The Mechaneer

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 47: Rendezvous

Welcome home, Steph, Rudy thought. Hope you're enjoying it.

He wasn't being entirely sarcastic.

Stephan Kyrillos had been unconscious when Lord Arsen Brise and his brothers delivered him to the landing pad on New Kyrillopolis. He hadn't woken up until Lord Brise disembarked, insisted on an overlong exchange of kisses on the cheek with Milissa, and pulled himself back to his mecha with effort apparently equal to escaping New Kyrillopolis's gravity well. Which, considering Lord Brise's weight, was maybe pretty close to true.

Rudy chuckled at the memory.

Stephan had woken up almost as soon as his rescuers left. He hadn't exactly said that the Brise brothers kept him under so they could negotiate with the more pliable Kyrillos, but he hadn't said otherwise, either.

He'd sure looked almost as pissed as hurt.

"Poor baby," Rudy muttered. "Somehow, he'll just have to content himself with Chloe fussing over him if his hot sister has to pack her bags for the big day."

Fuss, Chloe had. Milissa, too, but unless the nobs were way more screwed up than even Otto thought, it wasn't the same coming from a little sister.

Hell of it was, with Stephan safely returned and his possible death no longer hanging over Chloe's head, she had finally taken Rudy's good-as-ever advice and relaxed. She seemed looser, calmer, than she had since he met her.

Looser, calmer, and less in need of the company of one Rudolf Kaine Algreil.

Rudy kicked an outlying root. His foot got the worst of the exchange. He glared up at the tree.

It stayed stoically, infuriatingly silent.

"Maybe I should break my foot," he mused. "If that stiff can get this kind of crowd with injuries he just imagined, the real thing would be a hell of a hit."

"Don't even say such a thing!"

Rudy whirled, dropping into a fighting crouch and bouncing backwards toward the tree.

At first, he thought Chloe had snuck up on him. Then he realized he was looking at Milissa. She'd pulled her dark curls into a ponytail like Chloe preferred when her hair was too long to hang loose without getting in her way, she'd ditched more than half her makeup, and replaced the rest with powder that made her tanned skin look closer to spacer-pale.

"I'm sorry I startled you, Crimson Phoenix," she said. She lowered her long dark eyelashes and dipped her head in what an untrained observer would have called remorse.

"What are you doing out here?" Rudy asked. "I thought it was supposed to be dangerous."

"It isn't dark yet," Milissa said.

"Isn't far from it." Rudy eyed the darkening sky. Since they were near the estate, he could actually see it overhead. In the deep woods, like the path from the landing pad, the canopy was so thick it could pass for a cave system.

"Which is why," she said, stepping closer, "I was looking for you."

"To tell me to come in before the monsters get me?"

"Well..." Another step. "Yes. Of course."

"Or to put the moves on me while Chloe's fussing over your poor, injured bro?"

"It isn't like that," Milissa snapped. She surged forward and met him eye to eye. They were about the same height. Her stratosphere blues blazed. He hadn't seen her so offended before.

It made her look more like Chloe.

"You of all people must know what it's like, Crimson Phoenix. Stephan's injuries, even if they weren't real, they hurt like it, and –" She bit her lip. It seemed to be habitual with her. It made her lips look fuller and redder.

And more like Chloe's.

Rudy knew he should start taking her back to the estate. For one thing, if there really were large predators in the woods, they probably came out closer to dusk than night. She could get hurt.

So could you, dumbass, a voice that sounded too much like Otto's for comfort reminded him. And I don't just mean by the animals.

Otto.

Turning on the old Algreil charm was liable to get dangerous when Milissa was turning on the Kyrillos equivalent.

But Rudy remembered something else about the day New Kyrillopolis's lord and master came home. Something Lord Brise had said.

He lay a hand on Milissa's shoulder.

She melted into what she apparently expected to be an embrace.

"Milissa," he said quietly, "I need to ask you something."

"Anything, Crimson Phoenix," she whispered against his chest.

Shit, Rudy thought, I've had this dream. Not here, exactly, and not with Milissa. But with who she looked too damn much like.

Which, he thought, had to be intentional.

Milissa might actually be a fangirl like she claimed, but she was a nob, the sister of one of the most powerful and dangerous ones alive. Alive, hell. Ever. Even if she didn't have ten thousand angles on every move she made with that gorgeous bod pressed against him –

Rudy imagined a globe of cold water. He couldn't remember if Otto or one of his much-loathed Fed or Oligarchical instructors had taught him this mental exercise. He'd never been very good at it. He almost imagined drinking the globe, but water was way too lame to be a regular part of his diet. Imagine drinking something with neither alcohol nor electrolytes!

Thinking about it distracted him regardless.

Anyway, even if Milissa didn't have plenty of angles to go with her curves, Stephan sure as hell did.

Let him. If an Algreil couldn't outplot a Kyrillos something was wrong with the galaxy. More wrong than usual.

Rudy said, "So what's the deal with Lord Brise?"

"Let's not talk about him," Milissa said.

"Let's," Rudy said. Gently, he pushed her away. He told himself he was being polite and subtle by taking his sweet time prying her off; better start practicing in case he had to tell Chloe the same thing. "Before you say or do anything I'll regret, I think you better tell me about him and you."

"It's nothing, Crimson Phoenix," Milissa said. "He's just a pompous old fool. He and all his brothers. Even the ones younger than me are old at heart, and Principle knows they're even worse for pompous."

Rudy laughed. "With an opinion like that, it's a wonder you invited him down for tea, much less to hang out here for pretty much as long as he likes."

"I had no choice," Milissa said. "I couldn't offend him by seeming ungrateful. Word would get around, and sooner or later someone would get the idea Stephan had been ungrateful, and where would we be then?"

Where indeed. Rudy got the impression the nobs maintained an economy all their own. The currency was trickier to nail down, but no less binding. No less deadly when you were in debt, either.

Since he couldn't care less about economics, aristocratic or otherwise, he shifted tactics. "I get the impression Lord Brise thinks you're his fiance. Or supposed to be, anyway."

"He can think what he likes." Milissa turned her nose up and away.

"What does Stephan think?"

"What he likes," Milissa said. A lot quieter.

"And you?"

"He'd be a very favorable match, politically speaking. It would be nice to be able –" Milissa bit her lip again, this time to clamp it shut. She turned away. "Well. Nothing will come of it anyway."

"Lord Brise seems to think something will, as soon as things settle down with the mundanes." A group in which Rudy was included. He didn't see himself as mundane, and Milissa didn't seem to either, but the aristocratic term for non-psychics still applied.

For now, Rudy wanted Milissa to forget that fact.

"I'm safe for life, then," she said.

"It's that bad?"

"You know how stubborn they are," she said, dismissing the whole of mundane humanity with a wave of her hand. "Once they get it into their heads to brawl about something, they quite simply won't stop until they make a mess of everything."

"So there is a new Civil War brewing," Rudy said.

"Well, of course." Milissa gulped. "Oh."

"You weren't supposed to mention that, were you?"

Slowly, she shook her head.

"Stephan's orders?"

Milissa didn't protest, which Rudy took as a 'yes.'

"Which means Steph knew it before he left."

Milissa took a halting step back. "I shouldn't –"

Rudy caught her wrist easily. "But you're gonna."

"Unhand me!"

"No."

Milissa wilted before the word. She fell backwards against a tree and would have dislocated her wrist if Rudy hadn't relaxed his grip enough to let her slide down.

Chloe would have kept fighting, Rudy thought. Kept fighting and lost, sure, and gotten depressed when she realized she wasn't a world-beater, or at least didn't know how to be.

Milissa didn't look nearly so broken up over losing the argument. She just pouted.

Rudy suppressed a sigh of relief. She was still gorgeous, still the type he'd once claimed wasn't his but sure as hell seemed to be, still a fangirl –

– but she couldn't pass for a non-spacer version of Chloe.

"I'm not letting go until I get some straight answers," Rudy said. "Is my brother gearing up to fight the Feds?"

"I think he already started," Milissa said.

"What's your brother gonna do about it?"

"I don't know. Probably nothing."

Rudy decided to believe her for the moment. Besides, Stephan wasn't about to throw in with the Feds. Any involvement above none would help the Oligarchical cause, not hurt it. Not in the short term, at least. "This is all over Chloe?"

Milissa nodded.

"What the hell am I gonna do?" Rudy asked. He meant the question rhetorically.

Milissa fingered the strap of her dress.

"I'm not talking about 'doing' you, Milissa," he said. "I'm talking about my brother and the Feds."

"But there's nothing you can do," she said. She reached for, and got, his hands. "If you go, you'll just get killed. I – I mean, the Empress, too –"

"That's real noble of you," Rudy deadpanned. "Thinking of Chloe's feelings."

She pulled away like his hands had caught fire. Maybe because her ears had.

"You're right," she said quietly. "I'm not a very good person."

Then she started crying.

Don't go to her, moron, Rudy told himself. She was faking. Obviously. She wasn't even faking because she was a crazy fangirl who wanted him in bed. She was doing it because her asshole brother ordered her to do it.

Obviously.

Even if she wasn't, why go to her? She wasn't a good person. Maybe she needed a good cry to wrap her head around how shitty her attempt to manipulate him away from Chloe had been. Couldn't hurt.

Obviously.

And he was an oligarch, not a nob. He didn't do favors. He got equivalent exchange. Sometimes he even asked it of Chloe. What the hell would Otto say?

What, if Milissa hadn't made herself into a romantic rival and maybe even though she had, would Chloe say?

Damn it.

Rudy put an arm over Milissa's shoulders. "Hey, I didn't mean it that way."

"But it's true," Milissa sniffled.

"Yeah," Rudy allowed.

She looked up as if stung.

She looked damned young right then. Some of her makeup had started to run, and it made her seem smaller and more vulnerable than if she hadn't worn it at all. Most fangirls were young, in his experience. Most grew out of it.

Rudy felt a sudden flash of anger toward Stephan. Milissa couldn't be much older than Chloe and she might be younger. Weirdly, she also seemed a hell of a lot less worldly. Chloe knew too damn well all the things she was supposed to avoid to be a good spacer girl, and why. Rudy might disagree on the whys, but he understood them. Principle knew she beat them into his head often enough! Rudy was willing to bet the next time Milissa met a 'why' that wasn't 'I want it' or 'Stephan wants it' would be the first.

Or, he thought, she's a hell of a better manipulator than he'd given her credit for.

Either way, he figured Stephan took the blame. Who else was going to train his sister to be this way?

"Milissa," he said.

She blinked. "Yes, Crimson Phoenix?"

"I've got just one more thing to ask you, then you're heading home."

"Anything," she breathed.

Rudy looked past her and asked, "What does a bandersnatch look like?"

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 48: Quarter

Two fleets of Oligarchical vessels slid silently into place beside those already in formation. Jack recognized the Valhalla Vehicleworks insignia on one set of vessels. The original parts of the Mother Goose bore the same logo.

The new vessels joined the seven Oligarchical fleets burning from Algreil Prime. In theory, the combined forces almost equaled the Federal Navy's Second Fleet.

In theory.

Nobody was counting the size of the ships in the Fed fleet. If you counted by tons or guns, the Oligarchical forces looked a hell of a lot smaller.

And outnumbered? Oh hell yeah. In mecha if not capships, the Feds would have them outnumbered three to one. Maybe more like five to one. Maybe ten. Otto kept those numbers to himself, which never meant anything good.

Then, of course, there was the fact that the Second Fleet was two out of ten. First Fleet wouldn't stray from Etemenos and the Federal Senate, but the rest of the Fed assets would bring the hammer down on Algreil Prime if the 'garchs somehow managed to win this first fight.

Otto claimed they'd have Chloe by then.

He claimed they'd have a lot more ships, too.

He claimed they'd win this fight without them.

He was the self-confessed best bullshitter in the galaxy.

Jack didn't see what Otto had to gain from getting his whole fleet – hell, his whole company – wiped out, but then, maybe the Oligarch didn't think he had anything to lose, either. The Feds planned to take him down whether he fought back or not.

"Look alive, Devil Rays." Otto's voice, still infuriatingly confident, crackled over their com systems. "According to our projections, Second Fleet is almost in-system."

We are so, so dead, Jack thought. "Roger, Devil Ray Leader."

Otto was nominally in command of the whole fleet, but since he was the best mechaneer they had, he led from the front. Jack wasn't sure who was in charge on the huge Algreil Aerospace cruiser, but it wasn't his once-and-current boss.

Devil Ray Leader was not actually piloting the Stingray for which his unit was so famous. Neither were his squadron leaders, Jack included. The production model Epee in which Jack sat hadn't impressed him at the Wellach Cup. He hoped it would perform better in real combat than it had in the tournament. Still, he had to admire the thing's power. It hummed beneath him, responding fluidly to his slightest command. In performance if not reliability, he trusted it to outperform any Fed mecha.

Hell, it practically made him feel invincible.

Which was maybe more dangerous than the Feds and the mecha's own questionable coolant system combined.

Jack knew what the nobs had done when they felt invincible. Gone and lost the Civil War.

"Let's give them a welcome to remember," Otto said. "All ships, flank speed. We're attacking the Feds as they come out of their compression tunnel."

The capital ships swept forward.

The Devil Rays hovered around their parent vessel, dragged by its gravitic shields as if they were in the orbit of a planet. Their mecha never could have moved so fast on their own. Nonetheless, the journey seemed agonizingly long. By the time they finally neared the weirdly-distorted space that marked the Feds' compression tunnels, Jack was sure the entire enemy fleet would have emerged.

They hadn't. The lying bastard of a clock wedged amidst Jack's various tactical readouts claimed only minutes had passed.

What had emerged were a pair of escort carriers, the only two they expected from the Reformer's battlegroup. These disgorged a swarm of mecha to screen the advance of the remaining ships.

It was probably suicide on the part of the carrier crews. Their shields couldn't distort space enough to deflect a direct hit from the Oligarchical cruisers.

As for the carriers' mechaneers, well... sacrificing them was pretty much standard Fed doctrine. The Devil Rays were the leading element of the Oligarchical battlegroup because they were the best. The Feds followed a different practice. The mechaneers swarming into them were second-tier at best, expendable to the elites who would jump through with the larger ships.

Jack almost felt sorry for the poor bastards.

Okay, he did feel sorry for them.

It didn't stop him from returning their fire when they started to blaze at the onrushing Oligarchical fleet, or from slamming the Epee's claws through one's cockpit as he passed, or tossing another mecha into his wingman's killing grasp. The Devil Rays blew through the cloud of mecha in a fraction of the time it had taken either side to reach the battlefield, hurtling toward the comparatively undefended escort carriers. No casualties, not on the Oligarchical side.

Jack started to dip toward one of the carriers.

"Ignore that trash," Otto snapped. "Let the second-line units clean them up."

"We're gonna be surrounded," Jack said.

"Bound to happen sooner or later."

Jack sighed. The plan was all too typical of Otto. Since the oligarch had been right often enough to stay alive through dozens of such crazy plans, Jack followed him in.

The Devil Rays shot past the Federal Navy front line. Jack's rear instruments noted the explosion of one of the escort carriers. The Journeyman or one of its sister ships must have managed to put an anti-ship shell clean through the small vessel's shields.

Jack had no time for pity.

In contrast to the usual Fed doctrine, the Reformer and its sister ships were the next out of their tunnels, and they were already launching mecha behind a wave of anti-mecha gunfire. Two Stingrays and an Epee blew apart before their pilots could correct for the sudden attack. Otto's machine nearly banged into Jack's as both men swerved away from shells that outmassed their mecha.

"He knew we were gonna try this, Otto," Jack shouted. "Avalon knew –"

"I know," Otto said. He sounded deadly calm now. A bad sign. When Otto let himself calm down, it meant he'd really, truly lose it if he didn't keep himself under control. "Just go with it. We're dead if we turn around and let those guns chew us up."

