amphion."

Mel listened uneasily. "Not exactly," she said. "I don't think so…" Finally, she tried singing over it: "`It is the end of the day, there is only the bill left to pay… Let the Fool rise, when Amphion falls!'" She shook her head.

"Is it an old song?" Ajax asked.

"I know I played it before you would have come here," she said. "The words are said to be ancient, and of course they were in Greek. The rest… I do not know what to make of it. In your world, I would not be surprised."

Then "O-o-h Child" played. Ajax started to sing along, vaguely embarrassed. Mel joined in at the repetition. "Is this the one who wrote the music?" she asked at the end.

"No," Ajax said, "most singers in my world have writers. That was what we call a `cover'. It was sung by another first, then the one you heard sang it. She did it better."

"She certainly did it well," Mel said. "Say, what do you say we use the lavatory again?"

Ajax smiled. "I would rather go to bed," he said.

The music continued to play as they laid down to sleep. "Meliboia," Ajax said, "I must tell you something. Whatever else may have happened, the air lock was not damaged by the raiders alone. It was blown from inside."

For a moment, it seemed that Mel was asleep. Then she looked up into his eyes. "I know," she said. "Now you do, too." Then she closed her eyes and said no more.