Jack Chalker - The Sea is Full of Stars

The people of the “New Empire” hexes knew none of this. The soldiers who did manage to return were debriefed exhaustively, then executed. News was carefully controlled and managed. The leaders declared a new wondrous victory to their people and, fuming, plotted their revenge while setting upon the highest ranks of the combined military staffs to root out the obvious traitors, for it was unthinkable that they might actually have overreached, that they were not as irresistible an object as they wholeheartedly believed.

In the palace deep within the central watery regions of Chalidang, the Empress Josich threw a homicidal fit, and personally hacked her general staff to death even though the plan had been entirely hers and implemented over their objections.

She had been this furious recently once before, over a different matter. It was when she received, via the embassy in Zone, a piece of shell from a dead Cromlin’s body with words painted not in Cromlinese nor in the language of Chalidang but in the language of the family Hadun of the old empire and the Realm.

you’re next, it read simply, with phonetic spelling of a non-Hadun name as the signature.

“Jeremiah,” the name became when pronounced.

“Not me, Jeremiah Kincaid!” she’d been heard screaming as she tore the messenger to bits. “ Now there will be no quarter! Now we conquer or die! Now they all die! The Kalindans, that bird thing, the Ochoan — all of them! And especially you, Jeremiah! Come and get me!”