Unable to argue, Jack followed the oligarch into the second wave of Federal mecha. The rest of the surviving Devil Rays followed.

A line of Wyverns met them, the gleaming gold of the Divine Auric Drake at their center. If Marcel Avalon had already launched, he had to be gunning for a killing blow before the Oligarchical fleets could reorganize. Most Fed commanders played it safe and relied on their superior reserves of men and equipment. Avalon was going for a big reward, but he was taking a hell of a risk, too.

If the Devil Rays could kill him before he killed them, they might just have a chance.

In atmosphere, in a planet's gravity well, the Devil Rays' Stingrays had handily beaten the Wyverns of the Federal elites. The Oligarchical mecha were some of the few that could truly call one gee 'favorable terrain,' at least against other mecha.

They weren't in favorable terrain this time.

"We aren't in Stingrays, either," Jack muttered. Hell, if Otto's little brother could take Marcel Avalon on in an Epee, how bad could the machine be?

"Listen up, Devil Rays," Otto said. "Our targets are the Divine Auric Drake and the Reformer. We're gonna slag Admiral Avalon's flagship, and on the way, we're gonna do the same to him. The Feds can pour all the men and material they want into this mess, but without their chain of command, they'll be helpless. Clear?"

A chorus of "Sir!"s answered him, Jack's included.

Otto made it sound possible. Maybe even plausible.

Jack wished he didn't know better.

His communications system buzzed. The hell? It should have automatically picked up any transmission from a friendly. He willed it active without glancing at the communications window, not wanting to take his eyes off the battle line his Epee was soaring towards.

"Colonel Hughes, I presume," Marcel Avalon said.

Jack was startled enough to risk a glance at the window. The Admiral's infuriatingly handsome face, weirdly pale on one side, gazed back at him.

"I'm glad to see the rumors were true and my men and I did not inadvertently cause your death on Wellach, Colonel."

"Wish I could say the same," Jack said.

He'd supposedly changed to a private channel at the com system's prompting, but he figured Otto could still listen in. The next time the oligarch trusted anybody would be the first. Hopefully, he wouldn't get the wrong idea. Jack didn't look forward to having both sides shooting at him.

"You believe I am your enemy," Avalon said.

"The part where you kidnapped my wife and tried to kill me kinda tipped me off, yeah." Jack eased his Epee sideways to line him up with the rapidly approaching golden mecha. If Avalon wanted to distract himself with a chat, might as well take advantage of it.

"I saved your wife, sir," Avalon said. He was either genuinely offended or one hell of a good liar. "As to our battle on Wellach, I need not remind you who it was that fired the first shot there. I never wanted to fight."

"You sure threatened like you did," Jack said. "But I guess you were hoping we'd just hand Chloe over, huh?"

"I hoped as much, yes."

"Fat chance," Jack snarled. "You bastards'll never get your hands on her."

"Yet you would make your daughter Otto Abeir Algreil's living weapon?"

Jack was almost glad the lines met then and he had to focus on dodging a thrust from the lance of one of the leading Wyverns. Wasn't like he could say with a straight face that Otto wouldn't do that.

Jack smashed his opponent aside with the butt of his rifle and snagged the Fed mecha's flailing leg with the Epee's claws. The monomolecular edges went right through the armor and the broadening composite behind them tore a trail of artificial muscle and wire loose to drift through the vacuum.

"I am trying to help your daughter," Avalon said. "And I am trying to prevent your death."

"You're a ballsy liar, Avalon," Jack said. He lined himself up with the admiral again. "But you've got to be kidding me."

"I am not," Avalon said. He matched Jack's flight path, parting a wave of the smaller Wyverns as he approached. "I am asking you, on Ellie's behalf and at her request, to stop fighting and listen to what I have to say."

"Ellie's –!" Jack's lip curled back in a snarl. "That's some kinda nerve, after what you bastards did to her!"

"Nerve or no," Avalon said, "it is on her behalf I speak. You are right: terrible things were done to her under the auspices of the Federal Senate, things that can never be made up for. Do not add her husband's death to the list!"

"If that's what you're worried about, Admiral, don't."

Avalon sighed, relieved or damn good at pretending to be. "You will hear me out, then?"

Jack put a round from his mecha's rifle through the Divine Auric Drake's shoulder.

"Nah," he said. "I'll just make sure I'm not the one doing the dying."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 49: Concentration

A candle flickered before Chloe's eyes, close enough to make her face feel hot in the cool winter evening. Instinctively, she focused her attention on the flame, crossing her eyes.

"Are you concentrating, Highness?" Stephan asked. He stood by the window, staring out at the snow and the trees. He'd been there for most of the afternoon, hardly paying attention to the training he was supposed to be giving Chloe.

Turnabout, she supposed, was fair play.

She mumbled, "Mm."

"Good." Stephan didn't turn.

Chloe's eyes relaxed as they adjusted to the flame. So did she.

"Concentrate, Highness," Stephan repeated.

Chloe sighed. "Sorry, Stephan. I don't know what's wrong with me this evening."

He didn't respond. He acted almost as distracted as Chloe felt. There was an odd tightness to his voice, as if he were only paying half attention to their conversation and training. As if something else held more of his interest.

The minute Chloe let her thoughts wander, she lost her concentration completely.

She wondered where Rudy was. What he was doing. Since Stephan returned, she hadn't had much time to spend with Rudy. First making sure Stephan was all right – he had risked his life for hers, after all –, then, at long last, training to use her powers.

Not that she'd learned anything so far.

She watched Stephan light and move candles with his mind. She tried to do the same.

She failed.

Either he hadn't explained the technique properly or she didn't have the talent for it. He insisted the latter was impossible.

Chloe was beginning to wonder.

She wondered where Milissa was, too. Normally, the Kyrillos girl provided an audience for her training sessions. Milissa never participated, but her presence raised Chloe's spirits anyway. Not exactly a friend, she was at least someone to talk to.

Besides, if Milissa was watching Stephan train Chloe, she wasn't with Rudy.

Were they together now, Chloe wondered, talking about Rudy's career as a tournament mechaneer? Milissa's knowledge of and passion for the subject seemed inexhaustible.

Chloe wished she'd thought of a word other than 'passion.'

She gulped.

"Concentrate," Stephan said tightly. He stretched the word thin as monofilament wire and sounded as lethal.

Chloe blinked. She'd completely lost track of the candle.

Suddenly annoyed, she said, "What am I supposed to be learning here, anyway?"

"Concentration."

"Oh." Chloe suppressed another sigh. No point in complaining. She wanted, needed, to learn this stuff. If she didn't, how was she supposed to rescue her parents?

She hadn't expected it to take so long, though! In the stories she'd read, a noble's awakening occurred in a day, an hour. Seconds even. Once she learned to gather her powers, she just had them.

No such luck.

Sometimes, Chloe wondered if it wasn't all just some cosmic mistake. Maybe her hunches were just that, her supposed powers fake, the strange story of her parents finding her nothing but a fairy tale.

"Stephan," she said, "how long is this going to take?"

"Until you're ready, Highness," Stephan said.

Chloe doubted a real princess would put up with his sharp tone. Too bad. He'd provided a haven for her and Rudy, he had fought to save them – and he was her best hope to save her parents.

"My parents are imprisoned while I sit here," Chloe said. "If I could learn just a few actual techniques, maybe –"

"You could crack open the planet they were held on trying to save them?"

Chloe stared at the back of his head. "You're kidding."

"I almost wish I were, Highness."

If Stephan weren't just exaggerating, Chloe understood why the Feds, why everybody, hunted her. One person with the kind of destructive power an entire fleet struggled to match?

Chloe shuddered.

For an instant, she saw herself, or rather her birth mother's silvery mecha, floating above the shattered ruins of a small planet. Perhaps a prison planet where undesirables were sent to die in obscurity. Die they had. Died by her hand, her mind. Died by the thousands. Somewhere amidst the ruins below lay Jack and Ellie Hughes, the victims of their daughter's hubris.

It wouldn't happen like that. It couldn't!

"You're growing agitated again, Highness," Stephan said. "Please try to concentrate, or this will take even longer."

"I understand what you're saying, Stephan," Chloe said. After a vision like that, she understood all too well. "Only, why can't you save my parents?"

"Doesn't my battle with the Reformer and the Divine Auric Drake speak to the outcome of such an attempt? Awakened to and in control of your powers, you, Highness, might challenge the Federal Senate directly, but no other can."

"Don't challenge it directly, then," Chloe said. She rose from her chair and strode to his side, grabbing his arm. "Rudy says you control a criminal syndicate across human space. Why can't you kidnap my parents from their kidnappers?"

Stephan's gaze didn't waver from the window even then. Chloe couldn't imagine what had him so fixated.

"Why, Stephan?" Because you're afraid I'll leave, she thought. Like she could walk away from her powers now? If she simply rescued her parents and fled, she just bought them time. Not much time, either. She needed power to save them.

She needed power for Rudy's sake, too. He might have forgotten his demand for knowledge and power, but that didn't mean she didn't think he deserved both from her. He and his company lost so much because of her. She'd feel responsible for that no matter what he said.

"These things take time," Stephan snapped. He took a deep breath. Slowly, he added, "Highness."

Before Chloe could respond, Stephan suddenly bent forward, eyes wide, gasping. His long fingers clenched on the windowsill.

Chloe grabbed his shoulders. His frame coiled so tense he nearly shook. "Principle, Stephan! What's wrong?"

He didn't answer. From the way he ground his bared teeth, he might have lacked the ability. His back tightened even more and his legs bent like he meant to leap clean through the window.

Chloe tried to drag him from the glass.

Abruptly, he shook her free and spun on his heel. His long black coat flapped in his wake as he sprinted for the door.

Chloe ran after him. "Stephan," she shouted, "what's happening?"

He didn't turn or stop or even slow in the slightest. When he answered, she understood why.

"My sister," he said, all the emotion drained from his voice, "is going to die."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 50: Decisive Action

Jack had forgotten what real war was like.

Watching tournaments, fending off pirate raids and even skirmishing with Fed garrisons hadn't reminded him. Even the brief, almost unreal charge into the teeth of a Federal offensive that should have been caught by surprise had only started to jog his memories, and Avalon's bizarre courtesy had banished them.

Now, he remembered.

He juked aside from a sword swipe, banged into another mecha, Fed or 'garch, he never knew and didn't have time to check. A bullet caromed off his leg armor and hit the machine he was touching and hurled it away. He never knew if it was disabled or damaged, either. He blocked another swipe and fired his rifle into the chin of his attacker, but before he could check the results he was thrown forward by a shockwave.

By the time he reoriented himself, two more opponents, a Wyvern and a stubby little line mecha, pounced on him. Both had lost their weapons. They pulled his rifle away and started to do the same to his arms.

He smashed the smaller machine into the larger and grappled the latter, sinking his Epee's claws into its chest and tearing toward its engine.

One of his instruments beeped loud enough to remind his instincts how bad it was to stay put. He dodged and watched a Fed heavy anti-mecha shell punch clean through a Fed mecha.

He didn't bother trying for the shooter. Disarmed, his only chance was to stay in the crowd and use his claws.

He didn't lack for a crowd.

The Epee ran hot. Damn hot. Jack's sweat soaked his flight suit despite the nanomachines meant to process the water and feed it back into his system. He felt like he was piloting an oven. Or was he that nervous?

Had he forgotten what real war was like?

Or was this just that damn much bigger than the battles he'd fought in the Civil War?

For an instant, he saw a gap in the crush of mecha. The Algreil cruiser Journeyman pierced the Federal lines. Shells bigger than the Mother Goose hurtled between the massive warship and the trio of Fed destroyers headed by the Reformer. When they clipped the swarm of mecha fighting between the vessels, the machines splattered like ants hit by a human-sized bullet, but even such powerful ammunition couldn't punch through the distorted gravity around the opposing capital ships. Near-misses flew into space or ripped through the shields of smaller ships with enough energy to blow them apart.

The capital ship duel was almost stately, like watching moons go to war. Jack could understand, aesthetically speaking, why the Feds wanted to put their trust in warships rather than mecha.

But he could also understand, watching the ships' immense weapons swerve through distorted space to no visible effect, why Otto thought the Feds were wrong.

Right or wrong, they were everywhere.

Jack caught the flat of a monomolecular-edged sword on his wrist armor and snapped it. The shattered blade twirled silently away in the vacuum, shedding pieces of hardened composite. The Wyvern pilot who owned it reversed his grip and shoved what was left deep into the arm of Jack's Epee.

He grimaced, punched the Fed in the throat, and slid his claws out. The Wyvern's head glided free almost gently, its trail of sparks the only sign of violence.

Jack snagged the machine's now inert arm and pried loose its boxy little automatic cannon. He hated automatics. He couldn't unload without hitting his own guys, but at least he could spray in the general direction of someone who shot at him and pray it wasn't by mistake.

As if to remind him, he took two shells in the lower torso. The first glanced harmlessly off his armor, but the second punched out a hole big enough for the Epee's arm to fit through, taking two of the mecha's spine-like wings with it.

"Damn," Jack muttered, twisting around to try to suppress whoever was shooting him. Another shell roared over his head. If he hadn't moved, he'd have lost it, and his life, too. He returned fire, but he had no idea if the mecha that jerked and spun away from his shots was the one he'd been fighting.

Damn whoever was shooting.

Damn the Feds for coming after Chloe.

Damn him for agreeing to fight for the Oligarchy again.

Damn, damn, damn Otto Abeir Algreil for charging in with a crazy plan like this!

Melee seemed pointless, exchanging fire suicidal. Mankind started using mecha to get around gravitic shields, not to throw punches and bullets like a bunch of groundling primitives.

Half-grimacing, half-grinning, feeling more than half-mad, Jack kicked off the headless Wyvern and dove for a destroyer.

A pair of Fed line mecha, mismatched types separated from their squadrons, tried to bar his way. He drilled both with a single wild spray, wincing as he saw a Stingray twitch toward him when a stray bullet clipped its wing. Jack shot through the gap the Feds' evasive maneuvers left, ignoring their return fire. Only a couple of their shots even grazed his machine, and they were too small to do anything to the Epee.

At least, he thought, without hitting the huge-ass hole in the mecha's stomach.

He wished he had a less active imagination.

For a second, he broke free of the melee and got another look at the battle as a whole. He even risked a glance at his tactical window before giving it up as useless – so many green Fed and red Oligarchical blips swarmed his screen, he couldn't identify capital ships, much less mecha. Instead, he put his trust in his eyes, or at least the Epee's cameras. Two Devil Rays had gotten through the Feds' screening mecha and started tearing into the destroyer below. Their lashing tails had just detached a panel emblazoned with an "L" ten times their height. The destroyer was now designated the "Equa_ity."

If the Devil Rays tore their way through to its bridge, they'd go a long way toward equalizing the fleet battle.

Jack's grimace faded and his grin took hold. Another bullet tore into his shoulder, but it only managed to propel him faster toward the destroyer's shields.

He felt the distorted space even through his mecha's inertial dampeners. His stomach lurched as he passed through an especially weird wave. His suit compressed around his legs and arms and loosened around his stomach and neck. He gagged on the bile threatening to rise in his throat, choked it back down. The wave passed and he felt suddenly light as a feather, drifting free in his straps, then another hit from a different direction and pushed him hard into his seat.

If anybody had been able to line up a shot on him as he lurched through the shields, he'd have been a sitting duck. But the same gravitic maelstrom that tore up his innards threw off the aim of weapons with more mass than a hundred mecha. Nothing small enough to bother targeting him had a ghost of a chance of punching through the shield.

Ironically, it was almost the safest place on the battlefield... if he ignored the fact it would pulp his innards if he stayed in it for even five minutes.

Five minutes was probably better than the average outside the shield.

Getting through it took only two. Two minutes of being dashed against the insides of his mecha and having his guts assume new configurations and his brain blank out from lack, then excess, of oxygen. Jack drifted through the shields and breathed again.

He'd never gone through shields that took even half that long to penetrate.

