MIGHT OF THE EMPIRE

With the gist of their multithreaded plan established, the team began preparations for the individual components. First order of business was to finally get a face-to-face audience with the ever-elusive Tanya Daguerrochev. In a rare windfall, the groundwork had already been laid by a previous failure.

Pulling this off would require first acquiring another army uniform, as the one they had was a legionnaire's uniform and therefore not suitable. This was a problem easily solved: Firefly easily located a suitable mark and lured him out of clear view with a fake story about a legionnaire passed out in an alley. Once away from prying eyes, she knocked him out, stole what she needed, and was already gone before anyone else was any the wiser.

Firefly then made her way to the military district. She got in easily, as the soldier whose uniform she had stolen had his documentation in good order. Roaming the camp looking suitably worried, she then tracked down an officer and asked for directions to Tanya's tent: she had urgent information on a sinister and treacherous plot. This got the officer's attention immediately, and he led her to one of the larger tents Pigeon had already identified. Pigeon had been following the proceedings from afar through her spyglass, and watched as Firefly vanished into the tent, straining to catch a glimpse of the woman who had opposed them indirectly all this time.

As Firefly entered the tent, she immediately began to take stock of its contents. Most of the tent was taken up by a large table, and there were smaller tables along the sides, some with radio equipment on them. At the far end of the large table was a woman who looked strikingly young for her office, barely four feet tall and with blonde hair almost as long as her full height. There was little doubt in anyone's mind at that moment that this was Tanya Daguerrochev.

Artfully maintaining the mien of a soldier who knew he had seen something he shouldn't, Firefly laid out her story. Martin Symmonds was really working with the enemy, and she had proof! His plan had been to sabotage the army's food supplies by having his minions hijack a barge, poison the supplies on board, and deliver them while posing as crew, but the plan had been scuppered by the military's respect for proper procedure. To hide the evidence of his failure, Martin had then ordered that the barge be taken upstream and sunk, and this was what the soldier had overheard. Tanya listened attentively, reacting seriously but not strongly, before finally thanking and dismissing Firefly.

It was only days later that the fourth general Diego Alvarez arrived and set up camp at the opposite end from the rest of the military. His welcome party followed not long after. Lady Ambrosia was scheduled to perform like always, but this time she was early. She was in good standings with the staff, which was why they were happy to acquiesce when she gave them a bottle of wine to distribute at the party, ostensibly of Alvarez's favourite vintage.

One person who was not early to the party was John Amhurst. Accompanied by two bodyguards, he was making his way through the city streets when he heard an unintelligible proclamation from a side alley. On cue, one of his men slumped to the ground beside him. He knelt down to check his companion while the other guard glanced about the street. As Amhurst gently shook him, he began to come to, bleary-eyed, when another incantation rang out and he slumped back onto the groun. At a soft thud from behind, Amhurst turned around to see that his other guard had also succumbed. At the same time, he spotted an unfamiliar figure at the far end of the street, holding a peculiar pose at the threshold of the gloom. Amhurst broke into a run, but the stranger kept pace easily. The uncanny words rang out a third and final time, and Amhurst himself fell to the ground in unnatural slumber.

The riskiest part of Pigeon's job was now done, but there was one last step to perform. After looking around for witnesses and finding none but the stars, she stepped over to the bodies of each of the insensible men in turn, and silently slit their throats. The bodies would create panic once they were found, but that couldn't be helped, Pigeon concluded. Her contribution to that night's grand scheme complete, she slipped away into the darkness.

Meanwhile those back at the party, blissfully unaware of one act of cold brutality already transpired on their streets and more yet to come, were meandering their way through another round of wine and nibbles. Alvarez had been pleased to receive Lady Ambrosia's gift, as were several others who were sharing it. Lady Ambrosia herself put on a merely passable performance, then excused herself from the gathering early, apparently unwell. Despite this the party continued on well into the night.

Beaver was lurking in the sniping tower he had constructed earlier just outside of town, surrounded by snares and traps to alert him of any who dared approach. He didn't know the outcome of Pigeon's mission, but he knew roughly when it would occur, and that his time window for action was narrow. He kept his sights trained on Tanya's tent, waiting.

Eventually, a short woman with a distinctive mane of blonde hair emerged from the tent, walking towards the latrines with four bodyguards in tow. As soon as she came to a halt Beaver steadied his aim, and fired.

At the sound of gunfire the camp immediately turned to a swarming hive of activity. With the pressing matter of escape outweighed any inclination to observe the ensuing chaos, Beaver immediately fled into the darkened countryside. He didn't need to watch to be certain that his target was dead. A search party was quickly organised and sent out from the now sprawling military camp, but between the cover of darkness and a head start, they had no hope of catching him.

