Chapter 65: Errant Magpie

When she saw the snowmobile, Chloe had hoped Rudy would have a chance to explain himself on their way to the platform where the Errant Magpie had landed what seemed like half a lifetime ago.

When she saw the snowmobile move, she knew better than to ask him.

Rudy wove it between conifers fast enough to kick up dual tidal waves of snow. Chloe couldn't even make out individual branches as they passed within what felt like millimeters of her head. She figured she wouldn't make them out if they hit her, either. The kinetic energy would probably be enough to explode a significant portion of her body.

Maybe that was hyperbole.

Maybe.

She supposed the snowmobile could go slower, but going slower meant giving the Kyrillos men-at-arms, and Stephan himself, more time to catch up. They'd gotten away from Stephan once, but Chloe didn't understand how.

In a mecha, fighting a noble one on one was mad, but not truly impossible. The machines could boost a psychic’s output only so much. At that scale, kinetic energy could start to keep up with telekinetic. And a mecha could move fast enough to make it tough for the noble to target.

On foot, though? With Stephan’s powers, he should’ve crushed Rudy with a wave of his hand. Or taken over his mind.

Chloe shuddered, more at the latter than the former.

They swerved onto the road, or rather path, between the estate and the landing pad. Chloe couldn't exactly breathe easily – low-hanging branches, weighed down with snow, almost touched the path –, but she could at least bear to watch.

They were maybe five minutes from the landing platform. The way Rudy drove, probably a lot less.

A thought shot through Chloe. A bad thought.

She gulped.

“Rudy,” she whispered, her flight suit transmitting the word to his.

“Yeah?”

“We've got a problem. A big one.”

“Lots,” he agreed. “Which one?”

“It's gonna take ten, maybe fifteen minutes to get the Magpie off the ground.”

“What! Why?”

“Tarkov actually shut it down when we landed,” Chloe yelled. “It's not like leaving it on standby. The last time Mom and Dad did it with the Mother Goose, it took us almost a half hour to get it started again.”

“Oh, that?” Rudy shrugged, which caused the snowmobile to swerve and Chloe to almost cry out before he, somehow, got it back on the path as casually as if nothing had happened. “Planned on it.”

Now that she looked, the snow had been disturbed by the wheeled vehicle they'd taken to the estate when they arrived. But she only saw one set of tracks. How had Rudy gotten back to the estate? For that matter, how had he stolen the Kyrillos vehicle without being spotted? “You drove out here before you came to get me?”

“Something like that.”

So help me Principle, Chloe thought, if he turns around and winks at me, we're dead anyway and I may as well punch him.

Fortunately, Rudy at least had the sense to keep his eyes on what passed for the road. He swerved around a fallen branch.

They shot into the clearing surrounding the landing platform, then onto the platform itself. Then into the air above it, as the ramp and their speed launched them practically onto one of the transports' wings.

At least, it seemed that way to Chloe before she scrunched her eyes shut.

They landed hard, shifting sideways, and snow hit Chloe's flank hard enough she had to grab onto Rudy to keep from falling. They slid for a moment longer, then, finally, blessedly, stopped.

Chloe opened her eyes.

They were about a meter from the Errant Magpie's entrance ramp.

Shakily, she stumbled off the cycle and caught her breath.

Rudy bounced off beside her. “You okay, Clo?”

No, she thought. I am not okay, you drive like a maniac, you are a maniac, we should be dead, it's cold, and I still don't trust you!

She said, “Yeah.”

Rudy glanced back at the snowmobile, half covered in the white powder it was designed to cross. “I've got to get me one of those. It's even better than my bike.”

She stared at him.

He winked. But since it wasn't going to kill her, Chloe let it go.

She looked up at the Magpie. Its ramp had only a dusting of snow and two lines of ice – snowy footprints that had turned to slush in the heated interior and refrozen when it opened to admit them. “Who started the ship, Rudy?”

He chewed his lip. “About that.”

