Chapter 32: Revelation

"What's going on?" Rudy jetted up to Slava and got as much in the ursid's muzzle as he could manage in zero gee. "Is Stephan talking to the Reformer? What frequency are they using, dammit?"

Slava ignored the questions. He went around Rudy with two quick bursts of maneuvering thrusters and continued toward the far airlock and the mecha bay beyond. His head stayed cocked the whole way. Listening to words from Stephan on high, no doubt.

Rudy's flight suit played with frequencies, seeking the one that would let him and Chloe in on a conversation that was probably determining their fates.

Stephan, he figured, would turn them over to the Feds in a heartbeat. Probably buy the sleazy bastard a few pardons, or at least a few Federal megamarks. The only thing keeping Slava from trying to grab Rudy and Chloe had to be his boss dickering on the finder's fee.

Rudy followed the ursid through the miasma of twisted Imperial corpses not because he wanted to buddy up to the ursid gangster when Feds and Syndicate settled on a price, but because he wanted to be as close to the mecha bay as possible.

The nobs were supposed to have had some damned fine machines. From what Chloe said, her mother's mecha surpassed even those. Maybe, with its power, he could renegotiate terms favorable to him and Chloe.

Assuming he could subdue an ursid twice his height and four or five times his weight.

Assuming Chloe could get her mother's mecha running.

Assuming either of them could pilot it.

Assuming good old Marcel didn't bring enough firepower to laugh it off – to throw bodies at the problem until it ceased to be a problem, in true Fed style.

Those sounded like painfully long odds, even to Rudy.

He had no better ideas, so he played them anyway.

He and Slava burned to a hard stop a few meters from the airlock. Slava wasted no time tearing the cover off and hurling it to bounce off the floor. His big hands worked the controls with surprising delicacy, sliding the great circular lock open faster than Rudy could have.

He sure seemed in a hurry.

Maybe negotiations had fallen through.

“Chloe, come on,” Rudy said – no reason to screw around with 'Petras' and 'Ollies' now – before realizing she hadn't bothered to stop. She was in the airlock, barely clearing the opening door, barely stopping at the far one. He joined her.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I'll figure something out.”

“In case you don't,” she said, jetting next to him and slowing herself by clasping his hands, “I want to apologize.”

“You want to apologize?”

“For everything you've gone through,” she said, “and for how little you've gotten in return.”

“If you're propositioning me, Clo, I'd much rather you waited till we were in an atmosphere where we could safely unseal these flight suits.”

“Please be serious, Rudy.” She sounded so heart-rendingly earnest, he couldn't say no. Damn that girl! “You're not a spacer, so you probably can't understand how much it bothered me when you asked what you did.”

She trailed off.

Rudy sure as hell wasn't a spacer, but she was wrong. He knew enough about their culture – from going on two months in Chloe's company if nothing else – to understand pretty damned well.

He'd known that for a long time, but he sure as hell hadn't let it stop him from raising the subject. Sure, he'd been kidding. Mostly.

He didn't think it was something Spacer girls kidded about.

Maybe it was time he started thinking about that, huh?

“Listen, Clo,” he said.

“Let me finish.” She seemed to get her confidence back, then lost it again just as quickly. “I think we're gonna die or get separated or worse.”

Rudy gulped. “You have a hunch?”

“I have a brain,” she said.

He wished he could tell her not to worry, but since she probably hadn't thought of half as many of their problems as he had, he didn't have the heart to. “Go on.”

“Rudy, I, someday… someday, if you…” He could see her gulp through her flight suit. “… what I'm trying to say is, you've done so much for me, and I wish I could give back half as much. I hope someday I can. Knowledge and power, of course, and anything else it's my right to give.”

“Chloe,” he began. He had it all laid out, a genuine rarest-of-all-rarities Rudy Kaine Algreil apology. He was the one who didn't get it. He'd been tired and angry and scared and coming off the god of all adrenaline highs, and what he'd wanted to say as a joke came out serious, and when she went off on him it had pissed him off so bad he couldn't even see straight. He didn't want knowledge or power or any of that crap, and she sure as hell was his friend as long as she wanted to be, and anything else she wanted to be, and if he'd hurt her, then dammit he meant to make it up to her a hundredfold! And he –

– never said a word of it.

The airlock finished its silent, stately roll to the open position.

"We have no time," Slava said. "The Reformer is here!"

The ursid grabbed Rudy and Chloe, moving quicker than anyone that big had any right to. He hauled them into the mecha bay on full jets, leaving a superheated particulate trail that rapidly dispersed in vacuum.

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Row upon row of mecha, painted white and gold and pale green – Imperial Guard colors –, filled the hangar. One look at the sleek elite models and Rudy fell silent, more awe-struck than by the battlecruiser itself. These were mecha decades ahead of their time. He could tell at a glance that the Epee, though considered state of the art by Federal and Oligarchical standards, wrestled with design flaws these had already solved.

Principle, talk about knowledge and power! If Otto could have put models like this into production, Rudy would have three or four Etemenos Cups on his mantle.

Yet none of the Imperial Guard mecha had launched during whatever attack doomed their ship.

None of them looked like the silvery mecha Chloe's parents had told her about.

"I don't think it's in this bay," Rudy said, shouting because the senses of scale and motion seemed to dictate he should. Without any kind of background noise, the feedback from his voice sounded painfully loud over the comlink.

"It isn't," Chloe said miserably. "I would feel it if it were."

Great. Wonderful. Their trip through the battlecruiser's hellish interior amounted to exactly squat?

Rudy sighed. “Now what?”

“We have to find it, Rudy.” Chloe stretched out her long fingers and gripped Slava's flight suit. “Slava, you have to slow down! We have to search another mecha bay.”