The following day was spent surveying the carnage. Diego Alvarez was dead, reportedly poisoned at a party, along with several others including Martin Symmonds, Neumann and Goncharov. Lady Ambrosia Seinfeld was missing and thought to be a victim of the same incident. Separately, John Amhurst and his bodyguards had also been found dead. In light of these attacks and the resulting unrest, the city had been placed under martial law. No one got in or out, and a strict curfew was enforced.

Tanya's camp had been completely silent.

The practical upshot of this was that Pigeon and Firefly were stranded inside the city and there was still one general yet to arrive. However new information indicated that this might not be the worst place to be for the mission. Home base had finished decoding the messages the group had stolen a few days earlier. As it turned out, they were communications between revolutionary cells which those in the house had intercepted.

Among other things, the messages revealed that the legionnaire who had attempted to kill Cecil had in fact been undercover. Between the contents of the messages themselves and how easily they had been intercepted, home base was of the opinion that this particular revolutionary group was utterly incompetent. This was what they had suspected all along, and why they had recalled Fulcrum to be deployed elsewhere. His primary capacity lay in rallying others to action, and with such inferior raw materials his talents would have been wasted.

Pigeon still had every intention of escaping, but Firefly believed she could work with the revolutionaries to further destabilise the empire. Perhaps with her guidance they could be effective, but there were short-term essentials to be dealt with before she could pursue this long-term plan. Over the course of the day, Firefly and Pigeon decommissioned the hideout in the lensmaker's shop, and hatched a plan for Pigeon to get out of the city.

Later that afternoon, they infiltrated the mill district by the river under the pretext of being shift workers, and hid out evading the guards until darkness fell. Then, when a gap in the patrols presented itself, Pigeon made her break for freedom, jumping into the river and swimming downstream. The lamps on the bridges didn't penetrate far into the water, so she could stay out of sight by keeping below the surface until she was beyond the city wall. Once outside, she swam ashore, dried herself off as best she could, and eventually reunited with Beaver.

It turned out Beaver had also been well-occupied that day. To keep news of the situation in the city from spreading, he had shot down a messenger he suspected was taking word to the fifth general, and stolen his horse.

Over the next couple of days, Pigeon and Beaver rode up the road towards the approaching fifth general and his army. These were not difficult to find. For another two days they watched at a distance, trying to discern who was in charge. Once they thought they knew, Beaver selected a sniping position on a ridge a little ahead on the army's trajectory and waited for it to come into range.

The shot was not a difficult one. With a staccato bang Beaver hit his target straight on, and the general collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut. After a moment of disbelief, the remaining officers began taking control of the camp and organising a response.

Rather than leave it at that, Beaver and Pigeon relocated to the other end of the ridge to watch who assumed command. They managed to narrow it down to three candidates, but could refine their guess no further with the time that they had.

Beaver concluded that he would have to trust his gut here, and took aim at the shortest one. Though his aim was true, this gave the other officers sufficient time to duck behind cover, where they remained, barking orders to their subordinates.

As the search parties fanned out Pigeon and Beaver galloped off, riding double towards the nearby kingdom border. They were in broad daylight this time, but the head start was enough to get them over the line.

They might have been home, but this did not mean they were safe. For Beaver, his intimate knowledge of what had transpired in the city meant that he might not receive much better treatment from his employers than at the hands of his foreign enemies. They all knew there was only one way to be sure of a man's silence. Pigeon's magical talents were too valuable to waste in such a way, but this was cold comfort to a conscript.

Throughout all of this, Firefly had remained trapped and vulnerable in the city. Cutting loose all ties to her previous life had involved several hard decisions. Despite its obvious utility, the radio had to go. Any substantial amount of cash would draw attention, so that was hidden, spread across several dead drops throughout the city. Lastly, there was Sir Fluffybutt III, who, set loose, could hope for no better than to join the ranks of Fluffybutt I and II.

With her Lady Ambrosia identity burned well and truly to a crisp, Firefly had resurrected her Jesse persona. After several ineffectual attempts at convincing one of Jesse's contacts to allow her to stay with them, she eventually found work at a church where she could lay low until things calmed down.

This took a while, as a ravenous witch-hunt swept through the city, claiming any and all with even the most tenuous thread connecting them with the assassinations. Executions swiftly followed, and the victims included all of the staff at Alvarez's welcome party, several dock workers and labourers suspected of grain tampering, the unfortunate fellow who had tried to sound the alarm on Beaver at the warehouse, the spies from whom the team had stolen coded messages, and numerous other supposed rabble-rousers.

The SoCC was formally broken up, though it was now headless and most members had distanced themselves from it anyway out of self-preservation. The lens-maker's shop was also raided, although by this time nothing incriminating remained.

As it turned out, Tanya Daguerrochev survived. The woman Firefly had spoken with and Beaver had later shot dead was in fact a body-double and the real Tanya was in a nearby tent spying on the whole proceedings using a short-range radio.

In spite of the team's best efforts, war was still likely, but the Empire's war machine had been thoroughly gutted. A single general with a diminished staff would struggle to put up a substantial fight against the kingdom.