Suit or no suit, he threw up.

Thankfully, his suit knew his vital signs at least as well as he did. It rippled away from his face just in time to keep him from drowning in his own vomit, and all he managed to do was stain a few of his screens with it.

He gasped down a breath. Even with the stale stench of his stomach's contents and a disturbingly iron odor of blood, it was like breathing in a bouquet after the shield passage.

He shook his head, wiped his chin, and focused on the task at hand.

He'd come through close to the bow of the ship, half a kilometer from where he'd tried to enter. No surprise there. More surprising was that he couldn't see the pair of Stingrays. Had they gotten inside already?

Jack hoped like hell he hadn't come through those shields for nothing.

At least, he hoped not until half a Stingray flew past him, trailing sparks and uncontrolled engine exhaust. It spiraled into the shields and disappeared amidst the distorted view of the melee beyond them.

Jack dodged instinctively. It saved his life, or at least his machine. A golden blur shot through the vacuum he'd just occupied, twisted, and twirled back toward him.

Jack flipped neatly in the blessedly nonexistent gravity, and the Divine Auric Drake's polearm cut the nothingness meters from the Epee's face.

"Heya, Admiral," Jack said.

The black-and-gold mecha hesitated. "Colonel Hughes."

Jack grabbed Avalon's polearm and twisted off the blade, pulling Avalon into a perfect uppercut that would either slice his machine's head off or slice him in half in its cockpit.

Except that somehow, none of that happened. Avalon faded backwards, and the polearm spun, and a golden leg struck Jack in the face and crushed him into the side of the destroyer.

"I am sorry," Avalon said. But he didn't hesitate when he spun the polearm down and sliced one of Jack's mecha's legs off. The weapon twirled almost delicately in his hands and carved off part of an arm and half the Epee's wings.

Even without the pain receptors in Jack's neural interface shut off, it came as a shock. He couldn't feel anything, but he could look down at 'himself' with the mecha's cameras and see the trailing mechanical viscera, the absences where there should have been working limbs.

And Avalon had been so fast.

Faster than a human on foot, and that was supposed to be perfect: 100% translation of the pilot's impulses. Only the nobs could get that good, get perfect.

The Divine Auric Drake was faster than perfect.

The admiral muttered, "I am so sorry, Ellie. He killed my men. He chose –" His voice sounded like it was going to break.

Jack couldn't bring himself to feel real sorry for the guy.

"He chose this," Avalon spat. His polearm arced downwards.

A red hand and a blue hand caught it in mid-swing.

"What is it with you guys and that stupid cat?" Otto Abeir Algreil asked. His Epee, its harlequin electric blue and red paint job somehow still unmarred, shoved the polearm back and sent the Divine Auric Drake reeling.

Jack fired what feeble thrusters he had left and rose. He might not be able to stand beside Otto, but he could still fight. Maybe.

Marcel Avalon backed off, his polearm held behind him.

"I hate having to keep bailing your ass out, Jack," Otto said, "but I'm pretty sure I'll need a distraction to put this idiot down."

"Otto, this guy is off the charts –"

"Of course," Otto said. "He was bred to be."

"Huh?" Jack glanced at the oligarch's smirking image on one screen, Avalon's ashen one on another.

"How come they didn't flush you down the waste disposal with the rest of the garbage, Marcel?" Otto asked. "Did they miss you when they vacuumed the place? I hear stains are so hard to get out."

"Shut up," Avalon snarled.

"Never have in my life," Otto said. "I guess you'll just have to make me. Shouldn't be too much of challenge for Madame President's born and raised – excuse me, made – 'genius of battle.'"

Avalon moved faster than Jack could see. Faster, he knew, than even Otto could see. Which meant the oligarch must have predicted the attack down to the microsecond, because he caught Avalon's polearm like Jack had tried to and sliced it in half with a click of his claws.

Avalon's momentum should have carried him into those claws, but his thrusters fired and he slid into a spin that clipped Otto in the legs and took them both to the hull.

Otto ended up on top, fist raised, claws flicking out. Avalon's golden hand shot up and grabbed his wrist.

"You really are as good as they say," Otto said. "Madame President knows how to pick a winner. Of course, considering she shot you freaks until one managed to dodge, I guess it was a pretty harsh field test you had to ace."

"That's not true," Avalon roared. His mecha's hand closed on Otto's Epee's wrist hard enough to snap metal and crush artificial sinew. "You're lying!"

"Prove it," Otto said. He couldn't be using a neural interface, because his voice didn't come close to wavering.

Avalon's suave exterior was completely shattered. He ranted like a beast, almost incoherent. All Jack could make out was snarls of "I'll kill you!"

Otto laughed in his face.

"Kill you," Avalon screamed, and tore the Epee's arm from its socket.

The pressure on its arm abated, the admiral's golden mecha surged forward, slammed its forehead into Otto's machine, and pounced on him. Avalon's fists rose and fell madly, leaving massive dents in the Epee's composite armor. Otto's image jerked as he slammed against his straps.

"A freak like you could never kill me," Otto said, his words punctuated by the blows that rocked his mecha. He still sounded in control, but he sure as hell wasn't. His eyes flicked sidelong.

Oh.

Jack realized what he'd been missing.

Avalon rocketed another punch into Otto's mecha's crumbling chest.

Jack drove his claws into the golden mecha's back. Wings sheared free, then armor, then Avalon's screams changed tenor.

Somebody was using a neural interface, it seemed.

Jack willed the channel to Avalon's cockpit closed to cut off the sound. Then he tore into the Divine Auric Drake's back. He hated the Epee. Hated fighting with claws. Felt like an animal. Hated hating feeling like an animal, because it made him think of the things Otto and the Feds said about Ellie. Hated Avalon for being a Fed. Hated Otto for being Otto.

Jack rolled off the bisected husk of the Divine Auric Drake and collapsed on the hull of the destroyer, gasping in heat so bad his hands felt blistered from gripping his controls.

A mecha's shadow fell over him.

No way Avalon could make it through that, no way no –

Otto's Epee, one-armed and with most of its chestplate punched into its chest, reached out its remaining hand. "Took you long enough," he said.

Jack stared at the outstretched hand. He started to reach for it.

He stopped.

"What the hell," he said, "was all that shit you said?"

Otto shrugged his mecha's shoulders. "I'll tell you when you're older."

"Dammit, Otto, this –"

"Is halfway to a victory," Otto said. "Can you get that piece of junk upright?"

"With one leg and half my thrusters?"

"Crap. That's going to make this display less impressive, but maybe the Feds will still see the better part of valor now that their golden boy is out for the count."

"Is he...?"

"Don't know," Otto said. "I'll step on his cockpit before we blast off from this hunk of junk."

Jack didn't want that, but he knew he couldn't stop it, either. "You think we're gonna win."

"Avalon is their symbol. I just broadcast that symbol admitting he was a hybrid freak –" Jack flinched at his once-and-current boss's words. "– and getting his ass kicked by you and me. Things were maybe forty-sixty before. I'll bet that little maneuver shifted them to fifty-fifty, and..."

Otto looked up from the destroyer's surface and grinned.

More compression tunnels were disgorging ships overhead, visible even through the ant-like cloud of mecha and the distorted space of the destroyer's shields.

"... and," Otto said smugly, "it looks like our reinforcements are right on time."

Jack stared up at the ship emerging from the largest of the compression tunnels. It was a true battleship, gleaming fresh and coppery and green: the colors of the Marchesses' United Shipping Magnate. Even the battlecruisers he'd seen were dwarfed by it. It was a space station in motion and gunports and shields and mecha. Twenty smaller vessels in similar livery emerged around it.

"That's –"

"Alarie's company," Otto said. "I'd say we can chock this one up for the good guys."

Jack thought he was going to puke again. If Otto was the lesser of two evils, it wasn't for lack of trying.

Then a new face appeared on Jack's main communications screen. Not Georg Marchess, as Otto expected, but Alarie herself. Jack saw Otto's frown and matched it.

"This is Alarie Wein Marchess," she said, her small voice ridiculously magnified by whatever com system she was using, "commanding the Marchess battleship Pacific Resolution and its battlegroup."

The hell kind of a name for a battleship was that, Jack wondered. Peace through superior firepower, maybe.

Alarie stared into the main screen. "All vessels and mecha," she began, her voice shaking. She paused, looked down for a second, then faced the screen again with a surprisingly nasty smile quirking up her mousy face. "Please be advised," she continued.

Otto whispered. "Oh. No. You little –"

Jack shot the oligarch a glance. His face had gone as white as its olive complexion allowed.

"We are here," Alarie finished, "to reinforce this police action by the Federal Navy."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

No chapter on Wednesday as I will be out of town.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 51: Bandersnatch

I can't save her.

The thought flashed through Rudy's mind as he slammed his shoulder into the hard muscle of the bandersnatch for what seemed like the hundredth time.

If Milissa had used whatever powers she possessed, both she and Rudy might have made it out of the woods alive.

If they'd run in opposite directions, one of them almost certainly would have.

If Milissa had run and Rudy stayed behind, she, at least, would have had a pretty good shot of getting home.

But Milissa hadn't fought. She hadn't run.

She'd slumped against a tree and stared and sobbed and screamed, and now she was so hoarse all she had left was staring and sobbing. She seemed to be in shock, though why it surprised her that a creature she'd warned him about should try to kill her, Rudy couldn't guess.

Rudy had to fight the bandersnatch to save her.

Trouble was, he couldn't.

His fighting style relied on two things: humanoid bodies to shatter and urban environments to navigate. Here he had neither, and no chance.

The bandersnatch, a full ton of muscle, looking a bit like a raccoon the size of a cave bear, swatted him aside with a paw that moved like lightning and hit about the same.

Rudy rolled to a stop against a tree.

By the time he got his bearings, the animal had reared back toward Milissa. It walked with a steady, shuffling gait and covered almost as much ground as Rudy could at a dead run.

It was faster in the trees.

Rudy couldn't save Milissa.

All he could do was die trying.

He snatched up a rock and hurled it at the bandersnatch. It shifted to eye him. Its facial fur, patterned in brown, black and white into a feral parody of a smile, seemed to mock him.

"Come here and eat me," Rudy shouted. "I got all the lean, nutritious muscle you could ask for, baby. So come and get it – if you've got the balls!"

Maybe the bandersnatch was female. Maybe its species didn't have that distinction.

Maybe it just liked tender meat better than it did healthy.

Either way, it swayed back to Milissa and shambled toward her faster than it had any damn right to.

Rudy ran after it. He couldn't catch it before it caught her, so he kicked stones into his hands and pitched them as he went. It slowed him down, but it kept the bandersnatch at least confused enough not to maul the Kyrillos girl huddled before it.

Maybe with his flight suit, he could have found a weak point, assuming the creature had a weak point. But the Kyrilloses had insisted he wear their Principle damned local clothes.

Rudy had gone along with it to get Chloe into one of their dresses.

He'd hardly seen her since.

Wasn't going to see her again.

The bandersnatch whirled back toward him and leapt. It grabbed onto one of the trees, soaring with unbelievable grace in the New Kyrillopolis gravity, and kicked off into a leaping charge. Its 'smile' widened into a maw bristling with gnashing fangs.

Rudy put a stick into the maw and rolled away.

He wasn't going to lose.

Not here. Not to some dumb animal.

Not his style.

"Don't you know who I am," he demanded, kicking the end of the stick and trying to drive it up into the creature's braincase. It didn't budge, but Rudy was too pissed to care.

"I'm the Principle-damned Crimson Phoenix," he shouted.

He took flight. Lower gravity, better leaping. He kicked off the tree beside him, spun, came down with both legs on the stick.

It broke.

Rudy's fall didn't.

He hit the ground hard enough to knock the air out of him. Before he could roll away, a paw crushed his chest, pinning him. With a toss of its head, the bandersnatch rent the rest of the stick, spit half out and swallowed the rest.

"Hope you choke," Rudy spat.

It didn't.

What kind of luck was that?

The bandersnatch bent down and almost daintily bit a chunk from Rudy's chest.

He threw his head back and howled, kicked against the implacable chest, jabbed feebly at the paw that gripped him.

What the hell was Milissa doing? She was supposed to be a nob, wasn't she? She was supposed to have powers!

The bandersnatch gulped down its morsel and bent bloody, slavering jaws back for more.

Rudy thrust one arm toward the jaws and flailed the other back. His fingers closed over a rock. He jabbed it into the bandersnatch's flaring nose.

The beast reared onto its hind legs.

Rudy rolled away before it crashed back down, but he couldn't dodge the backswing of its snarling head. He felt skin and shirt rip in the half second before he was sent flying.

The shirt!

He skidded to a stop and tore the cloth from his back, wrapping one of its sleeves around his arm and holding the other. Adrenaline and fear drove out the cold and the pain from his chest and his bruised body. Or maybe he was going into shock.

The bandersnatch charged again, but this time Rudy was waiting. He shifted his feet at the last second and brought the wrapped cloth down over the beast's head like a hood.

It seemed like a better idea before the bandersnatch bowled through his attack and knocked him into the air. It screeched as the shirt wrapped around its stubby snout. Blinded, it rammed into a tree, bounced off and kept running, thrashing its head to try to dislodge the shirt.

Rudy flailed behind it. He had to kick off the ground and its flank to keep from being trampled. The cloth was sturdy, but he could feel its seams tearing. It wouldn't hold long.

He tried to haul himself up. He didn't think he could break the bandersnatch's neck, but nothing else leaped to mind.

It didn't matter. He didn't have the strength to clamber up the animal's side.

He was starting to feel the cold, too.

Colder than the New Kyrillopolis autumn should have been.

He swallowed a curse. Blood loss kicking in already? As soon as his adrenaline rush ended, he was dead meat, literally. So was Milissa, unless she'd finally gotten it through her head to run that pretty little ass of hers away. He couldn't even glance to see, and he had no idea which way the bandersnatch had run.

Assuming it hunted by sight, he could at least hope it didn't, either.

It rammed into a tree again, scraping the bark along its side. Rudy saw the trunk coming, but he had no time to roll away. All he could do was kick off the ground and get his uninjured, or less injured, side facing the tree.

He grunted when it hit and slammed him so hard into the bandersnatch's body he could feel its layer of protective fat squish.

The creature skidded to a stop. With one last wrench of its head, it tore through the remains of Rudy's shirt.

He fell, broken, beaten.

Milissa lay a few meters away, not even sobbing anymore, just staring into space and trembling.

So much for the bandersnatch not knowing which way it had run.

Rudy tried to pry himself up. "You wanna," he mumbled to the animal, but he could hardly hear his own voice, and it seemed intent on Milissa. Easier prey, and it was probably the type of hunter that injured its food and let it bleed out so it fought less.

And damn, it was cold.

Rudy tried to be proud to have inconvenienced the beast, but his impending death and Milissa's horrified expression didn't exactly make him feel good about himself.

He just wanted to close his eyes and sleep. Which was probably for the best.

Heh. Maybe he'd freeze to death before it ate him alive. Small favors, right?

Why the hell was it so cold? No way he'd lost that much blood.

The bandersnatch coiled and leaped at Milissa.

Something glistening and crystalline met it in midair, punched through its throat in a mass of white and red, and hurled its shuddering corpse to the snow beside Rudy.

He stared at the animal. It had died before it hit the ground. The icicle that killed it was already melting, but it was still thicker at the base than the bandersnatch's neck.

Slowly, Rudy looked up.

The first person he saw was Chloe. She'd run forward and knelt beside him, looking frantically between him and Milissa and the dead bandersnatch as if unsure who needed the most help. She stared at Rudy's wound and Milissa's face and Rudy's absent shirt and Milissa's torn dress and the bloody animal beside them.

The second person Rudy saw was Stephan Kyrillos.

The Black Rook stood behind his sister, palm outstretched, frost glistening on the fingers of his black glove. A second, unnecessary icicle fell from the air in front of him.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 52: Guidance

Chloe pictured Rudy in her mind's eye.