“There is no time,” the ursid gangster said. “I am sorry, but the Magpie must pick us up.”

“No! We have to find it,” Chloe insisted. “We can't let the Feds get mother's mecha.”

“They won't.” A new voice entered the comlink conversation – Stephan's. “The people responsible for Empress Karissa's death dare not approach her erinyes. That angel's flaming sword would destroy them as surely as it will defend its rightful owner.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Rudy asked.

“It means get your Oligarchical ass on the Magpie, Rudy Kaine Algreil, or I will have the pleasure of leaving you to rot on this ghost ship.” Timed to Stephan's words, the mecha bay doors opened, moving in eerily silent fits and starts, and the Errant Magpie slid expertly through them. Its own, much smaller mecha bay opened in a single smooth motion as it swooped toward Rudy, Chloe and Slava.

Before it reached them, a mecha emerged.

It looked like a black version of the Imperial Guard models lining the mecha bay. Long arms ending in long, elegant fingers with vibrating, razor-sharp backs, a sextet of long thruster-wings emerging like a black sun from its smoothly rounded, humanoid torso, a sloping, avian head, pointed feet equipped with thrusters of their own, clearly designed exclusively for zero-gee use.

On its raven-feather shiny breastplate gleamed a white-outlined emblem of a black crow on a black field, soaring above a white tower.

Black crow.

Black Rook.

"Son of a bitch," Rudy swore. "That's where I recognized his voice from."

"With a razor-sharp mind like yours, I have no doubt you'll one day provide your company with record profits," Stephan, or whatever his real name was, said. "Now get aboard the Magpie."

"What are you gonna do, Rook, checkmate a whole destroyer?"

"I backed that destroyer off," Stephan said, "using my brain. I told them Her Highness had the erinyes and that she would destroy them all, assuming this battlecruiser does not. While they seemed disinclined to believe either, I expect the bluff to hold Marcel Avalon long enough for the Magpie to clear the battlecruiser's gravitic shield."

"Wait, what? 'Her Highness?' 'Erinyes?' I thought you nobs spoke the same language as the rest of us." Rudy slipped Slava's grasp and pulled Chloe after him. "I think you owe us an explanation."

"I certainly owe Princess Chloe an explanation," Stephan said. "You may be present if she wishes. However, I also owe her the service of getting her away from the Federal Navy."

"Princess?" Chloe looked down at herself. "There must be some mistake, Mr. Kronid!"

"Then we will learn as much later," he snapped. Belatedly, he added, "Your Highness."

"You still haven't explained why you're out here in your mecha," Rudy said. He hadn't explained a whole hell of a lot of things, starting with why a Periphery noble apparently ran a crime ring in his spare time.

"Because unlike you," Stephan said, "I do not need a ship to create a compression tunnel with which to escape this place. I will create a diversion to keep the Divine Auric Drake and his men from realizing you intend to flee, then join you."

"Are you sure you'll be all right?" Leave it to Chloe to worry about a guy who'd consistently played her and Rudy for fools. She sounded genuinely concerned about the bastard. "Can't you just come with us?"

"My first duty is to ensure your safety, Highness," Stephan said.

Rudy rolled his eyes. What was the harm? Chloe couldn't see him do it.

"Besides," the crime boss-cum-noble – or was it the other way around? – added, "the Crimson Phoenix has twice defeated the Divine Auric Drake. I hardly think the latter will provide me with a challenge."

That's it, Rudy thought. You'd better live, you bastard nob, 'cause I've got to kill you myself.

Chloe squeezed Rudy's hand, bringing him back to the moment. "I know what you're thinking," she whispered, "and maybe you have a right to, but this is not the time. Right?"

"Right," Rudy sighed.

He and Chloe followed Slava into the Errant Magpie's mecha bay, while the Black Rook faded into the shadows of the battlecruiser's larger one. Stephan's machine seemed to vanish. Rudy wondered if he just blended in, or if he used the same camouflage of light-deflecting psions the Animus Hunter had at the Wellach Cup.

Rudy also wondered what had happened to the Animus Hunter at the Wellach Cup. He'd seemed like the more powerful psychic in his duel with the Black Rook, at least to the point Rudy lost consciousness.

Rudy glanced around the hangar he hadn't been able to get into. Four smaller Civil War-era mecha, equipped like the Black Rook had been at the tournament, filled four of the bays. Probably mecha for Stephan's men-at-arms. Four bays sat empty, including the two largest. Rudy assumed one of those belonged to Stephan's preferred mecha and the other waited for Chloe's mother's.

Her 'erinyes?' Did Stephan mean the silvery mecha they'd come to find?

He shrugged. Whatever it was called, they weren't gonna get it this trip, and Rudy didn't fancy coming back for it.

"Up, little ones," Slava said. "To the bridge."

With a last glance at the mecha – not that Rudy particularly wanted to pilot one of the Civil War relics left in the bay – he bounded up a ladder and pulled Chloe after him. Good thing. She almost slipped, and he didn't blame her. Moving in normal gravity felt crippling after only a half hour of zero gee.

The long-locked door slid open as they approached. Rudy charged through and sprinted upwards. He hated feeling powerless and in the dark, and away from the bridge, he was both. At least he'd be able to see the fight on the Magpie's main screen.

He wondered who he should root for. The enemy of his enemy, in this case, was another enemy.

He decided to back Marcel. The enemy he knew and all that, and besides, if the admiral and his men took Stephan down, Rudy still felt confident he could wrest control of the Errant Magpie from the latter's thugs.

Where he would take the ship, now, posed a greater challenge.