“I did, Highness.” Milissa poked her head out the hatch. The rest of her emerged a moment later, clad in a black and white flight suit that could have been twin to Chloe's white one in both its design and the shape it covered. She gave a little wave. “Um. Hello? I'm really glad you're both safe? How am I supposed to say hi? I'm new to this adventure business, you know.”

Chloe's brain seemed incapable of processing the implications. All it could manage was to curl her consciousness up in a corner and let her survival instincts take over.

Once they were in the air, they'd have time to talk.

Weeks, if they jumped out of system.

“Maybe you should try 'all aboard,'” Rudy suggested. It took Chloe a moment to realize he was still talking about how to greet them. “Dash it off in a hurry, but be cool about it. Like you expected somebody to pull a sick spin-stop right at your feet.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“I'll write that down,” Milissa said. “I expected nothing less, of course.”

Chloe groaned. The last thing the world needed was somebody else with Rudy's sense of humor. “Could we actually get aboard instead of talking about it? You should've waited on the bridge and taken off as soon as we got here.”

Milissa blinked. “Taken off?”

“Yeah,” Rudy said. “You know, lifted us into the sky on wings of applied gravitics.”

“Oh, I don't know how to fly the Magpie,” Milissa said. “I haven't been off this planet since I was twelve! Aren't you going to pilot it?”

“Um,” Rudy said. “Heh. About that. It can't be that different from a mecha, right?”

“I'll fly it,” Chloe snapped. She stalked up the ramp and past Milissa, trying to remember the quickest route from the still-full mecha bay to the bridge. She heard the other two following at her heels, but she didn't bother stopping until she slipped through the bridge doors and settled in beside the navigation console.

From a distance, it had looked enough like the Mother Goose's that Chloe thought, or at least hoped, she could pilot it.

It looked less alike now that she could actually see what she was doing.

If she couldn't control it...

She shook her head. "Of course I can," she muttered. "If I couldn't, it would probably get us killed, and then what would be the point of worrying, right?"

Her logic apparently didn't impress the transport's computer, which remained resolutely silent. She'd left Rudy and Milissa far enough behind they didn't say anything, either.

Chloe took a deep breath, pressed her hands to the control panels, and waited. The main screen lit, displaying the landing platform, and the touchpads beneath Chloe's fingers emitted a familiar glow. So far, so good.

Gently, she pressed her left hand into the pad and rolled it forward to the tips of her fingers. The transport shuddered and hummed and spat. For a moment, Chloe feared Milissa had made some mistake in the startup process and damaged the engine.

Then the transport lurched upwards.

Its armor could handle space dust hurtling into it at gigameters a second. When it scraped against the boughs of the towering New Kyrillopolis pines, they broke long before its wings did.

The transport tipped, its external audio transmitting the screech of metal and crash of wood. It wavered, then shot upwards in an uncontrolled ascent. The acceleration pushed Chloe into her chair. Startled, she brought her palm down, and the ascent threatened to turn into a dive. The ground filled the main screen, and she instinctively smashed her hand flat.

The transport hovered, shaking along with her hands.

She gulped down a breath.

So far, she thought, so good.

Takeoffs and landings were supposed to be the hardest part. She couldn't do much damage to the transport now that it was actually airborne.

She hoped.

She glanced over her shoulder when the bridge doors slid open.

Rudy, rubbing his head and scowling, stumbled onto the bridge with one hand gripping a wall the whole way. "The hell? I thought you said you could fly this thing!"

"I can," Chloe said. "Sort of."

"'Sort of' as in 'you're not gonna get us killed?' Or 'sort of' as in 'you have no idea what you're doing but you're pushing buttons anyway?'"

"Half of one, half of the other," Chloe said.

Rudy shrugged. "Good enough for me."

"Your head okay?"

"Fortunately, I'm told I have a thick skull, so no harm done."

“And Milissa?”

He nodded to the doorway, where she was in the process of stumbling onto the bridge. She clung to the wall for dear life. “That wasn't very smooth, Highness.”