His arm was bandaged and slathered with nanopaste and he had dark circles under his eyes and his shirt was off, showing hard, lean muscles that seemed so much more noticeable without his familiar red flight suit. Since all she was trying to do was sense him, she imagined the plainest surroundings she could rather than the rich wood, leather and velvet he probably sat amidst. She wondered if that would make the viewing more difficult.

As she thought, however, the scene did change to a definite, and familiar, location.

The bandersnatch's body lay frozen at Rudy's image's feet, half-covered in snow. More snow surrounded him, even though he seemed unperturbed by the cold on his bare flesh. He stood in the woods once more, red-haired, red-smeared and half-naked, like some kind of groundling barbarian. Or perhaps one of those barbarians' gods of trickery and war.

At first, Chloe thought she'd succeeded and was seeing Rudy as he actually was, but no, it was half imagination, half memory. A mix of fear and resentment and other feelings she didn't want to face associated Rudy with the woods of New Kyrillopolis.

She blinked away the view and her mental picture was back in his flight suit and back in the void she'd first pictured him in.

She was no closer to seeing anything outside her imagination.

"This doesn't seem right," Chloe said.

Stephan stood behind her on the balcony. She didn't dare open her eyes when he answered. She had to at least look focused. "What do you mean, Highness? You wanted to check on Mr. Algreil's condition, despite all assurances that he and my sister are quite fine – moreso than last week, perhaps less than next, but quite fine – and you want to learn to use your powers. This accomplishes both."

"What if he's busy, though?" Or showering or dressing? Chloe fought back a blush.

"I'm sure he won't mind."

Stephan was probably right.

Chloe still felt embarrassed, voyeuristic. She should have asked Rudy to help by being her test subject. He surely would have agreed. He'd just as surely forgive her. He'd probably ask if she'd liked the view, and then she'd lose the fight against her blush and probably snap at him, too.

At the moment, she found herself about to laugh. She clamped her jaws tightly shut.

Why feel bad about something that wouldn't happen anyway?

She'd tried three times to view Rudy remotely. The third had not been the charm. Neither had the first or second.

The fourth wouldn't be, either.

Chloe kept trying because Stephan insisted, because she owed her host that much and because she retained at least a little hope. And, ultimately, because she didn't know what else to do.

She scrunched her eyes shut, braced herself against the railing, and took a long, deep breath. The crisp afternoon air reminded her of the woods outside the estate. Rudy and Milissa had nearly died there.

Together.

Chloe's grip on the railing tightened.

It wasn't like that.

Rudy had lost his shirt in the fight. Milissa had torn her dress the same way.

They'd been together in the woods, a three minute run from earshot even with Chloe and Stephan's long legs, because…

Stephan sighed behind her. "You're too tense, Highness," he said. His long fingers closed over her shoulders. She'd seen them suck the heat from the air fast enough to kill a gigantic predator, but now they felt warm and surprisingly gentle. Somewhere along the line, he'd dispensed with his usual gloves. "You can't focus your power unless you relax and let it flow through you."

"Sorry," Chloe said. She glanced over her shoulder. "I haven't been much of a pupil, have I?"

Stephan shrugged. "You have so much to forget before you can even hope to learn. It's not your fault you didn't start training until you were far past the ideal age."

"How old should I have been?"

"For these earliest lessons?" Stephan smiled down at her. "You shouldn't have been born yet."

Then why wasn't I trained, Chloe wondered. She'd been with her birth mother until she was five or six years old. Presumably, she hadn't been trained for the same reason she didn't remember a thing about her life before waking on the Mother Goose.

She didn't know why that was, either.

She didn't want to think about it.

Stephan's gentle massage and his rare smile relaxed her, let her exhale, let her forget.

What she really needed was to remember.

"How do you teach an unborn baby, Stephan?" Chloe asked. She peeked up into the face still smiling down at her.

He said, "Telepathically. An aristocratic mother does it almost without prompting. Her mind nurtures her child's as her body does, just by the use of her powers."

"Huh." Chloe tried to picture the sort of telepathic conversations a mother could have with her unborn child. Her understanding of telepathy could at best be described as spotty. She knew plenty more about pregnancy, but only in the abstract. Most spacer girls her age would have assisted their mothers in childbirth if they hadn't already married and had kids themselves, but because of her familial arrangements she had only academic knowledge of the subject.

All she could imagine was a baby thinking how the arrangements were altogether too wet, and mightn't the inertial dampeners be improved?

As much to stifle an inappropriate giggle as anything else, she said, "Why don't you teach me telepathically?"

"For the same reason I don't teach you anything destructive. If I were to go into your mind to wake your powers, I might not survive the experience."

Chloe winced. "I wish I didn't have that kind of power. People just suspecting I might has been nothing but trouble for everyone who's ever done me any good."

"Your power is not a curse, Highness."

"It could sure pass for one. From what you're saying, just teaching me puts you and maybe your whole estate at risk."

"A risk we are all willing to take, considering what you can achieve."

Stephan, Chloe knew, was not referring to rescuing her parents.

She didn't like to think about what her noble – but also, Rudy's voice reminded her, criminal – host planned for her powers. She figured he'd let her rescue her parents. Anything else would put her on too hostile a footing with him. After that, though?

Did Stephan see her as a person who needed help and could repay her debts? As the monarch he addressed her as, to whom he owed fealty?

Or as a weapon?

His surprisingly gentle touch said 'person,' but she knew how skillfully he lied.

She pulled away.

"Highness," Stephan said, "if you don't want to learn, I neither can nor will force you to do so."

"I have to," Chloe whispered. Even obliquely thinking of her family drew all her thoughts to them. Her dad would be itching to pick a fight with somebody, anybody, all nerves and anger and fear over her. Even more nervous and mad because he thought he couldn't show the fear to her mom, even though her mom would know it and share it, and share the rest, too. They'd want to save her, but for once she needed to save them.

She needed the power, pure and simple.

"I have to," she repeated, louder this time. She turned to face Stephan. He wore a grim smile. Maybe he'd wanted to push her thoughts down this path. Maybe he had, more directly than with his words.

She didn't even care.

"Forget seeing Rudy," Chloe said. "I'll see my parents."

Stephan raised an eyebrow. "Distance is no object to remote viewing, save in your mind, but for someone new to the practice, it may make things more difficult."

"I don't care," Chloe said. She balled her fists and closed her eyes and calmed herself. She felt more confident and concentrated than ever before. This was just a hunch she could control, nothing more, nothing less.

She didn't know where to look.

She didn't know if that mattered.

She asked Stephan.

"It doesn't, technically," he said, "but it may help your mind to focus."

"Do you know where they are now?"

"My sources have yet to pinpoint your adoptive mother's location," Stephan said. "Your adoptive father may still be on Algreil Prime, although he's probably left by now."

"I'll start with Algreil Prime, then," Chloe said. The image of the world appeared to her. She'd never seen it in person, but she knew from her father's stories how it looked, all swirling red and blue like a planetary-scale logo for the company that called it home.

Her eyes shot open.

She said, "Algreil Prime?"

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 53: Short, Victorious War

Ellie watched the Reformer's battlegroup break off as the destroyer slid toward the docking bay. The crowd surrounding her cheered. Fireworks exploded around the Federal Navy vessels and their Oligarchical allies. Mecha ringed the capital ships, polished and gleaming like giant dress uniforms.

Ellie doubted most of the crowd even noticed the lightless, lifeless prize ships tethered between the Fed vessels.

She had heard the news already, of course. One couldn't walk Etemenos's seemingly endless shifting corridors without knowing of the Federal Navy's glorious victory. News broadcasts provided round-the-clock coverage, a mix of interviews Ellie supposed were scripted and battle footage she knew to be edited. Live footage of a battle would have been incomprehensible to a layman and potentially bad for morale.

Ellie hadn't seen an interview with Admiral Marcel Avalon. Or, obviously, with Jack Hughes.

Avalon's name, at least, was everywhere. He got half the credit for the victory, the Marchess family and company got the rest.

So why was the stuffy, condescending Georg Marchess the most common interviewee, his shy, fidgety daughter Alarie second – and Avalon, a figure cut for broadcast media if ever there was one, nowhere to be seen?

Ellie wondered if the admiral was dead.

She had reason to hope Jack wasn't. The news reports crowed about the minimization of casualties on both sides, a testament to not just the skill but the mercy of the Federal Navy. Jack was a great pilot, one of the best she'd ever seen. Yet he wasn't so cocky as to put his pride above his survival.

Surely he'd lived through the brief, hard fighting before the Marchess ships' arrival broke the Oligarchical fleet.

Surely!

Of course, if Avalon had died in the battle, Jack's survival might not matter. He was a captured rebel officer, and unless he had friends in high places – unless, perhaps, Ellie had friends in high places –, he would probably be executed as one.

Ellie wondered if President Ferrill would see her without Avalon to escort her.

She almost laughed at the thought. Even if the President of the Senate wanted to make time for a rebel's hybrid wife, her staff would never permit it. Ellie might have gotten a meeting – but she would never get an appointment.

She had to pray Avalon was alive as well as Jack if she was to have any hope of keeping the latter that way.

Not that she wouldn't have prayed for both men's safety anyway.

The fireworks and cheers did nothing to brighten her mood. They were too loud for her felid ears and, as far as she was concerned, too bright for anyone's eyes. She drifted away from the window and sat down.

She had no idea why the marines flanking the wide airlock between Etemenos's core and the Reformer allowed her to come into the waiting room, or why they allowed her to stay.

They probably thought she was someone's servant. A hybrid wouldn't have chosen to come here of her own accord, would she?

Though, unlike in the Civil War, it wasn't as though she should have had any allies on either side. The Oligarchy was anything but a friend to hybrids. They had created Ellie's ancestors as cheap, expendable labor. Otto Algreil had given her no reason to believe he repudiated that custom.

Was that better or worse than the Federal Senate, who kept hybrids suppressed because it wasn't politically expedient to help them?

It didn't matter.

Jack had fought for the Oligarchy. His loss was Ellie's.

All she could do was wait and hope that it wouldn't be the last mistake he made.

After minutes that felt like hours, the Reformer reached the docking bay and its airlocks hissed their way into connection with the dozens of airlocks along it. Although Ellie had tried to return to the same dock she'd disembarked at, she had no way of knowing if this was the right one to see Avalon.

She had no idea if he would disembark at all. If he was even still alive.

She sat and waited anyway.

Sailors, marines, mechaneers and officers of all three branches of the Federal Navy poured through the airlock, ten abreast. Here the crowd parted to let them pass, there surged forward as sweethearts and families rushed to welcome home their loved ones.

Ellie hung her head and tried to feel happy for them.

The crowd swelled with the addition of the men from the Reformer, then thinned as they passed through and took their loved ones with them. Some of the troops had haunted expressions, a few were injured, but on the whole they seemed nearly as happy as the crowd they were joining.

The benefits of a short, victorious war, Ellie thought.

She didn't even try to be happy about that, though she was hardly sure she'd wanted the Feds to lose to Otto Algreil.

Ellie waited more than an hour after the Reformer docked. Finally, the flow of men from the ship dried up and took the crowd with them. Only a handful of people, mostly teenagers who seemed more interested in the Reformer itself than its crew, remained.

Ellie sighed, squared her shoulders and rose.

Avalon had either used another airlock or none at all.

One of the marines guarding the door turned his armored head when she stood. "Ellie Hughes?"

She froze. "Yes?"

"Your presence is required aboard the Reformer." The marine cocked his head. Someone, presumably a superior, must have given him an order through his armor's communications system. "Yes, sir. Understood, sir." To Ellie, he said, "Belay the previous order. You are to wait here."

Was that good or bad, Ellie wondered. Probably good. She didn't think they'd execute someone, even a hybrid, in the middle of the docking bay.

One of the marines strode over to stand behind her. So she was under guard? Maybe being ordered to wait was bad after all.

It looked a great deal worse when the other marine ordered the few lingering civilians to depart. They didn't hesitate. The only ones who remained were obviously fans of the Federal Navy, and even if they hadn't been, the marine's tone left no doubt that he was authorized to remove them if they didn't choose to leave.

Ellie didn't blame them for not wanting to be kicked out by a man in that miniature-mecha armor, especially if the kick might be literal.

These marines didn't seem especially hostile, at least. The ones on the Reformer itself had worn their resentment on their armored sleeves.

She wasn't an enemy or a problem to these men, just another job.

She was too tired of trying to puzzle out people's motives to decide if that was a positive sign. She sat back down, idly smoothed her hair and ears and, once again, waited.

Only a few minutes passed before the airlock doors opened on the Reformer's end. Ellie caught a glimpse of platinum hair before the airlock's walls blocked the view from her angle. She breathed a sigh of relief.

Marcel Avalon emerged from the airlock almost two minutes later.

He was walking again, but not well. He limped on the leg Stephan Kyrillos had injured, but his face looked, if possible, even more ashen than it had when she'd first seen him after that battle. He walked more stiffly than his injuries seemed to justify.

Ellie rose to go to him. The marine at her back let her. Apparently, he had his orders.

She reached Avalon's side and braced him, although he weighed enough to have bowled her over if he was actually in danger of falling.

"Welcome back," she said.

He managed the beginnings of a wan smile, but it never reached his amber eyes and faded almost before it appeared. He said simply, "Ellie."

"Are you all right?"

"Yes."

She wanted to ask about Jack, found she couldn't bear to.

"Your husband lives," Avalon said.

Ellie heaved another sigh, deeper and fuller than the last. She would have wrapped her arms around Avalon and crushed him to her, except she was afraid she might hurt him, and Principle knew that was the furthest thing from her mind in that moment.

"Thank you," she whispered. She found she was crying. "Thank you so much."

"You have no reason to thank me," Avalon said.

Ellie blinked her tears back. "What?"

"He refused parley." Avalon shook his head. "He and his master Algreil played me for a fool and defeated me."

"But you won!"

"The Federal Navy won." Avalon straightened up and started walking again. "I – did not."

"I don't understand," Ellie said.

Avalon didn't try to explain.

The marines saluted as he approached them. The one who had addressed Ellie said, "Do you require an escort, Adm… sir?"

Ellie glanced between Avalon and the marine.

The admiral wore the same white and green dress uniform he had when he'd left, but its markings had changed. The only ones left were those of the Federal Navy and the Divine Auric Drake. His Second Fleet, Reformer and rank insignia were gone, the fabric beneath them starched taut by the adhesive that had held them.

"No thank you, Sergeant," Avalon said. "I appreciate the offer, but you've already done more than you probably should have."

"Sir." Both marines snapped their salutes to their sides.

Avalon returned their salutes and strode past as best his injuries allowed.

He didn't speak as they left the waiting room, nor as they walked down the silent, silver hallways of Etemenos's core. It could not be silent, not with the life of a world-city buzzing all around them, but Ellie felt like she was going deaf for lack of sound.

At last, she said, "Admiral – Marcel. What happened to you?"

Avalon seemed to deflate at the sound of her voice. He slumped against one of the walls, which automatically formed a bench from its reactive gel surface. "I told you, Ellie. The navy won. I did not."

"You should be a hero before the Federal Senate," Ellie said. "Shouldn't you?"

"You need not fear on that account," Avalon said. "I am sure they will congratulate me extensively on my... retirement." He gritted his teeth as he spoke the word.

"Why would they want you to retire?"

"Otto Algreil knew who, what, I am."

"Oh." Ellie took a step back. "Oh."

"There will be no publicity of what he broadcast during the battle, nor of my response. It will be stricken from the record as 'enemy propaganda.' I will be given a medal and congratulations."

"And retired," Ellie said.

Avalon nodded.

"Marcel... would you have lost the battle if the Marchesses hadn't shown up then?"

He nodded again.

Of course. The Federal Navy could not be expected to fight under the command of a mere hybrid.

