Chapter 70: Phoenix Egg

Chloe spun the chair away from her console and looked up at Rudy. “We're underway, everything's working fine, and we've got nothing to do but wait. So – are you finished being enigmatic?”

Rudy thought about winking at her, just to stretch her faked anger out a little longer. But he figured it was only a matter of time before she got genuinely mad at him. Couldn't blame her, either.

Besides, now that he understood, Rudy felt like he needed someone else to.

“Yeah,” he said. “We can talk now.”

Milissa asked, “What are we talking about?” She'd be looking to Chloe.

Chloe was looking to Rudy.

Rudy said, “My power.”

“Your power,” Milissa squeaked. “B-but, you're – and I don't mean any offense, Crimson Phoenix, Principle knows, but – you're a mundane. An oligarch's son. You'd have to be an errant.”

“And there are less than one in ten billion of those,” Chloe said.

Rudy nodded.

“I'm sorry,” Chloe said, “but if you expect me to believe that kind of coincidence –”

“I wasn't born an errant.”

Chloe met his eyes. He couldn't say what she saw in his gaze. He, more than maybe anyone else in the galaxy, would never know her mind through direct contact. Whatever she got from his expression, her confused frown deepened to a concerned one.

She shut up.

Rudy took a deep breath, then did something he almost never did.

Hesitated.

He couldn't explain why the words choked in his throat. It might have been conditioning. Maybe it was why he couldn't play back a damned subliminal briefing without days of agonizing headache afterward.

It might have been he just didn't want to talk about it almost as much as he needed to.

He thought about asking Milissa to leave. He'd wanted to wait so he could explain to both young women at the same time, but now he only wanted Chloe to know. He opened his mouth. Shook his head.

He'd just kicked a nob's ass in single combat. A nob who could fight alone against the Reformer and its admiral and survive.

He was not a coward.

“I wasn't born an errant,” Rudy repeated, “I was made one.”

Failure, Otto had said. Reject.

Bro, Rudy thought, you either had no idea what you had or you were playing a game I don't even want to try to understand.

“Toward the end of the Civil War,” he said, “both the senate and the oligarchy had super-solider projects underway. They hoped to produce mechaneers who could go up against the nobs and win. I don't know what the Feds were messing around with, but Kalder-Black Industries was in charge of the Oligarchical program.”

Chloe said, “They're the ones the Feds crushed, right? That you showed me the recordings of?”

“Yeah. I'm not sure if that's connected or not.”

She waved him on.

“They called it the Prometheus project. It was our way of stealing power from the nobs.”

“How?”

This was the part Rudy didn't want to talk about. He did anyway. “You know how few nob prisoners there were during the Civil War, right? How they almost always fought to the death?”

“They had to protect their honor,” Milissa said.

Holy crap, Rudy thought, the nobs believed their own propaganda – and the Oligarchy's.

“Except they didn't always fight to the death,” Rudy said. “Maybe... maybe they should have.”

Chloe looked away. She got it already, no telepathy required. Of course, after what her parents had been through, she probably made those kinds of connections easier than most people.

“The ones the Oligarchy did capture were given Limiters and kept as prisoners of war,” Rudy said.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“But no one was ever released,” Milissa began. She gulped. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Rudy said. “If any of the captured nobs were still alive – and for their sake I hope they weren't – when the Kalder-Black headquarters on Port Caldera got scoured by the Feds, they died there. Understand, I was like five years old and in the wrong company when Prometheus was going on. I'm only giving you the version I got from Algreil Aerospace's files.”

“What did they do to them, Rudy?” Chloe asked quietly.

“They... harvested them.”

Rudy honestly didn't know the details. He only knew about the project at all because he'd had recurring nightmares of Otto snarling about his 'failure' and had checked the company files to figure out what, exactly, he'd failed at.

Rudy had never been so glad of his ignorance. Not knowing made it a hell of a lot easier to focus on mechaneering and forget about whether he fought for the right side.

But he did know more than he'd said. “They took cells at least, and maybe more extensive neural tissue. Then they retrovirally engineered the samples from the captives and the DNA of the test subjects so the samples wouldn't be rejected, the same way hybrids were originally created.”

Chloe swallowed. She had enough of an imagination to fill in the blanks. The captives were non-persons. Officially, they didn't exist. None of them had ever been released. And the oligarchs and nobs hated each other a whole hell of a lot after a hundred years of civil war.

She knew as well as Rudy did that the sample-takers hadn't concerned themselves with proper surgical care.

