[b]An explosion rocked the room, filling it first with a blinding light, then a searing heat.[/b]

For a few seconds, Commodore Janos Korwitz heard only silence and saw only darkness, as if he had died. Life came back to him slowly, though never completely; it was as if he was dreaming, and for what seemed like years he could only try to interpret the blurry and confused images he saw. There was screaming, yes- a united chorus of shrieks and shouts, coming from those he had come to known and worked with. He seemed to be covered in rubble, which impaired his vision, but at one point he thought he saw Commodore Fenris, a greatly respected man within the Navy, drag himself across the podium's floor, missing everything waist-down. Then again, it might have just been a hallucination, as he was blacking out regularily.

He was not conscious when they pulled him out of the rubble, put him in the van in a pile- like corpses, one would think- and put him on the operating table. Later, he would be told that his wounds were thought to be terminal: Both his legs had been blown off, and shrapnel had savaged his body, making a mess of his organs, and almost severing his right arm it two. But modern medical science was a truly amazing thing, and with the most advanced cybernetics, they were able to repair him, or was it replaced? He sometimes wondered if he was the same man who had entered the Royal Officer's Academy that day, to see his son's entrance into the His Majesty's Forces. Perhaps that man died, and he was simply a machine who believed himself to be the same. Twenty-three men died that day, including four captains and a commodore. 

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Half a year later, he was sitting amongst his peers, more machine than man, to see the entertainement. They were in a small room, filled with chairs and men of importance, all facing a glass window that covered a wall. Beyond the window was a firing squad: Twenty soldiers to execute ten prisonners. There was a jovial mood in the room, as captains and commodores traded jokes and laughed at the impending slaughter. Janos was in his own universe, however, and stared only at the prisonners, blindfolded, tied to the concrete wall, arms spread. 

They were members of the Sons of Liberty, he had learned- a terrorist organization of radicals seeking to overthrow His Majesty and instate a democratic republic. They had commited terrorist actions all over the Kingdom for years now, funded by Arius's regime, who sought to weaken the Kingdom to path the way for its invasion. It was they, he also knew, who had planted the explosive on that day, five months ago, which killed so many and destroyed so much. Since that day, there had been a severe crackdown- this was only the latest of a long string of executions. So far hundreds of their agents had been uncovered, judged guilty, and executed. It was one thing to massacre commoners, but killing officers was a crime in a league of its own.

The officer leading the firing squad barked an order, and his men raised their guns. When he barked again, they fired in unison, a thunder of shot raking the terrorists. Janos felt something in himself wither as he watched their limp corpses hang from their shackles. He did not know which one of them was his son, and yet strangely, that no longer mattered. The fact that his wife was also dead, having lept to her death shortly before the execution, also seemed to him strangely inconsequential. All other emotions were put aside to make way for cold rage, a silent, yet stifling fury, directed at the filthy jihadists and xenos, who had caused so much misery and death. For them, there would be no mercy of a quick death.

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Vice-Admiral Korwitz thus stood in the shadows, filled with a silent anger, watching with both his synthetic and his organic eye the xenos assembled here. [i]They should launched into the vacuum of space[/i], he thought, [i]not welcomed among us[/i]. [i]This will need to be rectified[/i]. He clenched his synthetic hand tightly.