Chapter 28: The Hulk

"Looks like you were right, after all, babe," Rudy said. He faked a grin and gave Chloe a comradely elbow.

No response.

Rudy wanted to glance at her, but he found it difficult to look away from the immense hulk filling the Errant Magpie's main screen. Rudy hadn't seen a Civil War-era battlecruiser up close since he was a little kid. Maybe he didn't remember how big they looked. Maybe this one looked even bigger than most.

Eight kilometers of reinforced composite armor and immense main guns and cavernous mecha bays and city-sized crew quarters.

All dead.

An eight kilometer long corpse, drifting through deep space.

Finally, he wrenched his eyes to Chloe.

She stared at the battlecruiser, wide-eyed, ashen-faced, fists clenched, unmoving. She didn't seem to have even noticed him speaking. Whatever he found so unnerving apparently affected her much more.

He reached over to take her hand.

Stephan Kronid stepped between them. He looked almost as ashen-faced as Chloe, not that it stopped him from butting in. "Let's get this over with," he said.

A murmur of assent rounded the bridge.

Rudy was glad to see the battlecruiser unnerved even the hard men of the Kronistine Syndicate. Made him feel better about letting it creep him out.

He was not glad to see Stephan step between him and Chloe. Even less to see the crime boss take Chloe's hand and say, "Are you going to be all right, Petra?"

"Petra will be fine," Rudy said. 'Ollie Brent' wouldn't stand for that crap. Had to stay in character, right? Hell, Rudy Kaine Algreil wouldn't stand for it, either. Rudy wasn't a good enough actor to project a wildly different personality. He was bluffing about his competence, not his character. Ollie Brent basically pretended to be what Rudy actually was.

"Yes," Chloe said, sounding distant and dazed and anything but ‘fine.’ "It's just a shock to see it like this. Where my… my dad… must have died."

Stephan nodded sympathetically.

Rudy resisted the urge to punch the crime boss out. With any luck, Stephan would pull a double-cross soon and give him an excuse to abandon restraint.

Rudy didn't doubt for a minute he could take the Kronistine men. He'd handled them easily enough when he was younger and less experienced.

Besides, he thought, eyeing Stephan and Chloe, he had more incentive this time.

"Quinn, Tarkov, keep the ship running," Stephan ordered. "Slava, with me. We'll get to the bridge and see how much of the ship is still working, then we'll look for Petra's father's mecha."

"Sir." The Syndicate men snapped to it with almost military efficiency.

Rudy had to admit he was impressed. The ones whose asses he'd kicked all those years ago must've been small-time in comparison. Which begged the question, why would some kind of big league crime boss and his elites operate off a backwater planet like Wellach?

"Me and Petra don't care about the bridge," he said.

Chloe and Stephan turned to him, the latter frowning. Chloe still looked dazed.

"Why don't the two of us go pick up her dad's mecha, and you guys can work on salvaging the ship or whatever the hell you want," Rudy said.

Stephan shook his head. "We should stick together. The ship may still be dangerous, and I doubt either of you have salvage experience."

Chloe started to speak. Caught herself at the last second.

Had Stephan noticed? Any of his men?

Rudy couldn't tell.

Quickly, he shrugged. "I'm not scared of a bunch of moldy ghosts. How about you, babe?"

Chloe looked absolutely terrified. She said, "N-no. I'm not scared."

"It's not the ghosts I'm concerned about," Stephan said, "it's the deadfalls, the live electrical conduits, the radiation, the unstable floors, the unexploded ammunition… need I go on, Mr. Brent?"

"I can handle it," Rudy said, making his voice sullen. "You trust me, right, babe?"

"Yeah," she said weakly.

Dammit, Chloe, he thought. I'm trying to get us clear of these guys. He didn't dare say it, though.

Instead, he said, "Look, man, if you're that worried, just send one of your guys along to spot all this crap you're saying's inside. We can wrap up here and get home." He jerked a thumb at the battlecruiser's looming hulk. "Unless you like the scenery?"

Stephan's deep set eyes narrowed. He glanced at the battlecruiser, at Chloe, at Rudy again. "You're very right, Mr. Brent. Slava, you're with our clients."

"Sir." The biggest of the Syndicate men, an ursid almost twice Rudy's height, nodded. "I take you to the ship, little ones."

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Rudy couldn't even object to being called little by the immense hybrid. He shrugged. "Sounds like a plan. C'mon, 'Pet, let's grab your memento and get the hell out of here. I'm starting to think this was a bad idea."

"Yeah," Chloe said. She stepped around Stephan and let Rudy take her hand. Hers trembled a little through her flight suit.

"You take care, Petra," Stephan said. Slick bastard. He sounded genuinely concerned – or maybe it was just the nervousness in his voice since they arrived at the battlecruiser. "I expect to see you again very soon."

She smiled weakly, not turning. "Of course."

Rudy did turn, and glared.

Stephan was already staring at the battlecruiser.

Chloe saw the place her mother died, the place she joined the people she thought of as her parents. Not to mention whatever the hell she might sense from the hulk with her intermittent, unreliable psychic abilities.

What about it set Stephan Kronid's nerves on edge?

Now, Rudy understood casual jitters. The battlecruiser's hulk drifted at the very edge of a star system far off the beaten path. It would have special significance to the Hugheses and they wouldn't have necessarily come back to finish the salvage job.

