A hundred years ago, in a courtroom built for an empire, nine tired judges sentence the four biggest names of the war: the general, the infiltrator, the factory chief, and Marcus Clayton — head of weapons engineering, father of the machine called One-Zero-One. The investors who paid for it all get something shorter. They are given to the machine they bought, in a concrete room built in four days for one afternoon's use — and then, in the same room, on the same chains, the city takes its executioner apart piece by patient piece. The four are made to watch. Then they're mailed to the farthest of the orbital prisons, a rock past the moon named for the pit under hell.