“I wasn't one of the initial test subjects, of course,” Rudy continued. “By the time Prometheus got to Algreil Aerospace, to me, Kalder-Black had already done proof-of-concept work.”

“On hybrids,” Chloe guessed.

Correctly.

They hadn't even had to use POWs. Hybrids were non-persons during the transition from empire to republic regardless of their political affiliation. Most places, they still were.

Chloe asked, “Successful tests?”

“No. The process was harmless. Zero percent tissue rejection, one hundred percent recovery for the subject. It also seemed to be useless. They got the idea maybe hybrid subjects wouldn't work, so, with the process deemed safe for human use, they needed volunteers.

“Once they moved on to human tests, though, they only wanted to perform the process on sons and daughters of the oligarchy,” he continued. “Kalder-Black didn't want to make artificial errants. They wanted to make artificial nobs.

“We were going to be the new order.” Rudy snorted. “What we were, was a bunch of confused kids who didn't understand why the hell we were going to the doctor's when we weren't sick – and, as my dear big brother was so fond of reminding me, what we turned out as was failures.”

“You're not a failure, Rudy,” Chloe said. “If what you're saying is true, you've got a power I've never even heard of. One that would have been invaluable to the Oligarchy, even if not in quite the way they expected.”

“Here's the thing, Clo. I didn't have it to begin with. Hell, the first time we went to the battlecruiser, I was feeling the psychic ambiance as bad, worse, than you or Slava. It was only after that my power started to kick in.”

“Well, obviously,” Milissa said.

Rudy and Chloe both looked at her.

She cocked her head. “Just putting the physical equipment in somebody's head wouldn't be enough. You'd have to bring them in contact with psions, too. Of course, I've never heard of a power working like yours does, Rudolf, but who knows what all that messing around with the DNA did?”

“Aristocratic mothers teach their children telepathically,” Chloe whispered. “Stephan told me so, but it's not, or not just, teaching, is it?”

“Psions react to certain patterns of human thought, but you can't have a reaction without interaction. We get exposed to plenty of psions just by being around our mothers, but Rudolph never even met the people who...” Milissa hesitated, either her own feelings or the ones her empathy was picking up dragging her down. She managed, “... whose powers his people wanted to steal.”

So it was all a mistake. Rudy's so-called “failure.” Kalder-Black’s inability to project themselves. Otto's bitterness at Rudy and the Feds and the whole damned world. Everything.

Probably for the best, Rudy figured. If Otto had realized what he had, the nobs on the Periphery would've been chopped up for spare parts long ago.

“If that's true, Milissa,” Chloe said, “is that why my powers haven't awakened?”

“Of course not, Highness. Your mother, Principle keep her, would've given you the same preparation as any other child. I'm not actually sure it's possible to stop it from happening. And anyway, you've experienced my brother's power, and mine.”

“But not for prolonged periods like a baby in the womb would,” Chloe said. “I've only been around Stephan a few months, and most of those he was hiding his power. You don't exactly throw yours around.”

“That still leaves your mom,” Rudy said.

“Who I don't remember despite being five years old when my parents – my adoptive parents, I mean – found me.”

“What are you saying, Clo?”

“I don't know,” she admitted. “Just... I'd like to try something.”

Rudy wondered if she'd really had an idea or just didn't want to dwell on what he'd told her. Or, equally possible, wouldn't let herself dwell on it until she wasn't around Milissa and her empathy.

“Milissa,” Chloe said, “I want you to try contacting me telepathically. With as much power as you've got.”

“I'm not sure that's such a good idea. You could get hurt, Highness. Or we all could.”

“May as well give it a shot,” Rudy said. “Mad my skills may be, but we're all toast if we go to Etemenos without a hell of a lot more power than even the Crimson Phoenix can muster. Besides, if things get out of hand, we've got the perfect safety valve right here.” He tapped his forehead.

“Please, Mili,” Chloe said. “You said it wouldn't be dangerous for you to teach me.”

“This isn't exactly the same thing...” Milissa bit her lip. “I guess you're right, though. We have the Crimson Phoenix to save us.”

Rudy gave her a thumbs-up.

He wondered if Chloe had come up with her scheme not to get her mind off what he'd said, but to spare him the recollection.

If so, mission accomplished.

“Let's do this,” he said.

Chloe closed her eyes.

Milissa did the same.

Both young women drew in deep breaths. Rudy couldn't help but appreciate the view. Both locked their mouths into hard lines. But for Chloe's spacer-pale skin, they could have been mirror images. Almost identical beads of sweat rolled down their faces.

Rudy, of course, couldn't feel a thing.

Then Chloe tumbled from her chair.