“Will you live?” Chloe asked.

Milissa nodded.

“Do you need to go to sickbay?”

Milissa shook her head.

“Smooth enough, then,” Chloe said.

Milissa tried for a nervous chuckle. Rudy, unsurprisingly, chuckled without any nerves at all. He strode to the weapons console beside Chloe and slid into the seat. “Watch the flight path, by the way.”

Chloe snapped her head around and just barely resisted the urge to juke to the side at his warning. When she saw clear skies above, she managed a nervous laugh of her own. “Aren't you supposed to be the one doing the crazy stunt and me the one 'whining' about it?”

“Now you know how annoying you are.”

She didn't deign to answer.

Now that she'd learned to adjust for the Magpie's more sensitive controls, she managed to lift the transport without further damage. Her fingers spread across the pad and she focused her attention on the screen showing their location relative to the trees.

“Wait up a second,” Rudy said.

“Do we have time?”

“Sure.” His own hands were on the weapons console. With a few flicks of his wrist, he activated the Magpie's cannons and sent a stream of shells into its two sister ships. Clouds of smoke and dust and snow erupted from the landing platform. When they drifted away, there was no platform left, and the unshielded ships were little more than slag. “Now we've got plenty of time.”

“No,” Milissa said. “Stephan can still come after you.” She gulped. “After us.”

“You were right the first time,” Rudy said. “We agreed, remember? You'd help us get off this rock, then you'd grab one of those mecha in the bay and head home.”

“I can't,” she said.

“It's not that hard, Milissa,” Chloe said, perhaps too quickly. “The mecha have direct neural interfaces, right? Rudy or I can show you how to get hooked in, and the rest will come naturally.”

“That's not what I mean.” Milissa looked away. Her gaze ended up on Rudy.

Oh. Oh. Chloe brushed her hand against the touchpad, gently spinning the ship and giving her an excuse to turn back to the screen. She pressed her lips together and tried not to listen to the rest of the conversation. It wasn't hers to have, and what she needed to talk to Rudy about could, evidently, wait.

Chloe started.

Rudy had risked his life for her even when he had Milissa waiting for him. Heck, they'd both risked their lives, although Chloe wasn't sure Milissa was in much danger. Stephan wouldn't hurt his own sister...

Would he?

What had Rudy said about monologuing? First symptom of villainy.

Chloe's shoulders slumped. She'd accused Rudy of helping her just because he wanted to get her in bed, of dumping her for the first willing girl they ran across. Especially the first of what he called the 'leggy noble type.' She'd shunned Milissa's friendship because she’d resented her for taking Rudy's away.

But if Rudy had come back to the manor for Chloe, Milissa notwithstanding, then that theory went all to hell.

He actually was the guy she'd hoped he would turn out to be, the decent guy who was there for her even if he thought she was crazy, the brave guy who would die for her even if she was just a friend.

She hadn't even been that to him.

Swallowing, hard, she turned.

Rudy and Milissa were both staring at her.

Chloe shifted her feet.

Why did they have to go and stare like that? Principle! She'd been about to leave them to themselves, even if it was because she'd been angry for all the wrong reasons.

She probably didn't have any right ones.

“Highness,” Milissa said, “what did you think I meant?”

Chloe fixed her gaze on her feet. “It's okay, Milissa, really. And Rudy. I mean, you don't have to... on my account... It's wonderful! That you've, you know, that you're happy, and you've both been so kind to me –”

Rudy rose from his chair and walked over to hers. “Chloe –”

“No, you don't have to explain,” she said. “I've got no right to complain. You've done so very much, and I'm not even saying it's wrong, you understand, only –”

“Chloe –”

“Don't, Rudy. Principle knows why you're doing this for me, but you have my sincerest thanks. I hope... it works out wonderfully for you, for both of you, okay?”

He cupped both palms around her chin and pulled her, startled and squirming, into a kiss.

She didn't squirm for long.