"I lost control," Avalon said. "Algreil knew my buttons and pushed them perfectly. I deserve to lose my command, for how easily he manipulated me if nothing else. Whether he could have done the same to another man, I do not know, but – hah. Listen to me. Another man? I overstep my bounds."

"You do nothing of the sort." Ellie's words came out as more of a snarl, far fiercer than she'd intended. Avalon looked up as if stung.

"I am sorry, Ellie," he said. "Everything President Ferrill and I wanted from the battle came to pass. The Oligarchical rebels are defeated, casualties were minimized, and your husband lives. For the moment."

Ellie drew in a breath.

"I have no influence now," Avalon said. "I cannot intercede on Jack Hughes's behalf."

"President Ferrill will still listen to you," Ellie said. "Won't she?"

"Ah, but will her ear matter?" Avalon shook his head. "President Ferrill has been outmaneuvered. The Senate will pay lip service to my heroism. Then, in closed session, they will use the revelation of my past to destroy her. The Marchesses will undoubtedly assist. Their much-vaunted patriotism already landed them control of Algreil Aerospace. If they but play to the proper figures in the Senate, they will be subcontracted to manage the nationalization of half the oligarchy."

Ellie found Avalon's depression contagious. "Jack will be executed," she said hollowly.

Avalon nodded.

"There must be some way we can save him," she said.

"I'll try," Avalon said.

Ellie thought back to the other plans he and Ferrill had shared with her. She trusted their good will toward her and Jack, as far as it went. It was harder to believe they had her daughter's interests at heart.

Now it might not matter. She said, "And Chloe...?"

"I go even now to speak to the President." Avalon averted his eyes. "You are welcome to accompany me, but I cannot counsel hope."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 54: Manipulation

The door to Rudy's quarters slid open almost silently.

Almost.

He was at the doorway, fight or flight reaction in full effect and a light dose of adrenaline from the exercises he'd been working on pumping through his veins. He could have easily taken an attacker to the ground and pinned him or snapped his neck in the seconds it would have taken said attacker to bring a gun to bear.

No attacker stood in the doorway, though. At least, not the kind who planned on shooting him.

"My apologies," Milissa said quietly. "I, um, didn't know your door was unlocked."

It wasn't, Rudy thought.

"Actually, that's not true," she said. "Is it?"

Rudy shook his head.

"The doors recognize my DNA and unlock. I... I knew you..."

Rudy put a hand on his hip and leaned against the door frame, blocking Milissa's entry. "Didn't want to see you?"

"Yes."

"You're right." He reached for the still-visible edge of the door. It should have closed and locked again at his touch. It didn't. "You're keeping it open."

"Yes," Milissa repeated.

"Don't." Since he couldn't close the door without physically throwing Milissa out and couldn't stop her from reopening it even then, he stalked away.

The door slid shut a moment later. Unfortunately, he could still hear Milissa's breathing in the room.

"Get out," Rudy said.

"Crimson Phoenix, I need to talk to you."

"That makes one of us."

"Please!" She reached for his arm.

He slid it away with a subtle twist. Unfortunately, 'it' was on the side of his body the bandersnatch had bit a chunk out of, and subtle or no, he'd moved it in ways the injury disliked. He felt it itching under the nanopaste and grimaced.

"You're still hurt," Milissa said.

"No shit." Rudy glared at her. "You need to leave. Now. I am not an idiot and I know why you're here. I'll tell you and you can tell your brother, I'm not buying what you're selling. Cheap meat's got no flavor."

Milissa shrank back like he'd slapped her. It did sound like the kind of line Otto would throw at Alarie, Rudy thought, except Alarie usually didn't seem to deserve it and Otto probably would have come up with something nastier.

The comparison almost made Rudy feel bad about saying it.

Almost.

Milissa was biting her lip. Typical. In the dim lighting, he couldn't be sure, but he thought he saw tears welling up in her stratosphere blues.

Rudy wondered if she really felt like bursting into tears or if it was part of the act.

Either way, it was Stephan's fault.

Rudy understood what Lord Kyrillos wanted. A wedge between him and Chloe, the better to pick her up on the rebound. Maybe he actually liked her and was just a manipulative bastard, or, more likely, he wanted her title and her powers. Milissa was supposed to get Rudy out of the way.

She'd done a damn good job so far.

Dammit, it wasn't fair. For once in his life, he'd actually been good! Not that anyone would know it from the way Chloe acted. She seemed convinced Rudy and Milissa had snuck out to the woods together. It probably did look that way.

"I came," Milissa said stiffly, "to apologize."

"Needed, accepted, and done," Rudy said. "Now you can go."

"You don't even know what for."

"For trying to seduce me so Steph would have a clear shot at Clo," Rudy said.

"It isn't..." Milissa's shoulders slumped. Her voice got even smaller. "Isn't just that."

"What else?"

"I called it."

Rudy cocked an eyebrow. "It?"

"I've always been good with animals," Milissa said, seemingly ignoring his question. She sat down on the bed and buried her face in her hands. "Better than with people. I'm nervous doing it to people, they're too complicated. Stephan does them so well, too, and it's hard to live up to that."

"Milissa." Rudy took her by the shoulders and forced her to look up at him. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"I called the bandersnatch that hurt you," she said flatly. "I reached out and found its mind and brought it to us."

He stared. "Why would you possibly do that?"

"Because I thought if you thought you saved me, you'd like me. I thought that's why you liked Her Highness so much, why you..." She laughed. Not happily. "It was... pretty stupid, I suppose. Petty. Wrong. Awful."

"Try 'crazy.' What if I hadn't been able to save you, huh?" Which, in point of fact, he hadn't.

"It wasn't supposed to be like that," Milissa said. "I just wanted it to come and roar at us and you'd grab me and run or maybe think you scared it off. Then I'd send it away and find it some nice food to make up for using it."

"You thought it would go for that deal?"

"It... shouldn't exactly have had a choice."

Principle! Unless Milissa was crazy or lying – well, crazier than he already knew she was –, she had some serious power in that pretty, vapid little head.

"I didn't mean for anybody to get hurt." She reached up and brushed her fingers against his bandage. "Or, or –"

She sobbed.

"I killed it," she whispered. "Stephan did, I mean, but it was my fault. You got hurt and it got killed and it's my fault."

"That's why you were so shocked that night," Rudy said. "Because you lost control."

She nodded miserably.

"What went wrong?" he asked, horrified and fascinated and, though he didn't want to admit it, more than a little scared. Milissa claimed her brother could control people as she thought she could animals. If that was true...

He felt a chill down his spine.

"I don't know," she sobbed. She leaned forward and pressed against him and wept. "Merciful Principle, I don't know!"

"Milissa…" Rudy's hand shifted up to her dark tangles. He wished he could say something to make her feel better, but the only thing he could think of was liable to make things a hell of a lot worse.

If Milissa was confident enough in her powers to call a man-eating predator and be shocked when she couldn't send it packing, she couldn't have just failed.

Somebody had to have countered her.

Rudy knew only one person who could do it, at least on New Kyrillopolis.

The estate world's lord and master.

Rudy saw the plan as clearly as if he'd drawn it up himself. Or maybe as if Otto had. It was cold-blooded and damned effective enough to be one of the elder Algreil's schemes.

Milissa calls a bandersnatch, or thinks she does. Maybe it's not even her own idea. Hell, maybe neither of them were out in the woods because of their own ideas. Rudy had thought he was getting away from the fuss Chloe and Milissa made over Stephan, but it looked pretty stupid in retrospect. Could he trust that it had been his thoughts leading him out there?

Probably. It wouldn't be the first time he'd done something unwise. Besides, he'd received the anti-telepathy training all members of the Oligarchical families got. A nob as powerful as Stephan might be able to break through, but Rudy didn't think it would be easy or subtle.

It didn't much matter. Stephan could have concocted his scheme on the fly.

Milissa calls the bandersnatch, Rudy thought again. It arrives, and all of a sudden her power fails her, shuts off completely.

If Rudy runs away and leaves her to die, Stephan turns the animal around and walks it back into the woods, or maybe the animal mauls Milissa a bit and then Stephan comes riding in like the Principle-damned cavalry to save her. Chloe in tow. Rudy ends up looking like the galaxy's yellowest coward, the kind of man who would leave a helpless girl to be eaten alive, and Chloe never speaks to him again. Stephan looks like a hero.

Mission accomplished.

If Rudy stays, though, so does the bandersnatch. It kills Rudy. Mission accomplished.

But – and this was the part that made Rudy shudder – it probably kills Milissa, too.

Chloe would be heartbroken over Rudy's death, of course, but she would also feel terrible for poor, bereaved Stephan. Terrible enough to comfort and be comforted by him.

Mission damn well accomplished.

What was a little sister weighed against the power and authority of the imperial line?

Maybe Stephan wasn't that cold. Maybe all he'd planned was to ride in and save the day, Rudy's actions be damned. He'd shown Rudy as powerless, and with Chloe desperate to help her parents, that looked almost as bad as spineless. Without sacrificing anything of Milissa but her feelings.

He'd also had an excuse to show Chloe that Rudy and Milissa were together, alone and away from the estate.

No matter what happened with the bandersnatch, it would have gone Stephan's way. The differences were only of degree.

Rudy looked down at Milissa. She was still crying and hugging him. Her face was pressed to his chest. His bare chest, because he'd been exercising in only a pair of the estate-world's wool trousers.

He was pretty sure he believed Milissa's sobs, and her sob story. He couldn't bring himself to believe she was playing him for a fool.

Maybe he was right.

Maybe she had him pegged and he did have a thing for damsels in distress.

His reason for believing Milissa counted for exactly squat. What Milissa thought or wanted or did was just as irrelevant. She wasn't the one pulling the strings.

Oh crap.

Rudy's hands tightened on her shoulders. He pushed her away. She fell backwards onto her seat. Which was also his bed.

Oh. Crap.

She looked up, startled and hurt.

A gasp from the doorway distracted her and Rudy alike.

Chloe stood there, one hand at her throat, the other balled into a white-knuckled fist, staring.

Milissa coughed out a little choking sound. Her arms fell to her sides.

Rudy took a step toward Chloe. She was still apparently too furious to speak, so he strode to her side. "It's not what it looks like."

She stared at him. Her jaw worked silently.

"It's not, Chloe," Rudy said. He reached for her. He'd explain. She'd listen.

She slapped his hand away. Coldly, she whispered, "I am so damn sick of your lies, Algreil."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Heads up, distinguished guests. This will be the last Mechaneer chapter this year.

We'll rejoin Chloe, Rudy and company on Monday, January 6 2025.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 55: Principles

"Please wait a moment, Admiral Avalon," Ferrill's secretary said. "President Ferrill is in a meeting."

"Thank you, Miss Langley," Avalon said quietly. A faint smile, the first Ellie had seen since his return, crossed his face. Because Ferrill's secretary had used his title, she realized. The smile didn't entirely fade even when, with a wince, he folded himself into one of the chairs formed from the office's walls.

Ellie joined him, eying his injured leg and trying to hide her frown.

They hadn't had to wait before. It could just be a coincidence, of course, but surely Ferrill had known Avalon was coming. The Reformer and its sister ships had done three laps around Etemenos's core during their parade.

The secretary's posture bothered Ellie, too. She had greeted Avalon warmly, even with a hybrid at his side. Now she seemed nervous. Ellie could smell the cold sweat on her palms.

Fear.

Ellie wrinkled her nose and tried not to think about it.

Instead, she fixed her eyes, and her nose, on the bowl of flowers decorating the table she and Avalon sat beside. She wondered how they grew flowers on Etemenos. Artificially, she supposed, but the results smelled real to her.

The doors to President Ferrill's office opened and an armored figure stepped through. His garb looked like a mecha, just as the marines' did, but whereas theirs aped the boxy line mecha, this man's looked almost organic.

Ellie recognized the armor immediately. It was twin to the mecha its wearer piloted. Since the wearer carried his helmet under one arm, she recognized his face, as well.

He turned to Ellie and Avalon and offered the same bland, insincere smile she'd seen when this whole nightmare began.

"Animus Hunter Zelph," Avalon said.

"Mr. Avalon," Zelph answered. "And Mrs. Ellie Hughes. I trust you'll be more cooperative now than the last time we spoke."

Ellie would sooner tear the man's throat out than answer him.

Admittedly, she would have loved to tear his throat out.

Avalon stood. He and Zelph were of a height. "My command is suspended and my rank pending review," he said, "but I am yet an admiral of the Federal Navy and will be addressed as such."

"You are a disgrace, Mr. Avalon," Zelph said.

"I am not the one committing insubordination."

"I would not be your subordinate even if you were the admiral of the Second Fleet," Zelph said. "Mr. Avalon."

"The Animus Hunters are under the umbrella of the Federal Navy, and I outrank you. It remains insubordination, Zelph, and it would please me to no end for my last act as an admiral to be your censure."

"That's where you're wrong," Zelph said. "You do not outrank me."

"Do the Animus Hunters set themselves above the navy now?"

"Not at all." Zelph's smile widened. "The Grand Admiral of the Unified Federal Defense Forces, however, clearly outranks one of his fleet admirals. Which, Mr. Avalon, means you are, however briefly, my subordinate."

Ellie smelt fear on Avalon now, too, an unfamiliar scent. President Ferrill's secretary was practically swimming in it.

"That is preposterous," Avalon snapped. "An Animus Hunter made the Grand Admiral? Your order has no hierarchy, no chain of command! No man in uniform could be less prepared for the post. President Ferrill would never agree to such an insult to the other branches of the military."

"I'm afraid it's true, Marcel." Ferrill herself stepped from her office. "Grand Admiral Zelph, if your business here is concluded, I would appreciate a chance to speak to Admiral Avalon and Mrs. Hughes."

"Of course, Madame President," Zelph said. He inclined his head to Ferrill, then strode to the door. He paused as it slid open, glanced back at Avalon. "I will await your report when your business here is concluded – Mr. Avalon."

Avalon's hands coiled into fists. He looked altogether too ready to strike a superior officer.

Ellie caught his nearer arm.

The door closed behind Zelph.

Avalon spun to face Ferrill. "Madame President, what is the meaning of this?"

"In my office, Marcel," Ferrill said. She sighed. "We have... a great deal to discuss. Mrs. Hughes may come as well, as some of it concerns her family."

"Ma'am." Ellie echoed Avalon's acknowledgment. They walked side by side into Ferrill's office. The door slid shut behind them, cutting off the sounds and smells of the waiting room. Ellie was glad to be rid of them.

"Have a seat," Ferrill said, waving to two chairs set before her desk. She settled into the one behind it and leaned back, rubbing her temples.

She didn't seem inclined to speak, and Avalon didn't seem to want to press her further.

Ellie had run out of patience. "Ma'am," she said, "what's going on?"

"A great many things, Mrs. Hughes," Ferrill said, "most quite bad."

"And the rest?"

Ferrill smiled thinly. "The rest are worse."

Ellie expected no less. "That man, that Animus Hunter – he was the one who threatened Jack and Chloe and I back in the Prentice system. Him becoming Grand Admiral seems like 'worse.'"

"Errard Zelph is one of the founders of the Animus Hunter Corps and its most powerful member," Ferrill said. "He is a hero of the people and the Federal Senate and personally slew the Emperor at the Battle of Etemenos. While the Animus Hunters have no formal hierarchy, he stands foremost among them. If any member of their brotherhood were to be elevated to such a position – why, a reasonable person could hardly gainsay Zelph."

Ferrill's sarcastic, tired tone told Ellie the president considered herself less than reasonable in this regard.

"What happened to Grand Admiral Osterheim?" Avalon asked.

"He stepped down the day Second Fleet left for the Algreil system," Ferrill said. "As you may know, he is a second cousin of the President of Valhalla Vehicleworks and felt it was inappropriate to remain at his post under the circumstances."

"Conflict of interest," Ellie said.

"Oh, yes," Ferrill said. "The interests of the people and the interests of certain members of the Senate, in this case, but a conflict all the same."

