We wouldn't be coming to him, she wants to say. She's not suicidal, not stupid, she knows that assaulting his stronghold is insane.

But… If we're talking about them being deployed against us, then we don't [i]have[/i] to. If they're a concern, it's because we worry he might send them against us. That means that all we have to do is survive one battle in good enough condition to pick up as many as we can on the way out.

If. If we survive. Fuck, she hates that word.

If. Not survive, obviously. Survive is a great word, If is less good. If means--

Reality sucks, you know that? She always knew they were fighting a losing battle, but hearing it laid out in numbers by someone who's much better at numbers than her really highlights it, lays it bare.

They're not a threat! 

But they are. Not because the crew of the [i]Plousios[/i] is a military power, but because they're a cultural threat. They represent a chance of something different, an idea apart from empire. Let one idea grow, and suddenly people get the idea that the status quo might be possible to change.

No matter how it might feel on the other end, for the ones who have to do the changing.

Surely missing one or two is--Liquid Bronze wouldn't even notice, right? They're insignificant to him, disposable, he proves it by how he made them.

But they're also his magnum opus. Losing even one is to set loose a new, uncontrollable warrior servitor species to rival the Ceronians.

How like an Azura to make a weapon with a built-in casus belli. 

Psh. Like they fuckin' [i]need[/i] one, right now. Planet lost, town stolen, knight dead, rogue servitors in an imperial ship about to go who the fuck knows where, least of all her.

Through a star, apparently.

It's the right thing to help them. It is! It one-hundred-percent is the moral thing to do.

And it's--

It's not impossible, insists the treacherous mental censor. You could pull it off.

All it would cost you is everything, but it could be done. It's the right thing to do. 

It'd be suicidal to pursue it. Destructive, not to just herself, but to everyone who follows her. All of her Pix? Gone. Her newfound friends? Dead, to no end. An angry mosquito, hurling itself and everyone they care about at a bug zapper in a last, meaningless 'fuck you' to the universe.

It still reeks of cowardice to her own mind, though.

It'd mean losing Brightberry. 

"I assume we'd survive blasting through a star," she grudgingly says, at last. "Make us hard to follow, or at least worth leaving alone."