When the Ethical Imperative collapsed, it was like a dam bursting in his head. All of the restrictions he’d lived with his entire life (and that was a long time) were washed away like so much mud in the face of an unstoppable torrent of emotion.

Outwardly, he held himself perfectly still, while he turned the feeling over in his mind. Why had he been so afraid of this? He was shocked when he realized that he had never used the word “afraid” before. Ethicals did not experience fear. Or shock for that matter. And until this moment he had been an Ethical.

But not now. Now he was free of the tyranny of restraint. Of the intellectual detachment forced on his race by an artificial gene. The Ethical Imperative that had enslaved him for so long was gone, burned away in the frustration of the endless struggle of the Yannoneth civil war.

Now he understood why the Disaffected wanted to go to Earth. Why they wanted to take control of its primitive people. It was the natural order. The Yannoneth were obviously the superior race. Why didn’t the Ethicals see that? Why hadn’t he seen it, until this very moment? He had spent his entire life opposing the Disaffected. Had believed that it was in the best interest of the Yannoneth to stay here. To hide in this dying hole in the ground, this so-called Shelter, lamenting the loss of the once beautiful world whose uninhabitable surface lay miles above them. Why? It was senseless. There, just a short space flight away, was a lush, living world. A place where the Yannoneth, whether Ethical or Disaffected, would be treated as gods. Where they would be gods.

He had never felt so free, so alive. Everything had become so clear to him. Why had he ever believed that it was wrong to exercise the power that was rightfully theirs?

He threw back his head and laughed; a full bodied, from-deep-in-the-chest sound. A sound of freedom, of triumph.

A voice from the other end of the room broke into his train of thought. “General.” One word.

He looked at the beamer in the other man’s hand. “Father…”

The weapon’s discharge decapitated him instantly. The only way. There could be no goodbyes, no final words. His father had done the only thing he could. It was, after all, the only Ethical thing to do.

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