She knew from the start it would end her.

Riven Polynices, felled at the height of his prowess, must be unkilled as a warning. For a year the salvage crews with their icy dewars combed high Seventh orbit for his wake. His brother's wreckage -- their brother, his body, his bones -- strewn-together with his, amidst the geigers still scintillating from the clash, and the spectrum of the Seventh still awash in gamma white. The recorded impact zone around the gate spanned several million leagues; the augurs indicated that the debris field would close the gate to freighters for at least another seven runs.

To rise against the city warrants erasure enough, to breach Kessler taboo demands worse. So sung the city across the translunar nets. Thebes cannot abide those who seek to close our straits; such demands pervert trade, test the system and endanger her twenty thousand lives. Lamination must therefore be his fate. To be rebuilt and cast down into Dionysus's frozen sea, left to think in forever twilight; the generators to last a good five millenia before they sputter out and fry what's left of him to death. "His traitorous intent is memetic poison; return it not to the city and her myth." Such is the policy by which her uncle sought to seek to serve the commons, and conformably as tyrant he could not help but abide.

Came a fortnight where the scavengers found enough of Empedocles to burn him. A few days later, the traitor's entry plug, heat-sealed and intact. The scrapmen get to work with their torches and knives. Carved him up and mounted him on silver pins inside his chandelier tomb. All this they showed on live feed to the city, how they have splayed the traitor out, flash-frozen the little slices of him onto the trays. The oscilloscope readouts, simulating agony. The teleprompter from the chorus fed my uncle lines, chanting for forgiveness from our forefathers and the gods, the Hadean rites as they seal the sarcophagus in infernal undeath.

When Creon turned to the camera his face was streaked with tears. Reading off the supplication-by-committee: and if any hand so much as touched him they'd face worse at the hands of the city. Promised he to the chorus, and so word became encrypted law.

Now her mech's lightning-quick; she'll escape the sensors yet. Under Dionysean eclipse she jukes the relays hanging in their high polar thrones, cloaks her heat signature in silvered chaff, kicks her wings to unform the contrails. Not hard to find his sarcophagus bleeding gold against the tropopause. The window of the eclipse narrowing, she ejects and initiates the transfer herself. Manipulator arms, flown by wire, navigate him gingerly into her chest. In the thickness of the helium sky every movement is precise.

Ejecta, six hundred leagues skyside. Panic, she aborts. Her uncle's drones have spotted her. The sarcophagus, mid-scoop, fires engines on autopilot and drops into the deep. She punches her engines into a waiting magnetostorm, cursing the fates. But not without a prize clutched in her claws, six radiothermal batteries, without which her brother would slowly power down to rest. She jettisons them into the heart of the god.

A virgin's folly; the loitering drones would fix him posthaste; she can do for him nothing more. With her task incomplete, now all in the city will know that one among them harbours intent to honour its traitor. Polluted its myth, poisoned its blood.

To let them know would be enough.