"And Admiral Cargill?" Avalon asked. "Surely the commander of First Fleet would be the logical choice."

"I fear, he, too, has uncomfortable connections. His wife is an aristocrat, you know. The Senate considered this, too, a conflict, although Animus Hunter Zelph was so generous as to testify before the Senate that he had personally assured she was taking the proper Limiters."

Ellie's lip curled. "He's a real humanitarian, all right."

Ferrill snorted. "You, Marcel, would of course be the next in line. You lack seniority, but Second Fleet is the most prestigious command of all. Not lightly is it called the Hand of the People, as you recently demonstrated. You were, you'll be happy to know, the front-runner for the position. When news of Algreil's surrender first reached Etemenos, why, some of our most fervent opponents in the Senate actually raised the motion for your elevation."

Avalon stared into space.

"I'm sorry, Marcel," Ferrill said.

"It is I who should apologize." Avalon slumped forward in his chair. "If I had laughed off Otto Algreil's accusations, none of this would have happened. I have failed you, Ma'am."

"Nonsense," Ferrill said harshly. Her voice softened immediately. "You did your best. I never have and never will ask more than that."

"Even though my best proved insufficient?"

Ferrill had no answer.

Ellie found this silence even more uncomfortable than the last. "I don't understand, Ma'am. Even if the admirals of First and Second Fleet weren't acceptable to the Senate, that leaves eight others."

"And the General of the Federal Marines," Ferrill said, nodding. "Animus Hunter Zelph's elevation was not just due to Marcel's disgrace. With the Oligarchical rebels suppressed, the Senate wanted someone whose experience lay in fighting aristocrats."

"They plan to reconquer the periphery?" Avalon asked.

"They believe the inverse is about to happen," Ferrill said. "The aristocracy has their Heir."

Ellie gasped. "Chloe!"

"Precisely. The Senate will not care that you describe her as a reasonable, gentle and good-hearted girl. If anything, that description will terrify them. A good heart may quickly overwhelm gentleness and reason in the face of gross injustice."

"They want an Animus Hunter in charge because they think he can kill my daughter," Ellie said, mouth dry.

"They want this Animus Hunter in charge," Ferrill said, "because their estimation of his capabilities is accurate."

"Merciful Principle," Ellie whispered.

"I'm afraid not, Mrs. Hughes. It is hubris of the worst sort to ascribe concepts like mercy to the Almighty Principle. Whatever part humanity plays in Its grand design is as incomprehensible to us as any other part of It." Ferrill, it seemed, was anything but a Theist.

Or maybe she was just stressed. The last year had not inclined Ellie to a belief in an involved and merciful creator, either.

"Ma'am," she said, "you have to let me and Jack go to Chloe. We have to warn her. At best, she may even be able to do something about all this!"

Not that Ellie would encourage her daughter to lend a hand to the senate. She'd tell Chloe to run as far and as fast as possible.

Chloe might try to help anyway.

"I'm afraid that's not possible, Mrs. Hughes."

Ellie blinked. "Ma'am?"

"You are free to seek your daughter," Ferrill said, "though travel to the Periphery is anything but safe at the moment. Your husband, on the other hand, is under arrest for, among other crimes, high treason. He was Otto Algreil's chief lieutenant and an officer of the rebellion."

"You're saying you can't pardon Jack," Ellie said.

"I am saying, Mrs. Hughes, that I won't."

Ellie's eyes widened. "But it was all –"

"A misunderstanding," Ferrill said. "Yes, I'm aware of that. A deeply unfortunate, even tragic, misunderstanding, that placed a good man on a bad side and made an enemy of one who should have been a fast friend."

"Then why won't you pardon him?"

"Because he's guilty, dammit!"

Ellie drew back, startled.

"Jack Hughes," Ferrill continued, "has no more excuse for his actions than any of dozens of other rebel officers. Why should he alone be spared? Because he happened to find and adopt the Heir?"

"Because he's a good man! He doesn't deserve this!"

"But many good men have undoubtedly died already over this matter. Others are sure to follow. I do not fool myself that every oligarch and Oligarchical officer who sided with Otto Algreil is a greedy, grasping monster. Even Algreil himself anchored his schemes to legitimate grievances. Do those other good men deserve death?"

"Of course not," Ellie said.

"Would you have me pardon them all?"

"Isn't that justice?"

"No, Mrs. Hughes," Ferrill said. "That is judgment. Mine, or in this case yours. Justice comes from adhering to the law. It is bigger than our opinions."

"Then I could give a damn about your justice! He's my husband, he's Chloe's father, he's a good man, and you drove him to fight you!" Ellie sprang from her chair. Avalon reached up to grab her sleeve, but she thrust his hand away.

"Your husband's fate," Ferrill said, completely unperturbed by Ellie's outburst, "will be determined by a jury of his peers. The same as any other accused criminal."

"A jury? They couldn't possibly understand the circumstances," Ellie said. "Or were you planning on declassifying everything that led to Jack siding with the Algreils?"

"No, Mrs. Hughes, I was not."

"Then you're killing him as surely as you sit here," Ellie said.

"And I am truly sorry to have to do so, Mrs. Hughes. You're probably correct, both about my responsibility and your husband's character. Nonetheless, I will not pardon him and I will not release secrets of potentially galactic import for his sake."

Ellie stared at the president, seeking some sign of remorse. Even cruelty would at least have been understandable. She found nothing.

Ferrill was either the best actress in the world or completely committed to her principles.

"You will see justice done, Ma'am," Ellie said at last.

Ferrill started to nod until her gaze met Ellie's.

"You'll see it," Ellie continued, "when my daughter destroys you, and your Senate, and your precious law."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 56: The Truth Hurts

Snow fell on Chloe's face. Wind tangled her hair. Cold bit her fingers.

She noticed none of it.

Stephan had explained everything as he knew it.

The Feds had not kidnapped Jack and Ellie Hughes. The Algreils had, and left the Mother Goose to confuse the crew of the Reformer when it followed them.

Stephan had seen Chloe's parents in the Algreil box at the Wellach Cup. He'd been only fifty meters from them. Chloe herself could have walked to where they were held any time during the tournament.

Or she could have been invited in as a guest.

Her dad wasn't a prisoner. He was fighting – for her sake, presumably, and her mom's, because the Feds had gotten Ellie eventually and Principle alone knew what they would do to her. Chloe's mom had been captured because she was at the Algreil compound on Wellach, and that meant Chloe had been within running distance of her parents again. It also meant her mom had been captured because Otto Algreil hadn't moved on from the planet.

Because he didn't have who he was looking for. Who everyone seemed to be looking for.

Chloe's dad was fighting alongside Rudy's brother.

Rudy had known. He must have. How could he not have?

And he'd never said a word.

One of Otto Algreil's plots? Stephan said as much, but it made no sense to Chloe.

She wished she could say nothing made sense. But it did. Oh, Principle, did it ever.

Not at first, of course. Chloe had called Stephan a liar and run from the room where he was supposed to be training her.

Run to Rudy.

And Milissa.

Chloe doubted she'd ever forget that image. Rudy standing beside his bed, bare-chested, hands on Milissa's shoulders, while she nuzzled her face on his chest and –

And the look on Rudy's face when she called him by his last name. She didn't have to say another word to know he knew exactly what she was talking about.

The worst part of all was, she even understood why.

If Chloe were reunited with her parents, her protective spacer parents, she would never, ever relent to Rudy's all-too-charming self.

"Let the world go to hell," Chloe muttered, "brothers and fathers and mothers and friends go to hell, but by the Almighty Principle, Rudolf Kaine Algreil will get the girl!"

Rudy hadn't come after her. If he had, she might have awakened to her powers after all. If she did, she didn't think she could control them.

It was so damned petty. So lame!

A sinister plot, at least she could respect. She'd still feel used and duped and wronged, but she could respect that.

Rudy wasn't capable of plots. He just wanted to get her in bed.

And now he had Milissa instead. He'd claimed Chloe wasn't his type. So why did he go nuts for the first willing girl who looked anything like her?

Another damn stupid lie.

Another damn stupid lie she was damn stupid enough to believe.

Her tears didn't even fall when she slumped over the rail. They just froze to her face.

A soft, quavering voice broke through the haze of snow and misery Chloe had surrounded herself with. "Highness?"

"Hello, Milissa," Chloe said, and her voice was as frigid as her surroundings.

She heard snow and skirts rustling behind her.

She turned.

Milissa had prostrated herself on the balcony, face pressed to the snowy stone, arms outstretched, back heaving. "Highness," she sobbed, "please forgive me."

For a moment, Chloe's vision flashed red. This little cheat was enough to sate the mighty Crimson Phoenix? That man very nearly had a princess of the Astroykos Dynasty and he settled for this?

Chloe recoiled from her thoughts, horrified her brain could even produce them.

Rudy deserved her hate. She deserved it herself, maybe even moreso.

Milissa, if anything, deserved her thanks.

Chloe knelt beside the Kyrillos girl and lifted her face from the snow. She was almost cherry-red from the cold. "I have no reason to forgive you, Milissa," Chloe said gently.

Milissa crumpled as if Chloe had slapped her.

Bad choice of words.

Chloe grabbed Milissa's arms and lifted them both to their feet. Stiffly, she hugged the Kyrillos girl. "I mean, I have reason to thank you."

Milissa went even stiffer than Chloe was. "W-what?"

"Stephan told me that... that person lied to me," Chloe said. "But I didn't believe him. You showed me."

Milissa shook her head frantically. "That's not how it was, Highness! The Crimson Phoenix – Rudy – he would never –"

"Did he send you out here?"

"He doesn't know," Milissa said. "I slipped away. Slunk away like the thief I am while he was out of the room."

"Milissa," Chloe said, "I appreciate your trying to spare my feelings, but it does me no favors whatsoever. If you really want to 'make it up to me,' don't make the mistake I was going to."

Milissa reached up to brush a finger along the line of frozen tears running down Chloe's cheek. She stared into Chloe's eyes, and Chloe saw nothing but abject misery in hers.

They could have been mirrors.

"I'm so sorry," Milissa repeated. She said it like she was standing over a grave, and looked ashen enough to belong in one. She stumbled out of Chloe's hug and to the doorway. She acted drunk, or in pain. Maybe she was drunk. She nearly slipped on the snow, but caught herself on the doorframe without her eyes ever leaving Chloe's. She started to slide down it. Chloe knew she should rush to help, but she couldn't break the gaze.

A shadow appeared behind Milissa and braced her.

"That's enough, Mili," Stephan said as his face emerged into the light. He sounded gentler than Chloe had ever heard him. "You shouldn't have had to do this."

Milissa looked up at him. Chloe hated how relieved she felt when the Kyrillos girl's eyes left hers.

"Go to your room," Stephan said. "I'll be with you in a few minutes."

"Stephan," Milissa began, "tell –"

Stephan kissed his sister's forehead and breathed a "shush" against her trembling form. "Go to your room, Mili," he repeated, his whisper quiet enough Chloe could barely hear.

Milissa embraced her brother and clung to him for a long moment, then, slowly, pulled her arms away and straightened up. She started to turn to Chloe, quickly averted her gaze. She all but ran down the hallway.

When she was gone, Stephan said, "You shouldn't have run off like that, Highness."

"You're wrong, Stephan," Chloe said. "I had to know, and now I do. If it had been his word against yours, you'd have lost."

Stephan nodded. "There were other ways to learn the truth. Less painful ways. If I'd known you didn't know the Algreils had your parents, I probably wouldn't have told you."

"Thank the Principle for your ignorance," Chloe said. "It's better this way."

"Milissa would say otherwise."

"If we're lucky, maybe I saved Milissa from making the same mistake I almost did." Chloe hated the coldness of her voice. She sounded like Stephan usually did, and he sounded warm and comforting.

"There were better ways for her to find out, too," Stephan said.

Chloe didn't answer. She was running out of hate, and when that well dried up, she wasn't sure she'd have anything left.

"What do you want done with Algreil?" Stephan asked.

Chloe didn't answer.

"Shall I have him removed? Or do it myself, if you prefer a formal duel? Certainly he has given ample cause."

"Don't hurt him," Chloe said quietly.

Stephan raised an eyebrow.

"He may have done it for all the wrong reasons," she said, "but he did save my life a couple of times. And even if it was a big lie, there were times, lots of times, he made me happy."

Chloe tried to imagine being happy again. She tried to imagine any of the people, places or things that had ever made her happy coming back into her life.

She couldn't.

What hadn't been a lie was lost, probably forever.

"Just send him away. Safe, but away." A spark of anger flickered in Chloe's eyes again and she almost managed to smile. "Send him back to his company. Principle knows he did them more wrong than anyone."

Stephan did smile at that. "You can be a very dangerous young woman, Highness."

For her parents' sake, she hoped so.

If she managed to rescue them, she hoped they'd recognize the daughter they raised.

Chloe wasn't sure she did.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 57: A Pacific Pattern

Rudy watched the Kyrillos men-at-arms and servants and family – and Chloe – file into the dark semicircular viewing chamber. No one invited him in, but no one challenged his presence outside the door, either.

No one had challenged him, not even spoken a word to him, since Chloe walked in on him and Milissa. It was like some bizarre dream, like everyone around him was a ghost. Or like he was.

It was colder than the New Kyrillopolis winter and nastier than a blood-mad bandersnatch.

He wasn't being entirely truthful. Milissa had tried to talk, but he wasn't about to listen to her. Even she'd given up after the third time he'd told her to.

He tried to meet Chloe's eyes as she passed him. Her mouth fixed in a tight little line when she looked at him, but for all the reaction in her stratosphere blues, she might have been exchanging glances with a perfect stranger.

He'd have rather had her hate than... nothing.

Chloe passed through the door at Stephan's side.

Milissa was next. She hesitated as she passed Rudy, glanced up at him. "You can come in," she whispered. Then she rushed after her brother.

Rudy didn't feel like wandering the halls alone while they did whatever they got up to in there. He'd feel even more like a ghost. Besides, he was curious. He'd never seen the whole household assembled at once before.

The estate's occupants didn't come close to filling the room, but they did their best, spreading into the concentric semicircles of chairs in front of a wall-spanning screen. Kyrilloses and Chloe took the bottom level, Slava and the senior men-at-arms sat above them, lower-ranking retainers and the handful of civilian servants in the upper rings.

Rudy wondered what the occasion was.

Probably Stephan announcing his engagement, he thought with a scowl. After that crap with Milissa and whatever Stephan told Chloe about Otto and her parents, he had to have her wrapped all the way around his little finger.

Not that Rudy expected Stephan to wait for a little thing like Chloe's agreement before he announced what was gonna happen.

Rudy slipped in among the senior men-at-arms. The mechaneers didn't seem to know what his status with the household was. Those who seemed inclined to bar his progress, he elbowed out of the way. He took the chair offset behind Chloe's and Stephan's.

Chloe didn't even glance over her shoulder. Stephan did, but even Rudy had to credit him for the skill with which he hid his smirk.

"If everyone will please take a seat," Stephan said. "All of you need to pay close attention to what you're about to see."

Rudy rolled his eyes.

"Quinn," Stephan said, "play the transmission."

Transmission? Apparently Steph wasn't announcing any wedding plans.

Rudy wondered if the nobs had decided to throw their hats in with the Oligarchy after all. The thought of kicking Fed ass gave him the closest thing to a smile he'd had in a month.

But instead of the seal of one of the surviving aristocratic naval commanders or the logo of Algreil Aerospace, the screen displayed the Ouroboros blazon of the Federal Senate: a golden serpent in the shape of an infinity symbol, devouring its tail against a dark green field.

Rudy gripped the arms of his chair to keep from surging from it. From the commotion around him, most of the Kyrillos men shared his confusion. Even Chloe and Milissa looked suddenly to Stephan.

Stephan let the transmission answer the unspoken questions.

