Boldness laughed, bright and clear and beautiful. "Oh!" it - she? said. "So many questions! You'll leave the Crimson in no time at all at this rate. How to put it? The Furnace Knight's crime is," again the translation spell stumbles over an intensely complicated concept being boiled down into a single word. The best it manages is '[i]redemption[/i]'. "So, yes. All of those reasons. It's hard to explain."

The defense is centered around a set of bulbous light mechs. These are unarmed, slow-moving all terrain quadrupeds, quite unlike the gravity technology seen elsewhere. To a scan, they seem to be little more than mobile reactors, heavily armoured and given basic locomotion. Each mobile reactor is tended to by a squad of nine soldiers, each carrying a strange nozzled weapon like a flamethrower or a chemical spray, attached directly to the reactor by a thick cable/hose. If those guns need a reactor the size of a car to fire then they will inflict [i]serious[/i] damage despite ostensibly being infantry weapons.

The aliens carrying them are a different branch from the ones seen before. These ones still wear yellow fabric, but rather than concealing their appearance behind baffling robes these ones seem intent on showing their bodies off. The diversity is wild; unrestrained biological and cybernetic modification allowing each individual to follow its own ideal of beauty. Aliens from a hundred species following a thousand individual aesthetics make this military formation look like what you might get if you built an army of interstellar bounty hunters.

"And isn't that interesting," Boldness mused, paying no heed whatsoever to all this. They weren't firing and she wasn't acting like they were about to. "You're an assassin who thinks like a politician, talks like a merchant, and asks questions like a philosopher. You also seem to have the authority to negotiate. I'd almost have guessed you were part of a mercenary warband, but you seem to think that we might pay you with diplomatic relations..." she snapped out of it. "Gratitude! I'm not sure, I get paid in amnesia. You, though? A wish is traditional, isn't it?"