Someone should have bagged a lot of that hardware in the decade and a half since the Civil War, though. So why hadn't they?

Why did the battlecruiser look almost intact, except for the places where the Errant Magpie's lights played over jagged tears from mecha weapons?

Maybe Stephan worried about the same things, his concerns magnified because he wanted to profit the Syndicate by selling off bits and pieces of the battlecruiser.

Rudy couldn't shake the feeling the crime boss's fears went beyond the merely economic.

What did it take to scare a man who thrived in one of, if not the, most dangerous and ruthless business environments in known space? Who, just by virtue of going to work in the morning, exposed himself to bombs and bullets and poisons and worse?

Rudy decided not to think about it. Wasn't like he could do anything but follow Chloe's hunch, regardless of his fears or Stephan's.

He and Chloe followed the ursid, Slava, to the Magpie's personnel airlocks. Rudy wondered what mecha the Syndicate men had stashed in their hangar. He couldn't imagine they'd gone without any, but he'd never been able to get inside to check. He'd never even seen them check the hangar, much less open it up long enough for him to slip in and look around.

"You know to use masks," the ursid said. "Outside, there is no atmosphere, and what is left inside we do not trust."

"We're not completely ignorant," Rudy snapped.

Chloe cast a sullen glance his way. "He's only trying to help," she said, which didn't seem in-character for Petra. Of course. Chloe had a hangup about hybrids.

Rudy would have liked to remind her she wasn't supposed to be herself, but he couldn't exactly do that without completely blowing their cover. Hopefully Slava wouldn't notice.

Rudy shrugged and slid his flight suit's mask up.

"Air tanks," Slava said, taking a pair from the wall and handing one each to Rudy and Chloe. "Careful. They are heavy in gravity."

No kidding, Rudy thought as he took the canister of compressed air and affixed it to his flight suit. He had to brace Chloe until she could get hers properly attached. Slava donned a pair without noticeable effort.

Wordlessly, he checked the connections on their tanks, nodded his massive, masked head and led them into the airlock.

Rudy leaned back and waited while the air evacuated into the ship's storage tanks. Gravity faded next. He was glad he'd trained and fought mecha battles in zero gee so often. The first time, what seemed like a lifetime ago, he'd thrown up all over his cockpit. Didn't bother him a bit, now.

Chloe was at least as used to the absence of gravity. If anything, she seemed to perk up, though that could have just been relief as the external air tank's weight disappeared.

Rudy frowned. Would Slava notice Chloe's comfort with zero gee? Would Stephan? He hadn't warned her about seeming too competent because, in atmosphere, she normally seemed anything but. She'd lived almost her whole life in space, though, and she might show it without ever realizing groundlings didn't move the way she could.

No way to warn her now.

The battlecruiser's overwhelming, awful presence might save the day. Chloe seemed clumsier when she looked at it, and it sure as hell distracted Stephan.

Distracted Rudy, too.

Without a transport's admittedly paltry armor between him and the gargantuan hulk, it unnerved him even more. More than the size, more than the damage, more even than the inexplicably intact, unsalvaged spans, it radiated menace – and pain. Some kind of psychic backwash, strong enough even he could feel it? He knew exactly squat about such things.

He jetted over to Chloe's side and gave her hand another squeeze, as much to give himself some kind of anchor to reality as to check on her.

"You okay," he asked over the comlink.

She didn't answer.

He shut the comlink off and pressed his head close to hers. Sound would vibrate through the material. "Hey," he whispered.

She shifted to face him.

He asked, "Is your comlink running?"

"I forgot to turn it on," she began. Her voice sounded muffled and distant with two flight suits as the medium through which it traveled. He couldn't make out inflection, but guessed she was nervous as hell.

"Don't," he said. "Listen, we've got a second to talk without them hearing us. Let's use it already."

"Oh." Pause.

"What exactly is wrong with you, Chloe?" Rudy asked, more glad than he cared to admit or explain just to be able to use her real name again. "And are you gonna be okay going in that place? Are any of us?"

"It's… hard to explain," she said.

"Try."

"You ever get that feeling like someone's walked over your grave? The hair on the back of your neck stands up and you feel cold even when it's hot out and your breath catches?"

"Yeah?"

"It's like that, only it's not a moment, it just keeps going, and it keeps getting worse."

Rudy gulped. "Are you sick?

"Only in my head," she said. Something that might have been a nervous laugh and might have been a sob passed through their flight suits.

"Should we go back?" Rudy asked.

"No!" She pulled away, then realized they couldn't communicate at all without physical contact. She drew up right next to him, like they were kissing.

It was, Rudy realized, the closest they'd ever come to doing so.

"We have to keep going, Rudy," Chloe said. "Well… you don't. It might be better if you didn't, if I went the rest of the way alone."

"Not a chance, Clo." Rudy patted her shoulder. "Even if I were willing to let you go, which I'm not, I don't think ol' Steph would look too kindly on me and Slava there letting you jet around solo.

"Besides," he added, grinning, "you still owe me that knowledge and power."

He realized his mistake as soon as he said it. Chloe couldn't see his grin or hear the way he tossed the line off. All she could hear, barely, were the words.

She stiffened and pulled away and, with a few expert puffs of maneuvering jets, turned to the battlecruiser.

When he heard her voice again, it was a little stronger, a lot colder, and over the comlink. And, he thought, all Petra Jaric. "I believe we can get to the nearest mecha bay this way. Let's be quick, shall we?"