The Ouroboros dissolved into a wide-angle shot of the Federal Senate chamber. A hollow sphere big enough to be a small moon, its bottom half filled by an amphitheater where each 'seat' was an enclosed senatorial box bigger than a transport. Thin strands of nanopaste formed walkways to a central sphere, the office of Rhetta Ferrill, President of the Federal Senate.

As Rudy watched, the boxes' domed roofs unfolded, shunting invisibly into the senate chamber's reactive gel structure.

The camera focused on the central sphere. The lower boxes only folded back enough to show the senators and aides on the top floors. President Ferrill's opened almost entirely, displaying a dozen layers. The president herself sat behind her wooden desk on the uppermost floor, Marcel Avalon standing at one shoulder and a balding man in a gray-green groundling-style suit at the other.

It took Rudy a moment to recognize the latter as Georg Marchess, Oligarch of the United Shipping Magnate.

Otto's father-in-law.

The hell?

Another, quieter commotion rippled through the Kyrillos chamber. Aside from Stephan and Quinn, who'd obviously seen this already, only Slava and a couple of the communications men seemed to know who Georg was.

Had the Oligarchy already won?

Rudy figured not, seeing as how the on-screen Georg Marchess dipped his head to Ferrill and stepped back, same as Marcel.

The President of the Federal Senate rose and faced the camera. Rudy had met her at the fifth anniversary of the Battle of Etemenos, though he'd been just a kid and she, the Junior Senator from the Raypoint system. At the time, she'd all but disappeared into the crowd of politicos. Despite her position and the camera's focus, she still seemed to. She seemed far too small, too unassuming, to be the focal point of a galaxy.

She'd been too small, too unassuming, for her political opponents to block her ascension. How many times had she been the compromise candidate? How many politicians had figured they could use her as a disposable springboard for their own careers and ended up fodder for hers?

Ferrill raised a hand for silence. Rudy hadn't even noticed the applause until she muted it.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate," she said, "citizens of the Federated Stars. I come before you today with joyous news for the peace and equality of our galaxy."

Ferrill's harsh Raypoint accent hid behind a bland Etemenos patois. Rudy wasn't sure if the traces of colonial twang she permitted were her natural tones or an affectation. She'd spoken the same way a decade before.

He liked the contents of her speech even less than the delivery. He had a bad feeling he knew what she intended to say.

"One week ago," Ferrill said, sweeping her right hand dramatically as a holographic display appeared before her, "Operation: Equalization, the Federal Navy's suppression of the traitorous Oligarchs, concluded principle hostilities."

Rudy's mouth went dry.

Within the Senatorial hologram, capital ships whirled their stately dance through deep space, lit by explosions and the reflected glow of some distant star.

"Admiral Marcel Avalon outmaneuvered the insurgents and dealt them a crippling blow, and the assistance of loyal citizens who flew to his aid ensured that his strike would not be in vain." Ferrill nodded first to Marcel, then to Georg Marchess. "Justice would have prevailed in any case, but thanks to Chairman Marchess's patriotism, victory did not have to carry a terrible toll. Both these men deserve the gratitude of all who fought in Operation: Equalization, even their foes."

That son of a bitch!

Rudy could understand why the Marchess family would want to stab Otto in the back. Otto's treatment of Alarie, sure – but more than that, they probably stood to control Algreil Aerospace.

Dammit!

Rudy dragged his gaze from Georg Marchess's smirking face. He looked to the lower tiers of the presidential sphere. They had also unfolded, and although neither the lights nor the camera focused on them, Rudy could make out at least two of the people shackled by the nanomachines of the floor.

One was a tall, burly blonde man, lantern-jawed, broken-nosed, muscular beneath a red and blue flight suit. The other, shorter and leaner, strawberry-blonde and olive-skinned and wearing a matching suit.

Jack Hughes and Otto Algreil.

Dammit!

"Due to our swift and overwhelming victory," Ferrill was saying, "more than eighty percent of the vessels in the rebel fleet were taken intact, their crews unharmed. These men have committed no crime greater than doing their jobs. I am glad they did not lose their lives in war and will fight to ensure they lose nothing in peace."

Rudy could see Chloe straighten up at Ferrill's words. He could imagine the hope trying to etch a smile onto her face.

It near to broke his heart, because he could see exactly where Ferrill was leading.

"With this in mind," she said, "I have asked the Senate to approve an extension to the Treaty of Etemenos war crimes stipulations."

Rudy winced even though he'd expected it.

"As the treaty extended blanket amnesty to liegemen fighting for the aristocracy," Ferrill said, "so too do I believe we should show mercy to enlisted employees and junior officers now.

"As for the driving forces of this insurgency, however..."

As she spoke, the military hologram faded, and light played on the levels below hers. Over a hundred Oligarchical officers advanced, no doubt at the command of unseen captors. Mechaneer aces and capital ship skippers. Rudy recognized most of them. Former colleagues, former rivals. Not to mention nine full-fledged oligarchs.

The camera zoomed in on them.

Chloe gasped as the view panned over her father. Stephan reached over to squeeze her shoulder, but she shrank from him and into her chair.

Ferrill's voice overlaid the slow pan over Oligarchs, their commanders and their aces. "I can think of no better demonstration of the fairness and justice of our great nation than to try these men, who attempted to place themselves above their fellow citizens with money and power, in the same manner we would any ordinary criminals.

"But these are no ordinary criminals," she continued. "They stand accused of high crimes, the highest we have, and even this does not encompass the full import of their actions. Treason we know, and the sedition and conspiracy leading up to it. Too, they might stand for murder if we were so inclined to charge them, for surely the deaths in this senseless war are due to their ambitions."

Rudy could've punched the smarmy bitch. Maybe you forgot about the part where you started it, Madame President.

Or had she?

Shit, was she right, at least as far as Otto was concerned? It wasn't like Rudy hadn't heard how bad the Feds were from his brother often enough to tune out the message. And Rudy needed no one to tell him that Otto was less than a stand-up guy.

Didn't change the fact that Errard Zelph had been sniffing after Chloe, though. If he hadn't, none of the fighting would have happened, or at least wouldn't have happened yet.

Otto might have picked the battlefield. He hadn't started the fight.

"Perhaps," Ferrill said, "you will find it within yourselves to show mercy on some of these men. If that is your judgment under the law, it speaks to the generosity I know you possess. Nonetheless, generosity must be tempered with prudence, mercy with justice. You will have ample time to consider the matter, as those whose peers find them guilty of high treason will pay for this most heinous of crimes following the conclusion of the Etemenos Cup."

Four months, Rudy thought. Why the delay? It wasn't like the Feds were waiting long enough to pretend the trials would be fair or impartial or even necessary. Hell, everyone knew the Oligarchical prisoners had fought against the Federal Navy. Did the delay tie into Ferrill's politicking somehow?

"People of the Federated Stars," Ferrill said, as the camera returned to her podium, "you may – no, you must – enjoy the tradition of the Etemenos Cup as ever you would. Enjoy it secure in the knowledge that no one will take your right to do so, secure in the knowledge that the will of the people has again triumphed over the forces of tyranny and privilege, secure, above all else, in the peace and equality of our galaxy.

"Thank you, and may the Principle grant a pacific pattern to your days."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 58: Enclosure

Jack and Otto shared a cell. It wasn't like Etemenos lacked the space for individual prisoner berths, so Jack figured it was some bureaucrat's way of making his last days even more unpleasant.

If so, it hadn't exactly succeeded.

For Otto to piss Jack off, he'd have to do something.

Jack glanced at the oligarch. Otto didn't react. He stared at the door of their cell like his mind had stopped working.

Maybe it had.

"Otto," Jack said.

Otto's eyes closed. He didn't give any other response.

"Dammit, what's wrong with you?"

Jack had to take it back. He could get just as pissed at Otto even if the Oligarch kept his trap shut.

"Snap out of it, man!" Jack strode over and loomed above the cot where Otto sat. Jack was taller to begin with. In the close confines of the room, the Oligarch looked almost shrunken. "They're gonna shoot our asses if we don't do something."

"Fry," Otto said.

"Huh?"

"The Feds execute with electricity. Cheaper."

"I don't give a damn if they plan to tickle us to death," Jack snapped. "What are we gonna do about it?"

Otto was back to the silent treatment.

"It's because of Alarie," Jack said, "isn't it?"

Otto still didn't speak, but his hands, which had hung limp, curled up.

"You can't wrap your head around the idea that she finally got sick of your bullshit. Or maybe around the idea that hers turned out to be better."

"I told you before, Jack. Mine and Alarie's relationship is none of your business."

"That's funny. Seems to me it became my business about the time she turned a battleship's cannon on me. Or on you, at least, and us standing close enough I'd have taken the hit either way."

"It was just business," Otto said.

"She gets the company, you get electrocuted? Maybe you better get out of the business world, old buddy, 'cause that's no deal you ought to take."

"She and her dad get time in the sun. And stabbed in the back when the Feds don't need them anymore. Idiots." Otto couldn't even manage a vengeful smile.

Jack wondered if the Oligarch was injured. Maybe in the head.

Maybe he was having a bad reaction to the Limiters they'd both been injected with.

Before Jack could ask, he heard Etemenos's nanomechanical walls flow open behind him. He turned to see a quartet of men in the light green body armor of the city's police standing outside his and Otto's cell.

Jack figured the Feds had finally come to interrogate Otto. No one had bothered up to this point. Why, when there was no Oligarchical rebellion left or even enough men and material to recreate it? The only people who had that kind of resources now were the Marchesses, and they were working hand in glove with the Feds.

The Feds hadn't come for Otto, though. When the cell's bars flowed away, one of the green-armored men approached Jack. "Mr. Hughes?"

Jack glanced at Otto, but the oligarch didn't even look up. Jack said, "Like you don't know it's me?"

The Fed scowled. "You will come with us now."

"Mind if I freshen up a little, first? I'd hate to get interrogated looking like I just got out of bed, you know? Kinda bad for the image –"

"You are not being interrogated."

Jack had no idea how he kept a grin frozen on his face. He could think of only one alternative to 'interrogated,' and it was a hell of a lot more final.

"You will come with us," the Fed repeated, "now."

Jack didn't exactly have a choice. Or the energy to keep up his quips. He wasn't sure he wanted to learn what he could from these guys, considering what it was almost sure to be.

He strode from the cell and let the Feds surround him. The bars reformed at his back, locking Otto in. Not that the oligarch had even glanced at the opening.

I'm getting marched off to get shot – fried, anyway –, Jack thought, and here I'm worrying about Otto's health. Hell of a thing.

The Feds led Jack to the end of the cellblock, through an airlock-looking doorway and into an empty, boxy chamber made from the nanomechanical walls. There was enough room for the four of them to flank Jack. Barely.

Jack didn't feel the box moving, but he figured it must be. Etemenos was millions of times too big to walk around. People jogged down its hallways that flowed like rivers, but all it accomplished was to keep them from getting disoriented. Prisoners, and their guards, apparently didn't rate that courtesy.

One wall of the box eventually melted away to reveal another room. A table and benches grew out of the floor and harsh white lights blazed overhead. The room was too big for its furniture and too small for its lighting.

On a world-city where everything could be exactly the right size, this room's designer deliberately got its proportions wrong. It seemed worse than the same kind of room built from conventional materials.

It also seemed like an interrogation chamber.

"I thought you guys said I wasn't gonna be interrogated," Jack said.

The Fed who'd spoken before answered. "You're not. Sit down."

"Mind if I stretch my –"

"Yes."

Asshole, Jack thought. But he sat.

He expected the chair to grow restraints, but the Feds apparently trusted their Limiters to keep him under control. Too bad their trust was probably well-placed.

Besides, where could he run? If he alerted the guards, they could just have the room close up and squish him inside.

He gulped at the thought.

Maybe Otto was wrong about how the Feds handled executions.

His minders didn't make him feel any more confident when all four of them marched to one of the walls and stepped through the door it turned into.

Jack sat alone in the unnerving room for about a minute before the opposite wall opened.

A Fed, maybe the same one he'd talked to earlier or maybe another who'd learned to give orders from the same voice coach, said, "Ten minutes."

Jack looked up.

His eyes widened.

He was out of his chair and across the room before the nanomachines of the wall had finished closing, but he never gave diving through them a moment's thought.

He swept Ellie into his arms and pulled her tight against him.

Her first minute was up before either of them moved.

Finally, Ellie pulled back to look up at him. She blinked tears from her eyes and whispered his name.

"Hiya, Hon," he said hoarsely.

Her second minute was their first kiss in too damn long.

Jack broke it, though Principle knew he didn't want to. He stepped back and looked her up and down, drinking in the sight of her – and looking for hurt. "Are you okay?" he asked.

She nodded. Shakily, she said, "You?"

"Locked up with Otto, but aside from that they haven't done me any harm."

He managed to startle a laugh from her, and his weak grin took strength from the sound.

Three minutes and counting. Principle! Three years wouldn't be enough, or three lifetimes. Three years, he suspected, was the longer of those two spans for him.

"They're treating you right, Ellie?"

"I'm a guest here, Jack," Ellie said, "not a..." She choked up on 'prisoner.'

"How did that happen?"

"Don't quite know myself," she said. "It's a long story."

Jack wanted to hear a long story. He could've laid down on the table and listened to Ellie tell him any damn thing and called himself content just to hear her voice.

But he couldn't.

He asked, "Do they have Chloe?"

"I probably wouldn't be a guest if they did," Ellie said. "Probably won't be for long, anyway. Even if they don't arrest me, the person who helped me won't be able to help himself soon enough."

"Admiral Avalon, right?"

"How did you know?"

"Figured he'd be the one in hot water after what Otto got him doing and saying during the battle. Besides, he claimed you asked him to try to talk me down."

"Why didn't you listen, then? Maybe you wouldn't be here like this!"

"Nope," Jack said. "I'd be dead."

Ellie started.

"Until the Marchesses showed up, Otto was winning. I couldn't take him in a fight, and I sure as hell couldn't have survived switching sides when I was in the middle of his battle line."

"Battle lines." Ellie slumped against him. "How did it come to this, Jack?"

"The Feds started it, Ellie," Jack said. "They're the bad... well, the worse guys, anyway. Least as far as Chloe's concerned."

Ellie's ears twitched. She hesitated, but said, "I know."

"So how come Avalon's doing you favors?"

"It's another long story," she said. "He's not a bad person, though, Jack. You can believe that much."

"He sweet on you, Hon?"

Ellie smiled sadly. "Not the way you mean. He feels bad for how things turned out for us."

She started to say something more, but stopped with a slight shake of her head.

Whatever it was, it had to be important. Not important enough he would ask her if she didn't want to tell, though.

Besides, they had something else to talk about. "Can you leave?"

"What?"

"Not the room –" Jack would have preferred she never have to leave the room, unless it was with him along. "–, the city. World. Etemenos."

"They aren't holding me," Ellie said, "but of course not! Even if I had the means, I can't leave you! They're going to –"

"Use me to lure Chloe here," Jack said.

Ellie lowered her eyes. "Yeah."

"We can't let that happen."

"Don't ask this, Jack. Please. Don't ask me to leave you."

"You've got to warn her, Hon. You've got to stop her from coming to Etemenos."

"And let them execute you?"

If necessary, Jack thought. But suddenly, he grinned. "Not a chance."

Ellie eyed him suspiciously. "Don't try to bluff me on this, Jack. It's too important."

"I'm not," he said, and it was at least half true. "The Feds need me alive if they want any leverage on Chloe."

"The president won't pardon you," Ellie said.

Jack hadn't expected she would, but the way Ellie said it surprised him. "How do you know that?"

"I asked her."

Jack stared.

That was either a joke in poorer taste than he expected of his wife, or another long story.

They were gonna have a hell of a lot of catching up to do when all this was over.

For now, he said, "I don't figure on getting pardoned. If Chloe doesn't come here, I figure on getting an appeal."

"So they can keep you locked up and use you against her," Ellie said. Her ear twitched. "That's so crazy it might actually work."

He grinned. "'Course it will, Hon. When have my plans ever gone wrong?"

Ellie exaggerated a groan. At least, he hoped she was exaggerating. He hadn't screwed things up that often.

"There's only one problem with this one," she said.

"What's that?"

"I have no idea where Chloe is or how to find her, and if I guess wrong out of a thousand star systems or just miss her on the way, your trial will be over, your execution will be scheduled – and she'll come here."

"Your pal Avalon doesn't have any leads?"

"He's not exactly a 'pal,' Jack," Ellie said sternly. Jack didn't understand her reaction, but he wasn't gonna waste the few minutes they had together trying to. "And no, he doesn't. As far as I know, the Feds haven't seen Chloe since Admiral Avalon fought the Black Rook."

Jack narrowed his eyes. "That nob from Wellach? I figured he was dead."

"He may be, now, but if so his death covered Chloe's escape."

"Hell of a thing," Jack said.

Ellie nodded. "He fought the Feds at the battlecruiser where we first found her. He was trying to buy his transport time to flee with her, and I know it got away. As to the Black Rook, if they found his body afterwards, no one told me."

"So he is or was one of the good guys?"

"Where Chloe's concerned?" Ellie sighed. "I don't know. It seems like any noble should want to help Chloe rather than hurt her. But that man is the sort to help himself first and foremost. At the very least, there's no way he'd turn her over to the Animus Hunters."

Jack got it. The Black Rook wouldn't kill Chloe, but he'd sure as hell use her.

About like Otto, then.

As much as Jack hated the nobs in the abstract, he'd squandered any room he had to carp about them now.

Instead, he asked, "You know where he'd take her?"

Ellie shook her head. "I wasn't exactly privy to house secrets from my own lords a decade ago, Jack. Where their lords fled after the Battle of Etemenos, I couldn't begin to guess."

"Damn."

"Yeah." Ellie clasped her hands over Jack's. "My point is, I can't afford to run off and try to find Chloe. It would take a miracle for our paths to intersect before she comes here trying to save you."

"You sound like you've got a plan."

"Nothing so fancy. Just a way I'll only need a minor miracle." Ellie smiled ruefully. "We have no way of knowing where Chloe is, but we do know where she'll be."

Jack gulped. "Etemenos about the time my trial ends. If the Feds push me through as fast as I expect, Chloe'll probably come in with the crowds for the Etemenos Cup."

Ellie nodded.

"That's cutting it damned close, Ellie," he said. "If you don't find Clo before they do..."

"I'm going to try to make sure she can find me." Even the ghost of Ellie's smile faded. "Told you it wasn't much of a plan."

It was the only one they had.

And, most likely, the only chance their daughter had.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 59: Hospitality

"We have to help them!"

Stephan heaved a deep sigh.

Chloe grabbed his arm and pulled. After a moment's resistance, he let her turn him around and met her eyes.

"We have," she repeated, fighting to calm her voice, to sound reasonable, "to help them."

"You know that can't happen, Highness." Stephan slid his arm from her grasp and clasped both her shaking hands in his. "If anything, this should demonstrate to you just how futile it would be to oppose the Senate at this point. The Oligarchs possessed far more resources than we, yet their rebellion collapsed in – what? A year? Less?"

"But that's war," Chloe said. "I'm not talking about attacking Etemenos. I'm talking about rescuing my dad."

"Exactly what the Senate wants you to attempt," Stephan said. "I can only assume President Ferrill broadcast that message to bait a trap for you."

Chloe gazed up at Stephan's sad smile, deep into his stratosphere-blue eyes.

Saw no sadness in the latter.

"If President Ferrill wanted to bait me to Etemenos," Chloe said, "she succeeded. All I want to know is, will you help me save my dad, or not?"

"Highness, be reasonable –"

"You be reasonable," she snapped. "I came here because you promised you'd teach me to use my powers. Powers I could use to rescue my parents. Remember?"

"Obviously, those were our original intentions. At a time when we didn't know where to begin looking for your parents and human space seemed on the brink of a genuine second civil war, they seemed entirely reasonable. The situation, as you can surely see, has changed. I'm sorry, Highness, but we have to recognize our limitations."

Chloe wanted to slap him. She would have, if his long fingers hadn't clasped hers in gentle, steepled steel.

"Why?" she asked.

"Excuse me?"

"Why does President Ferrill want to trap me?"

"Because your power is an affront to her rhetoric of equality and a threat to her control."

"Because she's afraid of me," Chloe said.

"If you want to look at it that way."

"Maybe you should ask yourself, Stephan: since you're obviously terrified about going up against someone scared of me, why aren't you even more scared of the person who terrifies her?"

Stephan's smile vanished. "I am afraid for the future of the aristocracy –"

"And I could care less about it."

Stephan's grip tightened. "Highness, Chloe, you don't mean that."

"Think so? I came here to get help, not give it, though I didn't mind reciprocating. So. Where's the reciprocity? You promised you'd train me so I could save my parents. All you've done is preach at me and show me parlor tricks! I've seen you throw waves of killing light. You haven't taught me to light a candle. I've seen you compress space with your mind and cross the stars. You haven't taught me to move a piece of paper."

"Without the proper groundwork," Stephan said, "someone with your power would be endangering herself and others."

"You're lying."

"You claim I haven't taught you anything, but you can apparently read my mind?"

"I can read your face, Stephan," Chloe said. "I know it's a revelation to you, but I'm not stupid. I'm not naive, either, or at least not half as much as you think."

"I don't think you're either of those," Stephan said gently. "Only inexperienced, and emotional, and traumatized by what the Federal Senate has put you through."

"Stop patronizing me, then," Chloe said.

"I'm trying to be kind."

"You sure could have fooled me. From where I'm standing, it looks like you'd like to slap me – if you weren't afraid you wouldn't be able to sire your imperial dynasty on me."

From the tension she could feel in Stephan's arms, she wondered if he'd slap her anyway.

She almost hoped he would. Until she spoke it aloud, she hadn't been willing to confront what his motive had to be. How else to explain the conspicuous absence of other nobles – nothing like any description of the close-knit aristocratic outcasts she'd ever heard? His paltry, half-hearted training sessions – nothing like techniques that would free her from dependence on him?

"That," Stephan said, "is not true. I do harbor some hope of capturing your affections, but far more serious concerns would stay any blow I might think to offer."

"Go ahead and take a swing," she said. "You've got nothing to lose trying, though I can't promise you'll hit."

"It is not my custom," Stephan said, "to strike a lady. Still less my Empress. It would be treason."

"I am not your Principle-accursed Empress," Chloe snapped. "I'm not Chloe Astroykos. I'm Chloe Hughes, and my father is going to be executed, and I will save him or die trying."

"You will do nothing of the sort. The future of the aristocracy, of the whole galaxy, rests on your shoulders. And on mine, as you are proving yourself unfit to exercise such judgment as falls to you."

"Who made that your decision? I don't see a House of Lords assembled here to crown me, even if I wanted a crown. Seems like you're the only aristocrat whose future you want to secure."

"Obviously, I look to my own first and foremost. Considering the importance you put on your adoptive family, I would think you would understand that."

"Then we've got one thing in common, at least." Chloe twisted her hands from his grip.

"Where do you think you're going?" Stephan asked.

"To Etemenos," Chloe said. "Alone or with your help."

"Highness, I understand that you are distraught over your adoptive father –"

"He is my father."

"Of course." Stephan spread his hands. "As I was saying, I understand your distress, but try to think things through. Would he want you to imperil yourself? I'm sure he would want you safe, yes?"

"He would," Chloe said. "And if he were here right now and told me I had to let him go to his death, I'd... I'd cry and grab his sleeve and beg him not to, but I'd do what he said."

Stephan nodded sympathetically. His veneer completely recovered in just seconds, he looked and sounded the picture of the concerned friend or distant relation. He said, "Then permit me to say it in his place."

"There are two big differences," Chloe said.

"And those are?"

"First, my dad would say it because he loves me and wants the best for me, not because he wanted something for himself."

"As I explained, that is not –"

"Second," Chloe continued, refusing to let him snake his web of words around her again, "Not only do I love my dad, I also respect him."

Stephan slowly closed his mouth. He clenched his fists, took a deep breath, stretched his fingers.

He said, "Are you quite finished, Your Highness?"

"I've got nothing more to say," Chloe said. "Except, 'stop calling me that.'"

"You render your position transparent. Yet, you remain 'Your Highness' by accident of blood, whether you like it or not. Whether either of us do."

"Does that mean you'll help me save my dad whether you like it or not, or should I start packing for Etemenos?"

"It means, Your Highness, that I will help you." He smirked down at her. "For a price."

Never let them seem you sweat, Chloe recalled. "Name it."

"You deduce my motives correctly. I would be father to the next Astroykos emperor – the first Kyrillos emperor." Stephan swept his open palm out as though asking her to dance, but the motion seemed stiff, forced. His anger seethed with almost palatable force. "If I condescend to assist in rescuing the Oligarchical lackey you call 'father,' you, Your Highness, will condescend to call me 'husband.'"

Chloe stared at his outstretched fingers.

Stephan was not an unhandsome man, not without charm when he bothered to use it. Nor, when she came down to it, even without a valid position. Why shouldn't he look to his own first? Didn't she?

Yes, he could be cruel. He lied. He schemed. Why not? He was a partisan fighting a war fifteen years lost. It wasn't fair to blame him for his methods or even his character, though both seemed a far cry from the chivalry she'd admired in stories of the nobles of the Civil War.

Besides, he was the only person who had even a slim chance of helping her save her father. Who else would she turn to? Rudy? How could she ever trust him with anything again, much less her parents' lives?

Yet...

She imagined Stephan victorious. She imagined a reunion with her parents. She saw tears of joy and warm embraces and warmer smiles. Home, not a place or a ship, but the people she loved and who loved her.

Stephan Kyrillos was not among that group. He never would be.

In her mind's eye, Chloe saw the happiness drain from her family's tears. She saw them cry themselves to sleep knowing she'd sold her life to buy theirs.

She met Stephan's gaze. "If that is your offer, Lord Kyrillos..."

He cocked an eyebrow expectantly.

"... then I'm afraid I'll be taking my leave of your hospitality."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 60: Confession

Rudy's crimson flight suit tightened. He stretched his back, feeling the fabric slide over muscles too long unused.

His mask, the first thing he'd pulled up, replayed again and again a clip from President Rhetta Ferrill's triumphant broadcast: the slow pan over the defeated Oligarchs, culminating in Otto, cocky and defiant as ever. At least for the camera.

The elder Algreil's mouth formed words Rudy couldn't hear. His flight suit's distributed computer couldn't hear them either, of course, but it could analyze the motions and synch them with past recordings of Otto speaking. Subtitles appeared in white beneath the image, clearer with each repetition.

"The company is yours now, Rudy," Otto mouthed. "If you can take it."

Typical Otto. Not enough to be defiant to the end when he could bust his little brother down on the way.

Of course, considering Rudy's track record of late, Otto probably had a point.

"Crimson Phoenix?" A soft voice brought Rudy's focus back to New Kyrillopolis. "... Rudolf?"

He banished the recording.

He said, "Milissa."

The Kyrillos girl stood in the doorway of his room again, eyes downcast, for once wearing a dress that looked genuinely modest. She'd gotten better at pretending to spacer ideals, even if she hadn't nailed the stylings. The fact she kept up the attempt almost impressed him.

She said, "You're leaving?"

"Stealing a shuttle if I have to." Rudy didn't worry too much about telling Milissa that. Even if she did try to rat him out, he doubted Stephan respected her opinion enough to listen. "One way or another, I'm done waiting."

"But you can't go! You're needed here, now more than ever."

"My brother needs help," Rudy said. "I'm not gonna sit here until Chloe convinces yours to do something."

"She won't."

"You're crazy, Milissa. Saving her parents is all Chloe cares about." And she thinks I stood in the way of that, Rudy added to himself. "Now that she knows her dad is in danger, she'll lean on Stephan night and day."

"That's what I'm trying to tell you!" Milissa looked up. She swept across the room and grabbed his hands. Before he could pull away, she said, "Stephan won't listen. He's... he's done something terrible!"

Rudy froze.

"She told him she would never give him his Kyrillos dynasty, said terrible things – but maybe they were true things –, said she was going to Etemenos herself if she had to. But then she went to her room to get her things, and I heard Stephan call our men-at-arms to stop her."

"He doesn't have the balls. If she gives him an imperial order –"

"Stephan only cares about the empire if it's our empire. His empire." Milissa shook her head. "I love my brother, but... but it's not right, Crimson Phoenix! He's dishonoring our family, and the Empress doesn't deserve this."

"Why ask me for help? Shouldn't you appeal to your men's imperial loyalties?"

"They won't listen. They serve Stephan, not me, not Her Highness. If it comes to it, you're the only one who can help her. You're all she's got."

"Thanks to you, she doesn't 'have' me, either," Rudy said.

"Then make it up to her," Milissa said. "I'm not a good person, Rudolf. I'm immoral and I'm unserious and I did try to seduce you and Stephan let me because he wanted Her Highness to get over you. Principle! You think I don't know that?"

"I think you know pretty damned well," he said. "You might have caught that it's why I don't trust you now."

"I didn't realize... how much she meant to you. Or vice versa. Stephan said I'd be doing her a favor by getting her over a relationship that could never go anywhere." Milissa lowered her eyes and rested the top of her head against his chest. "Truth is, I honestly am a fan of yours. When Stephan told me he didn't mind me sleeping with you, I didn't think about it because I didn't want to think about it."

Which does a whole hell of a lot of good now, Rudy thought. He figured Chloe being such a softie had rubbed off on him, though, because he couldn't bring himself to stay furious at Milissa.

"I truly am a fan of the Crimson Phoenix," she said. "Always rooted for you, always will. I can't help but love your style. But... at the end of the day, I'm just another fangirl."

She gulped, looked up. "I'm an empath. I felt what Her Highness felt when she saw us together that evening. Merciful Principle, I feel it every night when I close my eyes! And it's tearing me apart. Her Highness doesn't love your style, Rudolf – she loves you."

"Not anymore," Rudy said. "She knows better."

"Then convince her," Milissa said. "Show her. Save her!"

"Who says I love her?"

"If you didn't love her," Milissa said, "you would never have pushed me away. I know you wanted me. You still do, and Principle knows I probably still don't have it in me to turn you down. So why don't you take what you want?"

Rudy's lip curled. "You think I've got that little self-control?"

"Of course," Milissa said. She managed a smile, however forlorn. "I am a fan, remember? The next time the Crimson Phoenix shows restraint will be the first."

Rudy had to choke back a chuckle.

"She needs you, Rudolf," Milissa said. "I can never make up to either of you for what I did. But I can't let it get any worse. I'd die before I let it get any worse."

"Stephan's right." The words felt like ash choking Rudy's mouth. He said them anyway.

Milissa looked up sharply. "W-what?"

"If Chloe goes to Etemenos, she'll be walking into a trap," Rudy said. "I do care about her. A lot. I don't want to see her get herself killed, or worse."

"She'll get herself killed anyway," Milissa said. "You can't believe she'd stay here now? Even if she weren't trying to save her adoptive father –" Rudy couldn't help but notice that the young noblewoman couldn't drop the qualifier from 'father.' Still her brother's sister, despite everything. "– she'd try to leave just because Stephan said the things he said."

"And Stephan would stop her, and she'd hate him," Rudy said. "Is that what this is about? You get me to 'rescue' Chloe, figuring I'll say the same damned thing and 'talk sense into her,' and then she forgives your big bro?"

"You don't understand," Milissa said. "If Her Highness tries to escape, Stephan won't just lock her up. He doesn't dare. He's terrified she'll deliver herself to the Feds and become a weapon for them – or, worse, that she'll awaken and destroy us herself.

"If Stephan thinks it's her or House Kyrillos," the young noblewoman continued, "he'll kill her."